This is my first time to ETech, and I feel like I ought to be more excited about it. As it is, I'm going in with 3 conferences under my belt already, the lingering unresolved hassles that accompany theft of one's possesions, and a kind of distracted uncalm. In other words, not the best way to be starting out.

I've been to a number of O'Reilly conferences, most of them OSCON's, but this is the first one where I've gotten spam from people rolling out products or having meetings around the event. I must have forgotten to check off a box on one of the registration forms.

After the adventures with the iBook at PyCon -- it seems to have reverted to a plainly dead state -- I was resigned to having no laptop to take with me to ETech. The only problem was that a lot of meeting up with people is likely to get organized via e-mail, and the thought of 5 days of e-mail piling up while I was gone was pretty disconcerting. So last night I decided to try something more drastic on the Thinkpad. I had already tried to reinstall it from the recovery partition, but was not having much luck. So I figured that perhaps the problem was with the disk in the machine, and I wondered if I could tear apart one of my Firewire/USB disk enclosures, slap an IDE CD-ROM in there, and try to get the machine to boot off of that. I turned on the machine figuring that I would look around in the BIOS for a boot from USB setting (I'd never done that before), but I wasn't quite fast enough, so the machine kept booting, right into part of the Win2k installation sequence. I was going to wait until it locked up to reboot it, but instead of hanging, it kept on going right through to the end.

Additional detail is probably boring, but the upshot of it is that the machine seems to be happy now, and I've been able to use it for some simple tasks, like e-mail, web browsing, and simple Word documents. So it seems like it's better than nothing to take this thing along with me to ETech and see how far I can get. It has a PCMCIA wireless card in it, but I don't have a way to test that, and the battery life is 0, so I'll have to be plugged in. Fortunately, the other O'Reilly conferences have been pretty decent about power. Then again, I didn't get spam...

A happy thing did happen today. We've been waiting to get an official copy of the report from the Vancouver police. In order to get one of those, you have to submit a request on paper, along with a copy of your government issued picture ID. We send off the request quite some time ago (the USPS website said the letter was delivered in Canada on Feb 20), and the document finally arrived today. Next step is to fax that and a pile of other materials to our insurance company.

I haven't been able to get any of the Windows or Linux blogging clients to work with Pybloxsom's Metaweblog API support (which is semi embarrassing since I wrote that support), so blogging is going to continue to be light. Once you've used something like Ecto or MarsEdit, both of which worked with Pyblosxom, it's hard to go back. That MacBook Pro can't ship fast enough for me.

I'm flying out tomorrow night so that I can hit V2.0 of Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users tutorial, and I'm around till late Thursday afternoon. I'll definitely be at Mimi Yin's talk on Personal Information Architecture and Chandler