My mass reduction regime has reached its first milestone. I’ve lost my first 20 pounds. I decided that instead of my usual choice of a single insurmountable goal, that I would go for several, smaller insurmountable goals instead. I picked 20 pound increments that divided evenly into my weight at the time, bought a scale, and have been monitoring myself.

Through a combination of what I like to call a food-reduced diet, and using my elliptical (admittedly I’m not using it as much as I had hoped, due to lack of time these days), have brought me to my first goal in something around 2 months. I had one fall-off-the-wagon last weekend where I ate rather more than I should have, and drank a lion’s share of 3 pitchers of beer while watching the Canada Men’s hockey team in the semi-final olympic match, I ended up gaining 8 pounds back (or so the scale said the next day), but it settled down after that, I should avoid intoxicants for this reason.

Aside: I’ve drunk water at home exclusively for a while now, I used to use crystal light, but I ditched the Aspartame and now I put a bit of lemon juice in it and sometimes some splenda for fun (and I await the day that they say that splenda is actually death in powder form). Anyway, I noticed on the lemon juice label (and the lime juice one I also have) that it is not a significant source of a variety of things, but was surprised when it included Vitamin C. Wasn’t the whole Limey’s being a reference to the British because of them using lime juice to stave off scurvy. I find it a little worrisome. (Addendum: Apparently the pasteurization destroys it, and it isn’t readded, oh well, best take my vitamin pills)

Despite the first checkpoint having been reached, there are still very many more checkpoints to reach. How many more? Not telling. Especially since I have no clear idea when I will claim success. If there is an absolute value where one goes from being ‘fat’ to not being ‘fat’, probably a little below there before I make the next plan. Motivation? Let’s be upbeat and say it’s so I can fit into a normal-sized-person’s coffin.

It’s that time again. Past couple of years I didn’t mark the passing of this particular day, but I feel like it this year as it stings more than usual.

Love is just an optimization problem. Women (or indeed, any group that is looking for good material from another group) are looking for a global maximum. The chances of finding such a thing is hopelessly low, since they themselves are unlikely to be the global maximum for the other person, and that’s if they ever actually meet this person at all. So we seek global maximums, but due to geography and such, we settle for local maximums. I don’t remember much about this kind of math, but I think it bodes very badly for me being a global minimum.

Happy ugly-fat-person shame day to us all.

When depressed, I occasionally do impulsive things.  Not usually interesting things, but occasionally I’ll go out and buy something frivolous when usually I’m pretty careful about buying gadgetry or frivolity, other than of course DVD’s.  But what started as a vague idea with no real plan for execution has this week come to fruition.  I’ve bought an elliptical trainer.

Yes, I’ve bought a Life Fitness X7 Elliptical trainer.  It was one of the few that was in a price range I was willing to afford, while being able to stand up to my advanced mass.  After deciding that I would get such a device at all, I made the trek up to my local Fitness Depot.  I had checked their website and found one that had the virtues I wanted while not being too expensive.  However, once I got to the place I was told that the model was not to be found in North America.  As their website only served North America, I found this rather perplexing, especially how other models were listed as sold out, while the one I inquired about was not.  I came back home and wondered where else I could get such a thing, not ever having entertained buying such a device before.  I found a Fitness Source which, as it turned out, was located a stones-throw away from the Fitness Depot, but still a bit of a jaunt to get back in that area from my apartment, having already walked there and back in my futile Fitness Depot attempt.  But I went out again into the cold and found a model that, normally I wouldn’t have been able to afford, but suspiciously was 50% off.  I’m wary of deals since I usually chalk them up to underhandedness.  And that may still be the case, but I decided to go with it and purchased it then and there.

I asked for it to be delivered the following week, and during the intervening weekend had parents up to help me throw out an old desk, sofa-chair and a matching 3-seater sofa which all took up a large amount of space in my apartment.  All I have left in the way of seating is a two-seater sofa, a stool and my computer chair, but as no one comes to my apartment anyway, I thought it was something I could live with.  The delivery men came on the appointed day and assembled the unit in something like 20 minutes.  It takes up rather a bit more space than I thought, but I might be able to reposition some things.

It takes up an inordinate amount of space, we have something in common

I haven’t used it much yet as I have been quite busy over the past couple of days, but hopefully I settle into a routine and eventually am able to rejoin the human race.

