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You are here: Home / Social Media for Business / Having Fun, The “Social-Techno” Way

Having Fun, The “Social-Techno” Way

April 15, 2010 •

Today I man­aged to have fun while work­ing. At long last I set up a per­sonal Face­book page and uploaded some fam­ily pho­tos. At the same time I trans­ferred files and apps from a 2‑year-old Mac­Book Pro to a brand new Mac­Book Pro (one of the mod­els released ear­lier this week). I got the first 15-inch i7 model sold by Apple’s Belle­vue loca­tion.

My office has sev­eral Macs side by side, so it was easy to work on mul­ti­ple par­al­lel tasks. When the file/program trans­fer process fin­ishes, my hus­band will be the lucky recip­i­ent of a Mac lap­top that also runs Win­dows 7.

Transferring Files & Programs to a New Mac

When you have hun­dreds of giga­bytes worth of stuff on a Mac lap­top, the process of trans­fer­ring from one to another takes a cou­ple hours over a Firewire cable. But it requires no super­vi­sion once the process is under­way. (Hence the Face­book project as a pro­duc­tive use of time while trans­fer­ring files.)

Every time I go through the process of trans­fer­ring files and pro­grams from an older Mac to a newer one, I’m reminded of how well Apple has sim­pli­fied this process com­pared to what you expe­ri­ence when fac­ing a sim­i­lar chal­lenge with Win­dows PCs. The Mac trans­fer is almost flaw­less — espe­cially if you remem­ber which pro­grams (like Adobe’s Cre­ative Suite) need to be deac­ti­vated so you don’t get into license con­flict.

Get­ting my doc­u­ments and apps installed in the Win­dows par­ti­tion of my new Mac­Book Pro will take far longer than it took to set up the Mac side of this com­puter. Tran­fer­ring the files is no prob­lem, but I have to rein­stall all the pro­grams, which means look­ing through my office files for all the license keys and typ­ing them in with no errors. (Not an easy feat.)

Proud Owner of a MacBook Pro i7

Luck­ily for me the Belle­vue Square Apple Store’s busi­ness con­sul­tant treats me well. He knew I was inter­ested in the new 2010 Mac­Book Pro mod­els, and kept me informed about inven­tory sta­tus, as he knew I wanted to see the new high-res anti-glare screen before choos­ing which con­fig­u­ra­tion to buy. His first i7 mod­els arrived in the store today, so he con­tacted me this morn­ing to let me know he had a few in stock.

There’s a lot to like about the new Mac­Book Pro with Intel’s i7 proces­sor: fast and sweet. It has all the usual Apple fit-and-fin­ish finesse, but with supe­rior graph­ics, a ter­rific screen, and a big boost in per­for­mance, when com­pared to my older lap­top.

After lunch I ordered a copy of Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional from Ama­zon, and took advan­tage of their local deliv­ery option (for $2 more than it would have cost to receive the soft­ware on Sat­ur­day). It arrived in time for me to begin the install before sup­per time.

As I write this, I’ve set up Boot­camp, par­ti­tioned the Mac, have installed Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional (64-bit ver­sion), and am now installing Apple’s hard­ware dri­vers for Win­dows. Com­pared to how long this process took on my older lap­top, albeit with the 32-bit ver­sion of Win 7, this install is just scream­ing fast. It’s so fast that I keep get­ting dis­tracted from this blog entry.

Real Time “Social”

But the truly fun part about today was exchang­ing com­ments and photo tags with my niece Melanie, who was closely mon­i­tor­ing my Face­book progress. She lives 3 time zones to the east of here, so her work­day has ended and she’s relax­ing in the evening while I’m still plug­ging away. She made sure fam­ily mem­bers are get­ting tagged prop­erly in my Face­book photo albums.

No sooner did I get a photo or two uploaded, but Mel had tagged the fam­ily mem­bers whose faces appear in the photo. Except she for­got to tag her father in one of the shots. I won­der if that was a Freudian slip, or if the image appears cropped on her com­puter, so she didn’t see his face…

So here I am, installing Win­dows, and exchang­ing com­ments with fam­ily back in New Eng­land. Jug­gling fun, social inter­ac­tions, and work all at the same time. Thanks Face­book, thanks Apple, thanks Ama­zon (for same-day ser­vice on Win­dows 7). You all made my fun day pos­si­ble.

About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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