After closing the lid on your laptop, do not decide to remove the wireless card before the machine has safely gone to sleep. Failure to follow this advice can leave the wireless driver in a state which prevents the machine from being suspended (not a good thing if you’re going to be on a plane) and which also prevents it from recognizing the card if it’s reinserted. Oh, well, I guess it was a good time to reboot anyway.

Other than that, my flight home was just fine. I didn’t get to Ralph’s, though.

The meeting went well, I think — at any rate, there was much lively discussion. Now, though, the hard work begins — we need to continue to collaborate off-line and build up the material necessary to write our report.

Dinner tonight was at the Oriental Diner in Hawthorne. They serve both Chinese and Japanese food, so I asked one of my local colleagues which she’d recommend; she said that the sushi was “not too bad”. I got spoiled by the sushi in Japan (which is far better than getting spoiled sushi), and decided to pass in favor of Rainbow Chicken from the Chinese menu — it was much better than “not too bad”. There were 20 of us, and for no reason that I can understand, the waiter decided to figure each of our bills individually instead of just giving us a combined bill to deal with; that slowed the payment process a bit, but I guess the people who weren’t on expense accounts appreciated not having to subsidize the rest the group.

Tomorrow, I’m off to IBM Somers to work with some people from the CIO’s office — then home! If I get really lucky, maybe I can visit a Ralph’s Italian Ices location before I give back my rental car.