I started today quite early (as judged by EDT inhabitants), about 05:30.
I woke up somewhat unsettled. I hadn't planned on sleeping so early last night, and I had a bunch of work to do before my family reunion today.
I'm rebuilding my old Thinkpad x120e. I had repaved its drive when my x230 had shown up, and now I'm paying the price for such behaviour. With my x230 dead, I've got to get the x120e going at least partially.
Installing a new laptop from scratch is quite a hassle; installing on a misbehaving laptop is a serious hassle. It seems like whenever the x120e is driving its CPU hard, it will not survive its next reboot, requiring me to leave it sitting without power for 30 minutes before it will boot successfully. I found that by blowing into its fan for 5 minutes will shorten its required nap, but boy howdy, what a hassle.
As a result of the rebuilding effort, I got out for the reunion a bit later than I planned. I was hoping to be at the reunion in Komoka, Ontario (about 15km west of London) for 13:00 but I rolled in about 30 minutes late.
With the activities of the past few weeks, I certainly had no shortage of conversation material.
It was a good turn-out. Not the best in recent years, but still decent.
I noticed that the clock change was starting to impact me at about 18:00, so I started making the motions to return from London to Toronto. I had to stop at a service station for a coffee to try to snap my brain back into functioning order.
I remembered something about European service stations; their washrooms are almost always charged; usually 0.50-0.75 euros. You often get a coupon for some of that back to apply to a purchase (like water, pop, snacks, etc). You may pay for the washrooms, but they go above and beyond to make sure the washroom is clean; the toilets are so self-cleaning that they have a mechanism to scrub the entire seat as soon as you stand up. Pretty slick.
For Monday, I was doing a lot of preparations for the return. Ran out and bought some clothes, a new jumpstart battery for the car (which is dead again, of course), and a couple automotive feeler gauges.
I used the feeler gauges to finally remove the SSD in my new laptop, allowing me to return it to a serviceable state. I used them to create oiled slides to get the 9mm SSD past the edge of the magnesium edges in the 7mm drive bay. Shortly afterwards, IBM called to tell me that there is no ETA for the parts for my laptop yet. I arranged to leave it with a friend in Mississauga so he can work with the IBM team on the repair call.
Grabbed some dinner, rushed my packing nearly leaving the iPad at home, and grabbed a limo to the airport for my 22:10 flight. I land at about noon tomorrow in Frankfurt to begin the second chapter of my trip!
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