I’m heading back to LA tonight, for the next week and a half. Not sure how much blogging will be happening.

[Evening update, about 9:40 CDT]

Well, I’m stuck at DFW, with my LA flight delayed until 11 PM local, which gets me into LA about midnight, and probably to my room over an hour later. Should have taken the non-stop from Miami.

[Bleary Wednesday morning update from the left coast]

OK, I was wrong. It wasn’t delayed until 11 pm — it didn’t rise the wheels until 12:30 AM (1:30 AM my body time on a day after I’d gotten up at 5 AM). We got into LAX about 2 AM Pacific (24 hours after I had first arisen). National had only two cars, both vans. The first one (a Kia Sedona) started beeping at me, and lighted an indicator saying that both front doors were ajar (no, it’s not a jar, it’s a door…) and the interior light came on and wouldn’t go off. This behavior continued, so I returned the car, to little rejoicing, and got the other one, a Dodge of some variety. I didn’t get to bed until after 3 AM. It’s now almost 10 AM, and I’m at work.

Hopefully, I’ll get caught up a little tonight.

Well, it’s windy, raining, with what looks to be a lot more to come on the Marathon radar. It looks like a low, verging on a tropical depression, as hurricane season really gets into the swing of things. So what’s the plan for today? Drive forty miles toward Key West, and get on a boat to go out snorkeling. Really. The captain says it will be fine.

Well, it’s no skin off his nose if we drive an hour each way for nothing.

[Update a few minutes later]

We cancelled, after looking at the radar again. Off to Key West instead. If this rain keeps up, it might actually be pleasant (i.e., not blistering hot) there today.

We drove down to Marathon yesterday afternoon, after picking up some friends from Michigan at the Fort Lauderdale airport. We have Internet where we’re staying, but between snorkeling, kayaking, Sunfishing et al, blogging may be light for a few days.

And yes, I know it will be hot down there. But it’s what they want to do.

…and finally doing final editing on my New Atlantis piece, so blogging will remain light until then.

I’ve got a hardware problem of some kind.

I put in a brand new terabyte drive and installed Fedora 11 on it. As I was doing some package updates, the screen froze, just as it did yesterday, when all the trouble started. When I tried to reboot, it didn’t even recognize the drive as a system disk. I rescued it, and fsck said the boot sector was clean (I don’t know if that means no problems, or it has no data).

I did a full memory check overnight last night, so I don’t think it’s that. Maybe Carl had the right idea about a bad video card, but how would that cause it to trash the hard drive? Any other ideas?