Off to the PT Wooden Boat Festival

The first day of the PTWBF was yesterday, Friday.  I chose to stay in Kingston to see my niece Elisa off on her return to her working life in Pennsylvania.  I also wanted to meet Andy, a relative of Sandra, and his friend Travis.  Sandra would remain at Seatac airport after seeing Elisa off to meet Andy and Travis in the afternoon.

Late in the morning UPS arrived with my two BU-353 GPS antennas and the new extended life battery for the Acer netbook.  I expect to get at least 4 hours of running time from the new battery.

During the middle of the day I drove to Silverdale intent on purchasing an HP g6-1d11dx laptop at Best Buy. I was discussing the HP machine with the sales guy and noticed a Toshiba C855-S5206 next to it at the same price ($400).  I wound up purchasing the Toshiba because I was familiar with Toshibas, there would be a compatibility with power adaptors (simplifying my cabling and giving me redundancy in case of failure), and the Toshiba offered a fast USB 3.0 port (along with two USB 2.0 ports).  I set the machine up in the evening and it felt exactly like the Toshiba that I had just put in for repairs.  The C855 is a more powerful version, with a faster processor,  4 GBof memory instead of 2 GB, and 500 GB of disc instead of 320 GB, and a 6-cell battery providing 4 hours of running time.

I visited the "Geek Squad" counter of Best Buy and was told that the Toshiba C655 machine that I had brought from Brazil with keyboard problems would have to be sent to Kentucky for assessment, and that it may not be worth fixing.  However, for a non-refundable $35 they would ship it to Louisville and give me a quotation.  If I decided not to proceed with repair the machine would be returned to me.  I figured that at $35 it was worth the shot.

I am about to set off for an early start at the Boat Festival to see as much of it as possible.  At about 11.30 AM I will be meeting for lunch my friends Nigel and Patrick who are driving all of they way from Vancouver, BC.