Arriving in New Orleans

March 3, 2012  Earlier this morning we arrived in New Orleans at the Louis Armstrong International Airport.  Our flight here was a non event.  Perfect.  There were not a lot of people here at 1:00 AM... but I took this shot since I loved the high barrel ceiling that went forever in both directions.

A tribute to the king of jazz, Louis Armstrong stands in front of a huge mural high on the wall.  Here is a guy who just loved to do what he did best... never giving a thought about how famous he would someday be... of having an airport named in his honour.

March 2, 2012  Today was another Lesson Learned the Hard Way. The main reason I bought my new little MacBook Air was so that when we travel I don't have to lug along a heavy bulky lap top... but try as I might there are now TWO computers in my bag on this trip.

Computer problems cause loss of sleep, anxiety and frustration.  Yesterday I wanted to move all my photos from my MacBook Pro onto my new MacBook Air.  So I called up Rob Sauter, the Apple wizard who works at Future Shop in Victoria and he guided me thru the process of what to do.  He warned me that there is always a risk, so back up everything before doing  the transfer… so I plugged in my Passport portable hard drive first and ran TimeMachine back-up.

I then transferred all my photos onto the same hard drive and with click and drag put them onto the Passport hard drive. After I tried to then transfer those photos to the MacBook Air I could not open iPhoto on either of them.  Instead I now got this ugly message that “iPhoto has been damaged or is incomplete.”  YIKES!

Here I am about to leave on our cruise vacation and I have lost my ability to even use iPhoto on either of my machines!  CRISIS ALERT BELLS were going off… and it caused me great loss of sleep and anxiety.  I had to stay up and worry!  What a terrible night.

We left on the early morning ferry to Victoria to catch a noon plane out of here… and I was at Future Shop at 9:00 AM to try to beg some “Sympathy Service” to get an instant fix.

They don’t open before 10 AM, but I asked one of the employees who was also waiting outside the front door if he could see if Ron Neufeld, the tech guy I knew, and ask him to come to the door to see me… which he did.  After explaining my problem to him he said he thought he could help me… but no customers are allowed in the store before 10 AM… I would have to come back. 

We had some bank and post office stuff to do, so we went and did that first and then came back.  He did an iLife restore… and we then reset the Time Machine to it’s latest back up… and we then set up the Passport portable hard drive to reload the photos into the library.  Since that would take some time Ron walked my computer with me back to the truck where Shirley was and she held it until it finished and we headed toward the airport.  DAMN!  I still got the same ERROR message. 

So I called Rob from the airport… and he said that since Ron used a newer version of iLife we should look online for any updates to iPhoto… and maybe that would get things fixed.  I learned how to check for updates today and quickly did the search… Yes!  There was an update… but even though I tried to download it… the plane came before the update was completed.

So as soon as we were in our hotel in New Orleans, I went online, checked for updates again… and set up both computers to do all the updates recommended.

This morning when I checked… all the updates had been successful.  So I turned off and restarted the computers… and VOILA!  I could open iPhoto in both computers.  Equilibrium has been restored to this part of the planet.

Another Lesson Learned the hard way.

“Five minutes before the party is no time to learn to dance.”

But I now know where to go to check for updates for my computers.  Click on the big Apple in the upper left corner and the second tab in the drop down menu is Software Updates.

We are just now heading to the cruise ship... and unless things are a lot better than the last time we cruised... we may not be able to another blog post for 7-8 days and we are back in New Orleans again.  The internet speed on the last cruise ship made uploading photos impossible before the system timed out.