Evanston: the long and the thin
Evanston: the long and the thin
Like almost 100,000,000 other Americans I watched the Super Bowl, which was a great game even if you are a Patriots fan, as I am. Unfortunately the Giants deserved to win.
The Patriots have now lost late leads to a Manning quarterbacked team two years in a row, or they might have won five of the last seven Super Bowls and stand alone as the greatest dynasty in NFL history, instead of still looking up at the four victories each of the San Francisco and Pittsburgh teams of the past. ‘Might have’ doesn’t matter. What actually happens does. In sports, as in voyages, the difference is clear.
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I made my airline reservations Sunday morning before the game, and depart on March 2. For 80,000 frequent flyer miles I got a free ticket as far as Auckland. Have to pay for the last 110 miles to Kerikeri. Would have been the same number of miles for a round-trip ticket; but I’m not flying back from New Zealand this time.
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The MacBook Air took as long to cover the last 175 miles from Indianapolis as it did whatever thousands of miles lie between Shanghai and Indianapolis vis Anchorage. It arrived yesterday afternoon, and has thus far exceeded my expectations.
I had prepared for migrating from the larger hard drive on the MacBook, where I had 85 gb of stuff on a 160 gb 7200 rpm hard drive to the smaller and slower, 80 gb 4200 rpm Air, by using a free utility, What Size, that shows the sizes of all the folders and files on a drive.
By far my biggest folder is my iTunes library of 37 gb. I have another 12 gb of photos.
I was surprised when I first turned on the Air to discover that 17 gb were already used of the 74 gb actually available on what is only nominally an 80 gb hard drive.
I was able to reduce that by 10 gb by deleting Garage Band and iDVD, which I have never used on the MacBook; removing Epsom, Lexmark and HP printer drivers; using another free utility, Monolingual, to remove all the languages except English; and removing iLife audio files.
I made the migration via Migration Assistant and Time Machine, after temporality deleting my iTunes music library folder from the MacBook. It only took a half hour to move the remaining settings, folders and applications to the Air. It went more smoothly than I dared hoped and as far as I can tell, everything is working. I now have 37.5 gb on the Air hard drive, with 36.5 free. The iTunes library is on an external hard drive, and the music plays seamlessly both when the hard drive is connected directly to the computer, or as now when I have it connected to an Airport Extreme router across the room, and am streaming the music wirelessly.
I may still move my Aperture and iPhoto libraries from the Air to the external hard drive, but at present there is no need.
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The long is approximately 30’ of sail, stretching from our living room well into the kitchen. The sailmaker startled me by emailing dimensions that included a foot length of 38’, which is longer than the boat. When I was refolding the sail to fit it in a smaller bag, I measured this myself and came up with a bit less than 30’, so perhaps he meant to write a ‘2’ instead of a ‘3’. It only weighs 20 pounds, including the bag. I’m looking forward to seeing it flying.
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Now that the old list is toast, inevitably I’ve begun a new one, which so far includes making a reservation for a rental car to meet me in Kerikeri; making another to haul out the boat and antifoul in mid-March; and mail a box containing two spare light air vanes for the Monitor, which are too long to fit into my airplane luggage, to myself in Opua.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008