Finally Done and Moved In

The kitchen is finished!

I now have a completely functional house to live in. Still dozens of minor issues to address but the main ones preventing me from living inside have been addressed. Now to return to a normal writing schedule ASAP. Been slacking off terribly this entire summer using one excuse after another to avoid writing. But the end of the year is fast approaching and some work needs to be completed before then.

Of course, as soon as I make the decision to start writing again I screw up my back and spent a week recovering. Of course that’s a sign I really need to begin exercising again as well.

macOS Sierra

macOS Sierra

And then, yesterday Apple released the latest macOS update named Sierra and my installation failed at around 90% complete. Had totally forgotten I’d replaced the default boot loader with one that allowed me to choose between Mac OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu partitions. Well, by the time I’d figured that out my main partition was FUBARed. Spent all afternoon erasing, repartitioning, and reinstalling macOS Sierra onto the hard drive. Fortunately I’d finally gotten around to running Time Machine backups on an hourly basis so recovering, while time consuming, was pretty straight forward and easy. Had a working machine within a few hours with only a couple of major/minor hiccups to still recover from.

The first was my iTunes music library. I store all of my media in the Users/Shared folder and not in my personal folder. Made the decision years ago for some forgotten reason and never changed it back. Anyway, the Shared folder wasn’t backed up by Time Machine automatically. It should have been backed up, but somewhere along the way I decided to removed it from the backup list. In retrospect that was a bad decision. Figuring out how to download my music from iTunes Match was like pulling teeth. Something so simple should have been quick and easy but wasn’t. iTunes would show me songs I could download and yet nowhere was there a menu item or icon to click on to make it happen. And yes I had the iCloud column active in iTunes and yet the download icons were disabled.

After much hair pulling I finally logged out of my iTunes account and back in to make the icons enabled. Also, now the Songs menu showed a Download item in it, which wasn’t visible before logging back in. Sheesh, what a waste of time trying do something simple. Anyway, its finally downloading but that will take some time. 6500+ songs to download takes lots of time and effectively monopolizes my net connection. But, in a few hours I will have all my music back on my local drive.

My VMWare virtual machines for WinXP, Win7, and Ubuntu were also lost as they too were stored in the Users/Shared folder. I think I’ve got them backed up on another external HD but they’ll have to wait until I get my music back first. If I don’t have a backup then its back to the drawing board and starting them up again. What fun!

That’s my life right now, hope yours is going better.

About lfrank

Now suffering in the hinterlands of Michigan while trying to transform myself into a fiction author. Don't wait up.
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