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Boosted

I got my COVID booster yesterday…and my yearly flu shot.

This one has knocked me on my ass much the same way dose #2 did. And I was praying for death at 3:30 this morning when the fever and chills kicked in, along with the muscle and joint pain. I called out sick today and went back to sleep after Ben had left for work, and slept until nearly 10 am. I ran out for coffee and to the mailbox and came back home and plopped myself in front of the computer. I lasted another hour or so and decided it was time to go back to sleep. Sammy was fine with that—at least until a delivery person came to the front door and that was the end of my nap.

In other news…

Oops! I did it again! (Hopefully the last time for many more years.)

This is not what the delivery person was dropping off today. I picked this up yesterday.

I can hear y’all now: “Are you insane? Didn’t you just buy a new MacBook a few months ago?”

Yes. Yes I did. But believe it or not, this purchase was all part of a long term plan both Ben and I had in put place earlier this year when we’d both reached the end of our patience with our respective butterfly keyboard MacBook Pros. We knew the more powerful M1 chips would be coming out before the end of 2021, but we each went ahead and replaced our old gear with the basic M1s—knowing full well we’d be able to trade them back into Apple for a significant amount of money to be shaved off the cost of the new machines. And that’s what we did.

As I wrote earlier, I ordered, then cancelled, the reordered again a new MacBook Pro the day they came available. Ben ordered the same day, and his laptop was due to arrive yesterday. Because I’d hesitated, my order was pushed out two weeks further.

Scrolling through my news feed yesterday, I ran across a post that basically said, “Don’t want to wait? You know you can pick up any of the standard configurations at your local Apple Store today, right?”

It was true. I verified that the model I wanted was indeed available, and canceled my previous order outright. I drove to Scottsdale and came home with a shiny new 14-inch MacBook Pro.

Everything went well until I got to the point in the initial setup where you’re offered the opportunity to transfer your data from a backup or from another Mac.

Begin rant…

I use CarbonCopyCloner to do a nightly backup of my data to an external USB SSD. Like I’d done in times past, I plugged it in and directed the Mac to use it to transfer my profile and settings.

It read the disk and started transferring my data. I was kind of surprised that it was taking so long; after all, these new machines are supposed to be speed demons.

It finally finished up and I logged into the machine. Because these machines always ship with a slightly out-of-date OS installed, so I went about starting the update. Almost immediately I get a warning that I was almost out of disk space.

WTF? The Mac had a 1TB drive, and the data I was transferring was at most 350GB. I verified that it was indeed a 1TB drive in the machine, and then started looking at what exactly was using up space.

As it turns out, CCC was set to create “snapshots” when doing the nightly backups. These snapshots contain the the older files that are different from the current backup. In my case, this was taking up nearly 500 GB and it had—for some reason—been transferred over with the rest of the profile. Okay, I thought, I’ll just go in and delete all this garbage.

And thus a typical Apple clusterfuck began.

All those snapshots were locked. And they refused to allow themselves to be unlocked en masse. Why would they? Why should they? “It just works!”

At this point I got to check out the new “Erase All Content and Settings” function in Mac OS Monterey…several times.

TLDR, after another 6 hours and several more abortive attempts to get my data transferred, it finally worked.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

 

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Monday

It’s three days in the office this week, and I have to take the newbie out to our remote offices to do a physical inventory because apparently this has become a priority with the micromanager from hell.

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Dear Theists…

Before you take it upon yourself to tell me that I have no morals and will burn in Hell for all eternity for not believing in whatever god you’ve selected, please do me a favor:

Go outside on a clear night, away from city lights, and look up at the heavens. Try to visualize the vastness of our solar system, which orbits a single star. Now picture that our sun is merely one of the 300 billion stars that form our galaxy, the Milky Way. Finally, consider that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies that span the universe.

When you have done this, you will have come close to comprehending the enormity of the fuck I don’t give about your archaic, bigoted, and infantile opinions about creation and the way I choose to love my life.

Sincerely,

An Atheist

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