Work Day Thirteen - Unlucky for some (azar para alguns)

When we got to the office this morning Chi said she'd been having problems with her laptop.  She thought it might be due to low power so she borrowed a transformer and plugged it in, then booted up.  After whirring and clunking for much longer than normal the blue screen of death appeared.  Several attempts were made to get past this but all failed miserably. So much for having four highly experienced IT professionals in the team!  In fairness to myself and my fellow professionals we deal as infrequently with laptop issues (and as unsuccessfully as you can see) as most other people.

After a number of calls for help to various people Chi was able to get hold of the local IBM Branch Manager in Uberlândia, Mauro Holtz, and he was very helpful.  He advised that they did have a technician at the branch but they weren't around just now, however she should drop her laptop in and the technician will have a look at it later. So in the afternoon she went round to IBM Uberlândia and did that. Tomorrow we'll find out if we remain one laptop down, but we hope not.  It will make a difference to our productivity, quite apart from the traumatic effect on Chi of being "cut off" from all the usual tools and files we carry around with us.

IBM Uberlândia

Mariana arrived in with good news from her exam, she felt it had gone well. She missed out on lunch with us today as she is now catching up with her life following long periods of study. When Izadore arrived in the afternoon she brought us some sweet treats.

Izadore explaining to Michael what the sweets are

On the left is a sweet and chewy fudge, on the right a nutty fudge, both excellent!

Amped up with our sugar fix, we got stuck into completing some of the documentation we will leave behind us, and have got 80 or so pages together now and reasonably complete.  We have a couple of other presentations to get ready for Monday - substantially based on what we have already done but with enough tweaking required to tailor it for the expected audience as to require a reasonable amount of work. Tomorrow we hope to go through the material with Laerte who wasn't able to make it in to see us today.

The bad luck didn't stop at Chi's laptop unfortunately.  It was a fairly busy afternoon so I wasn't able to check the America's Cup site until I got back to the hotel and how disappointing was that result!  Not that I suspect anyone here is aware of it or cares about it.  I was very sorry to see it, but it would seem Oracle Team USA are rightful winners. Grumble, grumble.

After a very good ham omelette and a consoling bottle of Brahma with a couple of the others at what has become our "local", I've been busy catching up on a little backlog of non-Brazil email. And that's my day!

#ibmcsc brazil