Another christmas come and gone.  Went home, exchanged gifts, the usual thing.  Got my mother a Wii (and Wii Fit) since that’s the first thing she’s actually requested specifically as a gift for quite a long time.

Another year has come and gone.  Reading my previous New Year’s entries over the years, it’s quite a depressing stream.  And I’m sorry to say that not much has changed.. or rather, things have changed, but have only gotten worse.  In fact, the whole decade has been a bit of a write-off for me in a few ways, and I’ve lost quite a lot, more than I realized I had.  Not weight though, heh, far from it.  In fact, records I have from the start of the decade show that I gained almost a whole other person.  And so, my resolutions are the same as they have always been.  As I fear they will always be.

The noughties are over, hopefully I can find a way to move on.  Maybe the tens will be better, but I’m cognizant of the fact that I don’t have many more decades to play around with.

This is a little delayed, and violates my usual rule of not talking about work, but as it’s a major change, I’ll go ahead.

So I finally left Infor.  I seemed to me that I might end up there forever, as I was comfortable (in a way) and was settled far longer than may of my friends who came and went.  So I was there, for four and a half years, but finally, through a former collegue, found an exit vector (after a couple of irritating false starts elsewhere).

I’m now, and have been for the past 3 business days, an employee of Kobo.  Kobo, was until very very recently, called Shortcovers, but now we’re off with a new name.  I left a number of friends, and a large amount of domain knowledge behind in this move.  Hopefully I can find some friends and find my bearings sooner rather than later.

Unrelated to this change, but happening at nearly the same time, was my suffering what I consider to be the greatest emotional setback in my life so far.  It’s left me very raw, and very uncertain, and it’s just unfortunate this had to happen so close to the stress of starting a new job.  I won’t go into any details on this aspect of recent events, as, after all, this is “not a journal”.

Maybe one day I’ll make an e-book of my melodramas and sell it, now that’s synergy.

So on the heels of going off to Cancun for a week, I was shipped off to Greenville, South Carolina for a week for work related stuff. I won’t go into the work stuff, but I did try to spend the rest of the trip like a mini vacation, so I took photos and such.

Just getting there proved to be the most harrowing part of the trip. A colleague and I arrived at Pearson with about an hour and a half before the flight, but by the time we worked out the pre-customs form stuff and got our boarding passes, we had about an hour left.

As we passed through US customs, I guess we didn’t say the right things, as we were shunted off to what I call a Detainment Area, where we were summarily fingerprinted, photographed and made to sit in a room with about 20 or so other people who looked like they weren’t going to be making it to their destinations either. We waited for quite a while, and overheard snatches of other people’s conversations with the agents, things like “we’re denying you entry to the US” and such, which made us think that the trip would be cut very short indeed. However, when it was finally our turn and we explained we were only going for meetings and not to actually work, which would have required a work visa, we were released to continue our journey. We made it through security without any issues (though I grumbles that I had to remove my loaner laptop from the apparently checkpoint-friendly laptop bag, the whole notion of it being checkpoint-friendly was to make it unnecessary to remove it) but when we made it to the gate, the tenders exclaimed “where were you? We’ve been paging.” Basically, we made it in time for the flight time, but normally by then they would have been on the runway about to take off. But we didn’t miss it, they quickly ushered us out of the building to the tarmac and up the staircase next to the plane. That was as new experience for me as well. I always felt it would seem more real to climb stairs into the plane, rather than just walk down the umbilical corridor into the doorway. So it was neat to finally get to do that. However, I feel now that instead of thinking it made it seem more real, I might have been confusing it with making it seem more like the movies.

The flight landed in Cleveland and we immediately disembarked and re-embarked at the same gate, though I’m not sure it was the same plane as the flight attendant was different. In total I think we spent maybe an hour in the air. I mean, by the time we reached cruising altitude, we had just enough time for the drinks trolley to pass before we’d be starting our approach to the destination airport. The company “travel agency” as it were arranged me a seat by myself in an aisle that only has one seat at all. That is, each row of seats is Seat, Aisle, Seat, Seat. So I got to be by myself with my immensity. It wasn’t painful to sit in those seats, but I wouldn’t say it was comfortable either, but I managed.

We stayed in the Hampton Inn, which had large rooms, large bathroom, large bed, it was quite nice, and more expensive than I would have stayed in myself if I were paying for it. Though the bathroom was well stocked with little containers of various products, each time housekeeping had been, things wouldn’t be quite right. For example one time I suddenly didn’t get a new container of shower gel, but instead had two containers of shampoo.

