If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed my recent… saga.
I'm moving to Sweden in eleven days. The plan was to put a bunch of our stuff and our dog in the car and drive through France, Germany, Denmark and finally Sweden to get there. Our dog already has a pet passport and has had his rabies jabs. The only additional entry requirement over the standard EU passport requirements is that the animal must have a positive rabies antibody test 120 days or more after the original vaccination was given - the standard EU requirement is 30 days.
Three weeks ago, we sent off for the second test. There's still six months until his rabies booster is due, so what's the problem? I confidently paid the £75 and waited patiently for the result.
Two days ago, the result came back. A positive result comes back at 0.5 thingys per something or higher, and his test last year came back at exactly 0.5. This test, however, came back at less than 0.1 thingys per something.
Shit.
The only option remaining is to fly him out. As the UK and Sweden are both completely rabies free and don't have open borders, they have an agreement where animals can travel between the two countries without a rabies vaccination as long as it's a direct journey — by plane or boat.
The cost? £1,300. After the phone call from my vet, I tried to figure out what I could sell to get the cash together to get this done — money has hardly been plentiful recently. My piano was an excellent candidate, but very hard to sell!
After a while, I decided to sell my work machine — a Mac Pro and two displays. I won't be taking it to Sweden anyway, so it's not like I'll miss that they're gone!
As I was sifting through the files on the Mac Pro in preparation for wiping it for whoever buys it, I had a sinking feeling. That machine has gigabytes upon gigabytes of stuff in it - virtual machines, all the code I and employees have ever written and several native operating systems for testing.
The original idea was to take my laptop to Sweden and put my work stuff on it. It'd be amazing! However, the thought of all those years worth of work cruft being merged with years worth of personal cruft on one machine gives me a headache. There's definitely a strong work case for having a dedicated Work Mac, and the change from selling this Mac Pro and its displays will buy a new iMac - perfect!
This is stupid. I'll be working from home in Sweden, and at the rate I'm going I'll have my home laptop, its 24" LED Display, an iMac and my development Windows machine all in one room. However, I can't put all these operating systems and virtual machines on my poor MacBook!
It was at that point I remembered that the 27" iMac can act as an external display for other machines. Perfect! I can fill the iMac with virtual machines and native operating systems (replacing my development PC) as well as my work clutter without destroying my poor laptop. At the same time, I can sell the 24" LED display and use the iMac as the laptop's main screen.
Genius!
The only problem is that I have less than two weeks to sell all this stuff and get the money from PayPal into my bank account. I may well be visiting the Bluewater Apple Store as I go past on the way to Sweden to collect an iMac!