I make absolutely no bones that I’m almost married to my computer. I use my digital tools with abandon and with a certain amount of skill, if I do say so myself. At home I’m likely to be found in my sunroom-turned-office, plopped down before the big 30” monitor, working on some project or another. Sometimes music will be playing. Other times all is ghostly silence with perhaps only the faint buzz of the refrigerator in the other room providing audio counterpoint. That is, of course, unless yet another construction job is destroying the peace of my neighborhood.
The speed, quality, and overall panache of a computer is terribly important to me, given the amount of time I spend communing with the beast, so I generally head straight for the top of the line. For some years now I’ve had a bifurcated computational life via a mainstay desktop computer and a travel-anywhere laptop. The desktop is Herbie, a proud Mac Pro of the giant cheese-grater aluminum box variety, a fine big beast with four capacious hard drives and a spiffy video card. The laptop is a MacBook Pro that I have dubbed HankDeux, inasmuch as it is the successor to Hank, my original MacBook Pro.
It works after a fashion but the reduplication between machines is usually confusing. I’m never 100% certain just what materials are on what computer, although I’m sure that all of the big projects—my program and liner notes, lectures for the SFS Symphony and other institutions, classes for the Fromm Institute and UC Berkeley—are on Herbie. I’m also sure that most of my critical SF Conservatory materials—my long series of folders for each year and semester for the last several decades, all my materials that I generate while at school—are on HankDeux.
Today’s top-ranked MacBook Pro models actually perform better than Herbie. They have more memory, faster hard drives, and just as good if not better of video. They don’t have the inner space for all those hard drives, but that’s about the only objection.
My split computational personality trembles on the brink of becoming whole. I’ve decided to centralize and get it all to one main computer, while leaving my gargantuan audio library on Herbie with his dual four-terabyte drives, one for the library and the other for the instant backup. Herbie, who is still running quite well, can be allowed his dignified golden years as the server for that library, not a particularly challenging job for a fine Mac Pro, but a good use for him at this time of life.
For the rest, I updated to a very spiffy MacBook Pro; quad-core 2.8 gHz processor, 16 GB of memory, and a zanily fast one-terabyte flash drive. It’s a simple matter to connect it to my big 30” monitor, and given that Apple laptops run beautifully when closed, for all practical intents and purposes the new laptop, now dubbed HankTrois, can serve as my one primary home computer with an external keyboard and mouse, while remaining detachable for tucking into my backpack for using at school or onstage when lecturing. And everything will be in the one place and not scattered all over hither and yon. I’ll need to be extra vigilant about backups, but I’ve always been good about such things. I keep an in-house backup via a TimeCapsule and an off-site backup via CrashPlan, so once I’m sure I have everything transferred over for good, I’ll begin having HankTrois take care of those backups, while Herbie continues to watch over the music library.
I refuse to be in a hurry about this. I’m making the shift slowly, gradually. Bit by bit I’m copying over documents, setting up applications, taking care of stuff like mail and my iPhoto library. Music applications are always a major pain in the keester to deal with; usually the older copy must be de-authorized in order to use another, and there are issues such as iLoks and all that to deal with. But I’m in shape for it all. As long as I dawdle through it and make sure everything is hunky-dory, I have no reason to worry about anything being left behind. Nor do I intend to let go of Herbie or HankDeux any time soon. Anything missing is sure to be found on one or the other them, after all.