On Moving

Last night, I began moving files from my old Compaq to my new iMac. Like "real" moving, the first step was going through everything I had saved over the years (more than ten gigabytes worth of stuff) and seeing what to take and what to toss - a process easier said than done.

Instead of zipping through the contents of the hard drive, I got bogged down opening illogically labeled folders (like "whatev" and "paste") and listening to music files with mysterious names like 1317930941.mp3 and XtQ9_(Remix).mp3. Occasionally, I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard, like when 1317930941.mp3 turned out to be "The World I Know" by Collective Soul, but most of the time, it was a rather tedious process.

Once I finished sorting, I borrowed M's one-gigabyte USB flash drive to move everything. I quickly discovered that using a flash drive to transfer ten gigs of data is the electronic equivalent of using a Geo Metro Toyota Yaris to move several rooms of furniture. In both cases, they're a pain to load and require many trips.

Because my Compaq is equipped with a slow USB port, it took a lot longer than a flash to fill the flash drive - roughly thirty minutes each time. Luckily, the iMac's ports are faster and unloading the drive took less than five minutes.

I moved two gigabytes last night, which means I have about (doing some quick hasty math) 4.5 hours of flash drive fun in store for me. If I had my choice druthers, I would much rather hang out with the South Bay Blogger folks at Coffee Society tonight, but I know my own bad procrastination habit and if I don't tackle it now, the task of transferring files will drag on indefinitely.

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