Once that’s all done, we’re going to finish scrubbing the house down – it’s collected a TON of dust and dirt and clutter from the nearly-6-month-long renovation project. And then – BAKING! My favorite part.

Once we make it through the weekend, I want to focus on finishing up that front portion of the first floor. Why? Because that’s where my drawing desk (I call that section, “my studio”) is located, and I’m just itching to be able to put it to use! Do I smell a New Year’s resolution?

We’ll see.

Anyway. I’m going to go through the probably-hundreds of photos that I’ve collected from the renovation so far and post some before-during-after photos on the house blog. Keep an eye open for those! What a difference… It’s a whole new house!

I visited the Apple store one weekend for other reasons, and asked them about their iMac stock, you know, since I was already there. They don’t carry the upgraded model that I wanted (no surprise) so I’d have to order it online and wait. And that’s when the fun began…

When we returned home from the Apple store that day, it’s like the Mac Pro just knew. It seemed to retaliate and refused to boot up. Nothing I tried seemed to work – just the normal startup tone and a gray screen. Eventually, after I sucked it up and ordered the iMac, I realized that it was a system drive failure.

The iMac finally arrived and I was all giddy setting up my new toy. The screen is ridiculous. I just wish it was under better circumstances – I wanted to migrate my data over to it more gracefully, and at my own leisure…

I’ve learned a number of things during the setup of my iMac. First, I already knew that my most recent data backup was not really up to date (my bad), but at least I had something. Secondly, the Library folder is hidden in OS X Lion – so it takes just a little extra effort to migrate my data over to the new machine. And third, the folder structures in Lion have changed – significantly. I can no longer do a simple folder copy from one machine to another in order to “migrate” my data. It just won’t work.

I tried the migration assistant, which worked. Kind of. Since the iMac was already setup with a user account it needed to migrate the data over to a new user account. After that, I tested copying the Mail & Calendar folders over to the original user account now that they’ve been converted to the new folder structure – but that presented with a handful of permissions issues that I need to work through. The Calendar seemed to be mostly OK after that, but Mail just wasn’t quite right and, frustrated, I left it there.

I was actually able to get the old system drive working long enough to grab my Library & a few other folders off of it – so the data backup issue is no longer an issue. Now I just need to get everything Lion-ified.

So here’s my current plan of action (because I know that everyone’s just dying to know):

1. I scavenged another drive and rebuilt the Mac Pro with 10.6 & installed all of the updates.
2. I’ve started “restoring” my Mail, Calendar, and Address Book data back to the Mac Pro in 10.6 format.
3. Once that’s confirmed OK, I need to install my older version of iPhoto, make sure the photo library is OK, then link my iTunes library to the proper location and make sure that’s OK.
4. Then, I need to install the new version of iPhoto so that it’ll update the iPhoto library database. Apparently I decided at the wrong time to upgrade iPhoto – JUST prior to the failure. It didn’t actually install due to App Store connection issues…

That will be the end of the preparation phase. After that, I can go one of two routes:

1. Upgrade the Mac Pro to Lion and migrate the data over from there.
2. Reinstall Lion on the iMac and use the Migration Assistant to hopefully grab my data and migrate it over for me from the Mac Pro.

I’m going to reinstall Lion on the iMac anyway, because at this point I’ve tinkered so much that I don’t trust it’s stability. It’s already started throwing kernel panics.

This effort better be worth it! From what I’ve seen of the iMac and Lion so far, I think I’ll ultimately be pretty happy. If I can ever finish getting it setup.

I think it’s time to move back to Vanilla (again). It integrates so much better, and even though I absolutely loved it the last time I used it, it looks so much slicker now.

I’ve been doing some tinkering, and it’s NOT going to be an easy process. There’s a script that’s supposed to help with the migration – but it fails horribly for me no matter what I do to try to coerce into behaving. I’ve mapped out a lot of the fields (maybe I should actually write all of that down and share it) and that portion isn’t so bad. It’s the differences in the way that bbPress and Vanilla each store the content of the first post of each topic that’s going to be the biggest pain. Thankfully my little forum is pretty low traffic, so I can take my time.

So far I’ve tried a LOT of different approaches, and ruled them all out. I think I have a game plan now, and just need to sit down for a day and get it done. I’m hoping it actually works and I’m not wasting my time. It’s not entirely a waste though – I consider myself a database n00b, and hacking through all of this is teaching me quite a bit.

Since the upgrade I’ve noticed inconsistencies with these shortcuts. When I double-click on them, some would open in a new tab while others would open in a completely new window. Those who know me would initially think “You have too many tabs open, so it’s opening the overflow into new windows” – but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I’m not sure if it’s strictly the shortcuts from after the upgrade that are exhibiting this behavior, or just some of them (I haven’t done enough testing). I do know that at a minimum that it is not a random behavior – it’s always the same shortcuts that open in a new window.

My IE preferences are already configured to always open links and pop-ups in new tabs, so that wasn’t it, and viewing the properties of the shortcuts didn’t see to help either. I figured I’d try to edit the shortcuts and see if I could figure out what the difference was that caused this behavior. Bingo! I should have looked a little closer at the shortcut properties.

The shortcuts that opened in new tabs were “.url” files, while the shortcuts that opened in new windows are “.website” files. There’s about twice as much data in the shortcuts that open new windows, and all had different GUIDs. The shortcuts that opened in new tabs seemed to have all the same generic content with the exception of the URL propertly. Also, the .website shortcuts are called “Pinned Site Shortcuts” while the .url shortcuts are called “Internet Shortcuts”. I was able to copy the URL from one of the new-window shortcuts and paste it into one of the new-tab files and save it with a new name and it worked beautifully.

What a frustration. Now I have to figure out how to create the appropriate shortcut types on-demand.

Here is an example of the contents of a .website file:

[{000214A0-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]
Prop4=31,Page Title Here
Prop3=19,11
[{A7AF692E-098D-4C08-A225-D433CA835ED0}]
Prop5=3,0
Prop9=19,0
Prop2=65,2C0000000000000001000000FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF840000005C000000F0040000860300007A
[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://google.com
IDList=
[{9F4C2855-9F79-4B39-A8D0-E1D42DE1D5F3}]
Prop5=8,Microsoft.Website.1E0E98C3.ED613691


And here is an example of the contents of a .url file:
[{000214A0-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]
Prop3=19,11
[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://google.com
IDList=


I didn’t make any changes to the forum, though I have been attempting to integrate WordPress with a new install of Vanilla. I didn’t think I had made any changes that would impact bbPress, but apparently… I did?

Check back later this weekend. Might need to continue moving forward with the Vanilla install and manual data migration.