Bad news -- Good news

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. MacGillicuddy's Corollary: at the most inopportune time. Well, I'm here to tell ya Murphy is alive and well, and he's an ambitious SOB.

The bad news:
Tomorrow morning I'm leaving for my first real vacation in ... I can't remember how long. So why did the SSD in my ThinkPad pick last night to "light bulb"? And why did *both* of my optical drives choose this moment to fail, making it impossible to burn installation DVDs?

The good news:
The Computer Room had one last 2.5" SSD -- a 120GB Samsung. I'd rather have had a 256GB like the one that died, but that's all they had and it's big enough. At this afternoon's SILUG meeting, Steve had a local copy of the CentOS 7 installation DVD iso. Better, he knew of a new way to use it: dd its image directly to a thumb drive instead of a blank DVD.

By the time the meeting was over, I had my ThinkPad back up and running a basic CentOS 7. Just in time for tomorrow's departure. I'll worry about the optical drives after my vacation.

--Doc