Best Effort

There was no Ceremony indeed last night.  I came home and straight away headed to Mat's house, to help him try to remove Vista and go with Windows XP on his laptop.  Our efforts came to naught with a session3 initialization failure when it tried installing XP.  There were lots of possible culprits, including a defective CD drive, bad hard drive, or most likely: the Vista program was sentient and recognized we were trying to remove it, and fought to preserve it's own synthetic life.  Not only were we defeated, but Dell's tech support was spectacularly unhelpful.  We ended the night on a high note with some sushi to drown our sorrow.  He dropped me at home, where I puttered around and organized my desk, while my roommate banged on the drums all day (yes she did). 

Today was a much happier and upbeat day at work.  It was made even more so by the delicious beef stew I bought across the street.