Not your typical coffee shop patron

I was attempting to exit a coffee shop on Milton Keynes' Midsummer
Place mall when I walked right into a dalek. I imagine it was
browsing through the attached bookstore to obtain some insights on hu-
mans, but getting sidetracked by marauding space monkeys or some such,
hence the cautionary signage.

Monmouth Coffee

Mmmmmm.  And it's just a block from Forbidden Planet science fiction bookstore too.

More updates later since Monmouth Coffee is supposed to be a mobiles-free zone.

Still no luck

I'm still working on the dead computer.

New rule: mission-critical personnel should not be running nonvirtualized Windows. It's just too fragile.

Kristiana had a basically successful day at work yesterday, but it's only the beginning. Tonight she'll work late reconfiguring everything, and tomorrow will be Day One of the new setup, which is nearly always a trying time.

Early morning in the hotel lobby

Our 1st-floor room is very nice, but it's hard to be on differing
sleep schedules in it - light anywhere means light everywhere! I
awoke at about 5:30am local time and hope I didn't wake Michael as I
departed - the door is a bit loud.

So here I am, in the Courthouse Hotel Kempinski just past 6am, far too
awake to stay in bed, but only in my comfy clothes so going past the
lobby is out of the question. How nice if I could get some tea to go
with my book while I wait...

#*@%!

My computer, which was working fine yesterday, gave unable-to-hibernate errors last night and isn't booting today. Just a perpetual blinking cursor. BIOS tests seem to suggest that memory and HD are working so I HOPE it's just a corrupt MBR and nothing more, or this is going to be a really frustrating trip. I've planned on doing roughly two weeks worth of work during the three week trip, and there are strong business reasons not to back down from that.

Kristiana is downloading an Ubuntu Live CD to burn for me which should give me more tools to diagnose the problem - and to fix it if the MBR theory is correct.

The worst case scenario in which I buy a computer in the UK and have all my data overnighted to me on a portable drive and then build myself a working development environment on a hotel Internet connection is really ugly, but feasible if it comes to that.

OK

We're all checked in. Sleepy now. No updates for a while.

We've

Made it into London, but not yet to our hotel.

Paddington Station.

We're here

We've landed in London. All in all a pretty nice flight. I'll tell you about it later.