Drive Surgery
I've had this laptop hard drive at work whose motor was seriously failing that would have been nice to recover. However, after running for a few minutes, the bearing would inevitably sieze, and there would be read errors.

I noticed last night that I owned another very similar drive -- just one digit different in the part number -- that had a perfect motor, but bad platter or heads (causing read errors). After opening it, it became clear that the difference is the number of platters. The motor in these is integrated right into the aluminum chassis, so just swapping it is not possible.

No matter, I moved every other part from the drive I wanted to recover. To make a long story short, it didn't work. The drive wouldn't read properly.

But it was still a fascinating experiment.

Oh Em Gee
Before leaving a foreign country it's always nice to do a little bit of duty-free shopping. Alcohol is a good place to start. Now, there are some bottles that are a little out of my price range, and then there are ones that are just simply ridiculous.

An example of the latter is this bottle of Glenfiddich. While a pricetag of NTD288,000 might not seem like any meaningful number, with today's exchange rate of 30.7262, that is in fact a bottle that is damned near ten thousand dollars. Granted, it's older than my father. I've always wondered how a five hundred dollar shot tastes...

I felt cheap and bought a hundred dollar bottle of scotch instead.

Strangest Thing Ever
I am on my way once again from Ottawa to Taipei. The trip isn't starting well, as I've already been at YOW for almost an hour after I was supposed to land in Toronto. The plane had a flat tire. Go figure.

But the strangest thing happened while I was waiting for my flight. Two things that my brain could not process simultaneously: I was staring into the face of radio host Lowell Green, but the person I was looking at was wearing a Xandros shirt. Very unusual. This was somewhat difficult to resolve, so my brain paused for a moment. When he asked "Can I help you?", only then did the voice straighten out my confusion. Apparently his son-in-law works in my office.

Hopefully the rest of this trip goes more smoothly. The sun's going to go down in a couple of hours and I still have three planes ahead of me today!