May 26/27 - rolling

Friday was an inside day, working on the Linux setup mostly.  I did the upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04, which worked and then the VMware upgrade.  That made the backup boot disk mostly equivalent to the main disk, save the plex server which I'd installed in the interim.  The next step was to do the upgrade to 16.04 (these are the Long Term Support versions, thus the consistent numbering).  That completed but with some failure messages.  Sometimes that might not matter but this time, not so lucky.  That disk wouldn't boot. 

So ... I restored a backup of the main disk to the backup, bringing them completely in sync and that booted.  I will now try the upgrade to 16.04 again another day or I might try doing some of the interim updates to 14.04 as a prep.  We'll see.  The fallback would be to create an installation disk and do that upgrade sort-of from scratch.

I packed and got the car loaded, bike-wise, prepping for the drive to Barre.  Leaving at 4am, I got to Barrie a little before 6am, puttered around a bit, setting up my laptop in the Tim's and then riders started to arrive.  There were 7 of us riding the Big Chute 200k. 

It was a great day for a ride.  Moderate winds, one short period of fog/drizzle, mostly cloudy and cool.  I rode much of the day with Alex who hails from France, moving to Canada about 10 years ago. 

We had some fun along the way with a bridge under construction.  We had to lift our bikes up onto the replacement deck and then down the other side, scaling both sides with ladders.  Not exactly kosher, but that saved us what could have been a huge detour, you never know with detours.

Finishing up at 5:34, the others slightly ahead of me and Alex, they all headed off except for Charles who is riding the 300 on Sunday.  Shortly afterwards Trev arrived from Ottawa and the three of us went for dinner at the local Thai/Japanese all-you-can-eat place.  That was interesting -- you pay a set price and order a-la-carte.  They charge you extra if you have uneaten leftovers, which deals with the over ordering problem.  Orders are placed with a tablet; the server enters a code on the tablet and minutes later, the items are delivered.  It's quite a good deal.  I had a lot of sashimi, soup, a few other dishes. 

Well after 8pm back to my room, it didn't take me very long to fall asleep.  Now after 5am, I'll soon be checking out and heading to the Tim's next door with my bike and finding something for breakfast.  We leave at 6am.  I expect that it will be 9pm or later by the time I'm back here and midnight or later back to the cottage.  I'm hoping that we stay dry !

Onward !