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November 29, 2009, a Sunday
Pancho Villa State Park, New Mexico, USA
— Vacuumed the RV and installed a new hard drive in my MacBook Pro
Had my normal breakfast then finished the blog entry I started last night. I did some computer work, then we prepped the RV to move. I left in the Jeep around 11:05 to look for a site with electric hookups. I left the Jeep in Site 40, then walked back to the RV and stowed the solar-electric panels.

I drove the RV to Site 40. It was a nice level site, and we were hooked up to electricity by 11:30. I did some computer work.

Had lunch around 12:30 of a ham-and-Swiss sandwich on rye and the last of J's tortilla soup. Then I downselected images in Capture One (C1) from the first two days at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. I vacuumed the inside of the RV which included "dusting" the upper surfaces and vacuuming the floors. Then I organized some screws and such using a new Rubbermaid storage case with lots of small compartments while I was backing up my MacBook Pro onto the new Seagate 500GB in an external Mapower MAP-KC21ES enclosure.

At 4:15, after the backup finished, I started to install the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB 7200 rpm 2.5" SATA Notebook Hard Drive in my 15" MacBook Pro to replace the 200GB 7200 rpm drive that came with it. I followed the directions from directions from ifixit. I borrowed a #0 Phillips screwdriver from J because both of mine were destroyed in the great Canon TS-E 90 debacle. I also used her technique of using transparent tape to secure the screws I removed at each step at the instructions for that step to facilitate re-assembly. A listener commented on Car Talk recently that if one rebuilds a carburetor enough, soon you can build a second carburetor from the "leftover" parts. :) It was pretty easy to open up the case of the MacBook Pro and extract the old hard drive. Then I removed the Seagate Momentus 500GB drive from the Mapower MAP-KC21ES USB 2.0 and dual FireWire 800 enclosure and installed in the MacBook Pro. I reassembled the MacBook Pro, and it booted up just fine from the new drive at 4:54 — whew. It's so nice to have about 330GB of free space instead of about 40GB. The Mac will be happier to have virtual-memory space that isn't being taken by normal files, and I'll be happier because I'll be able to move more of my regular files to the MacBook Pro from an external drive so that they'll all be in one place. :)

My mother called as I was doing some computer work to let me know that my cousin S had a baby girl, H, this morning. I took the opportunity to multitask while talking with my mother to install the old 200GB hard drive from my MacBook Pro in the Mapower MAP-KC21ES.

I cleaned up some paperwork on my desk before we ...

Had dinner at 6:25 of J's special pasta based on Classico Caramelized Onions and Roasted Garlic pasta sauce over bowtie pasta and a salad. I enjoyed the pasta, but J wasn't too impressed by the Classico sauce.

I had some Asbach Uralt while downselecting images in Capture One (C1) from the last two days at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. It rained all evening.