The hotel was right on a river which had, we were told, been beautified over the recent years. Where before it was a refrigerator graveyard, it now had little waterfalls and parks all around it. We walked around there a couple of times, usually on the search for restaurants, though we almost always ended up at the same one. Our favourite spot was a place called Smoke on the Water, and though the food was alright, it was the happy hour and $2 beers that brought us back. On our last night I had four beers, which probably was more beer in that single sitting than I had had over the course of the previous year.

The town, or at least the section we were near, was small, and reminded me of waterloo in the way that it seemed the whole place shut down at around 6. The only places that appeared to be open after leaving the restaurant were other restaurants. Unlike waterloo, the streets were dead too, without even drunken students to avoid. The general Greenville area seemed very large, but quite full of trees. Flying over it when we landed I remarked just how green it was from the sky.

The food was, as I’ve heard from other travellers to the Us, plentiful and inexpensive. At one place we were at twice, Cracker Barrel, our mains would have been quite enough, but we also got to pick 3 side-dishes, and cornbread of biscuits. And it came to 8 USD (which is pretty well 8 CND without dealing with fiddly small change). And most of the places were like that. One thing I noticed about the menu’s is that they would frequently use the word Veg where we would use Side. In that, a menu might say that with your burger you got two Vegs, the selection of them frequently included Macaroni and Cheese, which I found a little odd. And the bread you would get with your meal was frequently corn bread, which was a nice change. The only thing I noticed with drinks is the concept of Ice Tea. At home, it usually tastes like it was made from a sugary powder form. In the US (at least using the 2 sample points of data I have) it appears that if you ask for Ice Tea, you get Iced Tea, quite literally, and it is not sweetened. If you want that, you ask for Sweet Tea, but even then, it’s still more like actual tea, that’s been cooled down, and sweetened.

Everyone we met was reasonably friendly. Perhaps too friendly, as one incident will illustrate. So my colleague brought along his GPS and we relied on it quite heavily. On our way back from the office to the airport for the journey home, we started to drive but didn’t actually have the address of the airport, so we found an empty looking street, pulled off a bit, put on the hazard lights and started going through its database looking for the airport and, once found, for the satellites to find us as it usually took a while for the think to find its marbles. While we were there, a guy drove up behind us, waited for a second, then pulled off as well, and got out of his car. At this point we were a little worried, since this type of thing usually doesn’t go well, so when he approached the car, we lowered the window a bit, and the guy said in a reasonably southern accent “Hi’yall, you fellows okay?” (may not be an exact quote, but it was as disarming). We explained we were just setting up the GPS, thanked him, he wished us well and drove on. Friendly, yes, but we’re from Toronto, where such things are more alarming.

The flights home were mostly uneventful, it was pretty stormy when we made it back so it took a while to land, and I finally made it home to my apartment. I survived the US and all I got was this lousy pair of shoes (actually they are fairly nice shoes, bought because my current ones were failing apart as per the 6-month rule).

Two international trips in one year, I’m quite the jetsetter, thick sarcasm intended.

I failed to write this up at the time, and now it has been a couple of weeks, but I recently traveled to Cancun with some friends. I won’t be doing a day by day analysis like I did with the Greece Trip, as the Cancun trip was more laid back, and also because I didn’t bring a notebook with which to jot down details as things went, but I’ll try to break things down into the days, and I might get details wrong, but essentially the whole thing went like this:

Day 1:

So it was an early morning flight, and I stayed over at Laura and Murad’s. They were going out for the evening, and so I was just going to sleep. They were supposed to be back at something like 11pm to finish packing and take a nap of their own, but when I woke up at 1am, they still weren’t back and I was kind of concerned. I phoned Laura’s cell just to have it ring next to me on the couch. But only minutes later they got back. They finished packing and we met up with Chez and drove to the airport around 4am. Alicia arrived in her own time a half-hour later and we eventually made it on the plane. The check-in lady remarked to me that I was very lucky, a statement I still have yet to decipher. A few hours later we arrived in Cancun, easily found our bus and headed off to the resort.

