Saturday
I got up early in the morning and went off to Oakland Airport to meet Michelle, just back from Southern California. How nice!
After visiting with her and her housemates, I went off to Walnut Square and met up with Ben, got some bread at the Cheeseboard, got the hiccups, and saw Ben's new apartment. I ended up staying there for about twelve hours, as we talked, assembled Ikea furniture, went to a health food store, continued to have hiccups (well, I did), had dinner, and got Debian working on his laptop.
Ben cooked some nice stuff, with the help of Shane, who joined us for dinner and also helped out with the Debian setup.
The Debian installation was a nice piece of technical work because that laptop can't boot CDs or floppy disks, and was originally running Red Hat. Ben had a swap partition of 128 megabytes, and we managed to manually extract the Debian base system into the swap partition (newly reformatted as ext2fs), then chroot in, do a bunch of configuration, mess around with boot loader stuff, and finally copy the resulting Debian installation back out onto his main partition. It works, and it has networking now. Installing Linux without any installation media is a fun challenge.
My shoulders were sore all day; my back didn't really hurt until the evening, and still wasn't as bad as last night. But since I didn't feel any back pain at all until last night, that's still not ideal.
Ben gave me a bunch of neat books he was trying to get rid of.
I still have the hiccups, some hours later.
