After Tuomas (tigert) arrived from his long plane flight, he opened up his laptop in a cube at work, resuming it from its suspended sleep. I was also in the same cube.

He then proceeded to show me something, but as soon as he pointed to it (with his finger toward the screen), the display went black. After trying all sorts of keypresses to wake the blank laptop, he decided to try to power cycle it. Weird things were happening on boot, and it would decide to either go blank or reboot at seemingly random places on start up. It even began having problems in the BIOS screen.

All of the laptop problems were eerily familiar — it was what my IBM ThinkPad was doing when I first got it. The difference was mine was on the first day and his was just this past week. Much like my laptop, his laptop’s cure is to get a motherboard replacement, so it was sent off to the service department.

Meanwhile… I also have a Mac laptop, so I have been using it while Tuomas has been using my ThinkPad (with his hard drive swapped out for mine). I don’t think he’ll get his laptop back before the conference, in around an hour…

Anyway, I just wanted to state the reason why I will have a Mac at the GNOME Summit instead of my ThinkPad.