We first wondered around waiting for our rooms to be ready. Laura and Murad had a room, and Alicia, Chez and I had one next door. It took quite a while for them to be ready, and in our triple-occupancy room they consistently forgot to give us three towels, and their idea of handling the sleeping arrangements was to push the two double beds (if even that wide) together. Alicia and I slept together (the unexciting form) with me trying to stay on the edge where the two beds join. Chez took the other bed.

Our first act on the resort was to get a round of 5 tequila shots, the burning was quite intense. Then we hung out by the beach and the pool. And we ate at the buffet for dinner first, though we had full run of the place with our black bracelets. The heat most of the days was, to me, almost cartoonish. I likened it to the wave of heat you feel when opening the oven to pull your dinner out. Even in the shade it was fairly intense.

A promising start

Day 2:

This day began with going to our Sunwing representative in the main building to hear about excursions. At first we were the only ones there because apparently no one else could find the building. We opted not to go with the Sunwing excursion offerings but to go with offerings from the hotel itself. Then we pretty much just relaxed for the rest of the day, with having our excursions the next day and another 2 days later.

We often swam in the pools since they had the swim up bar. It also had the advantage of being still, not being intensely salty and not being painfully rocky, which the beach failed to be.

Swim up bars might seem like a bad idea with the heat and swimming, but you’d be wrong

Day 3:

Our first excursion. My room nearly slept through it because our alarm was set to the right hour but as PM instead of AM. We rushed to get ready, some of us grabbed a quick breakfast at the buffet and made it to the van. It was a lengthy drive to the first section, which was in a jungle area where some Mayan’s hung out to take pictures of us and sell them to us. There was also the Cave. Ah, the Cave. We were meant to swim in it, and silly me, I thought the cave would be a horizontal one, where you swim into it. But this cave would be one you would merely fall directly down into, if not for the rappelling gear. So first we had a little ceremony with a Mayan who asked the land to accept us. If the land had any sense, it would have forbade me entry. I did make it into the cave, and out again, but it was an experience I’d rather not repeat, at least not with witnesses. But that was merely buttering me up for what was to come… for a little drive in the van later took us to the pyramid at Coba, and I managed after about half an hour and a liter of water to climb it. I can’t even be sure I didn’t die there and everything since has been residual neuron activity. Basically this excursion exhausted me physically and emotionally, and though I may be pleased after the fact that I made it to the top, I was less pleased at the time. Later we bought a CD with the photos they took of us (after forbading us from taking some ourselves at the cave) at quite the expense, but split 5 ways it was more reasonable.

I left behind pints of fluid at this place

Day 4:

This was a free day which I don’t have much recollection of what we did, other than relax. We played on the beach, which was always a challenge with the sharp rocks and the salt-water. That’s not to say it was fun, it was, but it was less fun the more the eyes stung to the point that you’d figure you’d be better off without them. I spent a bit of this time thinking about the day before and was pretty depressed about it. After dinner we went to the tail-end of a Mexican culture show put on in the hotel grounds, it was okay, but they did have a bit of a cock-fight at one point, and we were reasonably irked/displeased/uncomfortable with it. It didn’t go to any sort of conclusion, but certainly some feathers were flying at one point.

I was hoping the birds would turn on their handlers

Day 5:

This was another excursion, but was mostly relaxing on a catamaran. We were among a small group of english speakers, the rest I think were all spanish speakers. We went out a ways into the water and then did about an hour of snorkeling, which I found interesting, but from what I’m told doesn’t hold a candle to Hawaii. We then went to Isla Mujeres for some more beach play and lunch, and later on we did some shopping, but I managed not to buy anything. When we went back to the boat, it was raining, but us Canadians are hardy, plus it felt good compared to the heat I normally felt on this trip. We also bought some photos, I bought one of us underwater. When we got back we had our first bus ride from the docks back to the hotel. After getting back we probably just relaxed some more, it was a day for that. We ate dinner at a weird buffet where you got your sides yourself buffet-style, but people came around with skewers of meat and gave you some if you wanted.

