Why upgrading is not all it’s cracked up to be…

I have re-emerged after 4 days of a torturous transition.  So this is why I haven’t upgraded my main working system since 2011…  There are so many unforeseen and unexpected items that pop up.  Well…it’s done…mostly.

Let’s see… Wacom Tablet installed fine…moves the mouse…but nothing else is recognized.  Oh because mine is too old to be supported… have to buy a new tablet.  Can’t retouch without one.

Several software suites were windows only…I needed mac versions.  $$$.

Mojave has issues with external hard drives.  No software patch yet.  It told me my drives were damaged.  I wish I realized they were just fine before I did a restoration of 20 TERABYTES from my backups.  Talk about a waste of time and effort.  Sigh.  They all worked and checked out just fine on my laptop with High Sierra.  Always check on other computers.

Having to reinstall printer paper profiles and readjust to the mac interface for printing being quite a bit different.  Did you know that Epson printers need “custom paper sizes” made in order to print borderless…even if you select a borderless paper size and borderless option?  Makes no sense.

Does no one make an ergonomic keyboard for mac specifically?  It took me days to figure out I could change the Windows and the Alt key to actually match the Option and Command key on a mac keyboard.  I’m good…but for 3 days straight I was hitting the wrong hotkeys non stop.  Drove me nuts!  I think i’m back to normal now.

It’s all the little things.  Anyways…I am just about back to normal I think.  And able to get work done.

You know…it’s funny apple shows off their devices in such clean environments, so simplistic, etc…  Honestly…they must not use them in a professional working environment.  I am going to be straight honest with you…my setup doesn’t look anything like theirs…or any of the reviewers i’ve seen online!  I bought the Mac mini because it had LOTS of ports…which I could add lots of ports to.  Here are some pictures of my computer at the moment.

man mini 2018
Take note of the connections and cables…
mac mini
Notice USB hub to the side and below!

Take notice… and not everything is plugged in… but there are cables everywhere.  And I try to be neat about cable management.  I will tidy up a bit more once everything is finally transitioned.  Here is what I have to plug in…

10 port USB hub + power cable
4 port USB hub + power cable
Keyboard
Mouse
Card reader
Eizo display
Eizo USB port for color management
Sonnet eGPU
Wacom Tablet
Loupedeck
Focusrite Audio box (for mic preamps in)
Speakers
Ethernet
computer power cable
Epson printer (my daily paper printers are wireless on my network, but the epson for photography needs a cable)
Photo scanner
Time machine hard drive
Cache – temp file – and scratch drive SSD
Main working drive
2 daily backup drives
4 archive drives that connect as needed

That’s all the main stuff.  Other things connect as needed, like my phone for syncing, etc…  So while the design of the mac mini is nice and neat and minimalistic… the alluring photos of a sleek workspace with a modern aluminum computer and little else will never resemble my space.  Oh well.  At least the computer performs!

And this is my view out the window today.

Snowing
Snowing.

This is what happens when upgrading cameras too.  Buy a new camera… then you need a new L-bracket, new memory cards, new card reader potentially, more storage, faster computer to deal with the data, and on and on and on.  The joys of progress.

Lots more to come!

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November 15, 2018

5 responses on "Why upgrading is not all it's cracked up to be..."

  1. Congrats on making it alive, Tony! ;-)
    I had no idea Mojave has problems with external drives!?! I have tons of them but have held up on upgrading but almost did it a couple of weekends ago, but something came up. Is there a fix/solution or are you locked out of your drives?

    Cheers,
    Stéphane

  2. So here is the funny part. It won’t mount them. But if you do a repair it reports back error codes that don’t look good at all! Can fix it. However if you unplug and plug into a different port…might work perfect. For example I have plugged the same drives giving those errors into a 4-port USB3 hub and they work perfect. Nothing is wrong with them. They also work on my windows 7 system, and all of them are perfect on my Macbook pro that is one or two OSX versions back. So the fix for now is plug the drive into somewhere else on the computer… even a hub. Very weird. I’ve seen other people complaining about this on the apple support areas. We’ll see! Oh…and I am rarely one to update immediately. I know better… but this time the computer came with it. Downgrading seemed more trouble than it was worth.

  3. Hi Tony,

    I’m glad to see you back on your blog and sorry you’ve had so much hassle. Is there any update on the new website you mentioned last July?

  4. Hi Rene! You know i’ve been hesitant to post a launch date because i’ve hit so many technical and unforseen issues in doing all this…I didn’t want to promise a date again and not come through. Penciled in on my calendar is 2 weeks from now… Lets hope! Everything is ready to go finally, and just doing the last technical bits after the major programming hurdles were finally overcome on the back end. My web programmer is awesome. More shortly!

  5. Thanks for responding, Tony. No Pressure! Just curious and looking forward to seeing it.

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