We snorkeled in this, we were told not to touch the fish, but they would often nearly slam into me

Day 6:

This was our shopping day, so we got on a bus and headed to Market 28, which was more reminiscent to me of Turkey’s market during the Greece Trip. The shop keepers were quite aggressive in trying to get your into their shops, but usually we’d decide based on which ones had air conditioning, since it was boiling that day. I ended up buying a plate, since it was once of the few things I saw that I didn’t see at every single other shop, plus I thought it would go well with my Greece bowl. The guy who sold me the plate demonstrated its hardiness by taking his keys and trying to scratch the hell out of it. Then, as a comparison, took another kind of plate of his own merchandise, and proceeded to dig gashes in it with the keys. So in the end Alicia and I each got a plate, but we pretty well failed to get a deal on them. They were 20 each, but he almost talked himself down to 35 for the pair of them, and we tried for 30, but he wouldn’t hear of it (this compared to some of the other shopkeepers where it was quite easy to talk down). In the end we got them for 34, sigh. Still, as the only thing I bought (other than a fridge magnet for someone else) I’m pleased enough with it.

That night we had dinner at the one restaurant where you needed a reservation. It actually demanded, for men anyway, dress shirt, dress pants and shoes. I had dressy enough pants, and my shoes are always the vaguely dressy work shoes, but I had no dress shirt. The closest I had was a sort of white pullover with collar. I had told my companions that if I was denied entry to just go on without me, but I got in okay, and in fact we were an hour late. Well, they wrote 8pm on our reservation ticket, while 7pm on their own books, but it was fine, we got our meal, and they served one of the best white wines I’ve had that wasn’t actually an icewine.

This guy wouldn’t get out of my shot. I ended up buying a plate from him.

Day 7:

This was to be our last actual day, so it was mostly just relaxing. We hit our favorite restaurants for breakfast and lunch. For breakfast I had hotcakes which I forgot was a synonym for pancakes. For lunch we were back at the seafood place next to the sea we had been at a few days earlier. That time I had a bit of fish, which was alright but I’m still quite cautious of it. This second time I didn’t have the fish. We hung out by the beach a bit for our last swims. I decided to wear my sandals into the water which worked really well to avoid the sharp rocks and stubbing my toes. For dinner we went to the italian restaurant which, for some reason, had a fairly long wait. Once in, I copped out and had a personal pizza, but it being an italian restaurant I think its valid.

I’ll merge Day 8 in with this one because all Day 8 consisted of was finishing the packing, getting on the bus, getting back to the airport and getting on the plane. The only event of note was when I apparently set off the metal detector, a guy was telling me stuff in spanish and I just did what the movies told me, stand on the spot and raise my arms. They also put my carry-on through the detector again and swabbed it for some reason. As I was the only one to get subjected to that, I guess I did something wrong at some point, but I was a little anxious about it all, but that would be nothing compared to my trip to the states a few weeks later.

Last day at the beach, and just as rough as all the other days

Anyway, so that was the trip to Cancun. It was very hot, but fun overall. A week was a good length, the heat probably would have done me in if we had stayed two, heh.

Father Ted is a Irish Comedy (ishcom?) that I’ve more or less recently encountered, and I highly recommend it.

Basically it’s about the wacky adventures of three priests in a parish on the secluded and sparsely populated Craggy island, a fictitious island near Ireland. Father Ted, the titular character is mostly down to earth, less than completely moral but generally the sane anchor of the show. Father Dougal is young, childlike, living in fantasy and never quite aware what is going on. Father Jack is the old drunk who mostly is limited to the vocabulary “Drink”, “Feck”, and “Arse”.

Watch these clips to get a taste (but they are links, no one feels like allowing the embed, meh)
Intro (by The Divine Comedy)
Down with this sort of thing (sort of a meme now)
Being discovered acting racist (pt 1)
Should we all be racist now father? (pt 2)
Diversity slideshow (pt 3)
I don’t beeeeelieve it (One foot in the grave is also a good show)

If you enjoyed, go out and find the series. There are 3 of them (and being like television series over across the pond, it only amounts to 25 episodes. And there will never be any more, as Dermot Morgan, Father Ted, died during the wrap up party of the final series.

Drink!

So I’ve had yet another hardware issue, but this time with my UPS.

Last thursday, in the morning, my APC Back-UPS ES 500 started making a terrible noise, and I heard vista go duh-dun, the usual sound when a USB device is disconnected, and indeed that moment the monitoring software for the device, PowerChute, invoked a balloon message telling me it lost connection to the UPS. The noise lasted around 5 seconds, and then suddenly stopped, and all was well. I checked the status of the device thought the app which now apparently could connect to the UPS, and it said all was well, though the battery was charging, and was only at 57%. Odd, it hadn’t needed to go to battery in a long while. And the noise was quite alarming, like the sounds of dolphin laughter piped through a broken speaker.

Of course, it didn’t end there. The next day, in the morning, the exact same thing started to happen, and just as I was peeking behind my desk at the UPS to see what might be up, thwump, the computer reboots as gracelessly as possible (and the 4th graceless reboot in a row, all for different reasons). I was quite alarmed, the noise was just as terrible and went on for the 20-30 seconds before the reboot, and then stopped. And the USB had dropped out as well, before the reboot of course. I shut off the computer and unplugged everything from the unit, putting it aside while I rewired everything into the wall sockets.

I started searching the APC knowledge base and such looking for an explanation of this issue, and even resorted to emailing their tech support, which I had done before to get the Vista compatible version of the monitoring app when I ditched my old computer. The trouble is, the thing is supposed to beep, it just beeps in very specific ways. It beeps at a regular interval when the thing is on battery, it beeps for self-test, and it beeps continually for an overload. But the beeping it made for me during those ‘events’ were unlike any healthy beep. It sounded like the speaker itself was somehow messed up. I made this very clear in my email to the technicians, but of course the first three quarters of their reply was about the standard error code. I supposed it’s natural for them to assume that the users don’t know that their beeping unit is supposed to beep and that pasting back that same information will solve 90% of these types of inquiries. Just as natural as it is for me thinking them stupid for not reading the initial email properly saying it was very definitely not one of those types of beeps.

They did ask me further questions, the answers to which will almost certainly mean they’ll close the issue without any further digging. One was about the age of the battery, and it is quite old, so old that I can’t remember. Certainly older than 4 years, perhaps 5 or 6. On the forums, I read that apparently the lifespan given for any of these products is 6 years… that’s pretty bad, but also estimated 2 swaps of the battery in that time… ugh. A while ago the app was bringing up notices about how my battery was old and I should get a new one, but it was on pain of a lesser battery charge, not random noises and load-drops. Another question they asked was about the loads connected to it, and admittedly, there was a bit going on. There was the tower itself, and both LCD monitors, and then a power-bar with my four external hard-drives plugged in. All of that is not very good, but it never had any problems handling it before.

I haven’t heard back from them yet, but I suspect they’ll just say that with all that crap, and an old battery, anything could happen. Right now I have my own theory, but it has holes. The UPS sometimes runs self-tests, and from the sound the unit makes (deep click), which sounds like when it takes over due to a power spike/brown/loss, that the test actually throws the current load over to the battery. The battery, being old, can no longer handle the load, and it tries to signal the overload condition, a continuous beep. Now, there are a few issues I have with this: Why would the beep from the speaker be so screwed up? So little power that it causes it to sound like a robot coughing? And why would the USB drop out? Same? And the self-tests happen quite rarely (in fact, I’m not sure what actually controls or schedules them), so why did this happen two days in a row (where the second day, it actually couldn’t cope and the computer rebooted)? The only thing I can think of is that if it couldn’t complete a self-test on one day, it tries the same time the next day (both events occurred in the morning, and I think it was at the same time). Windows Event Log is no help, it reports Thursday’s drop out with the battery, but since on Friday it rebooted, it lost most of the logs around that event, but given where the logs stopped and started again, and given the time it took for me to rewire, I’m guessing it was at the same time each day.

So what exactly is the point of the self-test (if that’s what caused it) when it does something like this? Where’s my warning from PowerChute saying the battery is unusable? The requests for ordering a new one was based simply on age, not on any result of diagnostic as far as I know. It’s like a printer wanting you to replace a yellow ink cart that has barely been used because you printed a lot of black documents and it suggests replacements by page count, and you ignore it, until one day the yellow ink really is out, so the printer catches on fire. Anyway, I’ve wanted to upgrade to a newer unit ever since I got the new computer, so I went out and got an APC Back-UPS XS 900 (the two letter model number indicator doesn’t ever seem to match the advertised series, ES and BE, XS and BX). I was debating going with a different vendor given this experience, but everything I read online seems to indicate that APC was better, or at least as good, as the very few competitors out there for the yokel consumer space.

I haven’t rewired yet or plugged this beast in (basically the battery pack is two batteries, and the sockets are inconveniently in the back so I’ll have to rework the area it will sit in), hopefully it works because the forum did describe a few people who had units DOA.

This poor computer takes a lot of abuse. I’m off to Mexico in a week, so hopefully it gets the graceful shutdown it deserves.