the verdict is in: even with the nasal dilator i still manage to snore. it's not crazy loud, like a murmur, but snoring nevertheless. i'm going to try the sleep app tonight without the dilator, see if there's any difference. maybe i snore louder without them, which would mean the dilators work (not perfect, but better than nothing).

i decided to pay the porter square post office a visit this morning, to see if could get ahold of the package alex sent me. before doing so however, i stopped by the star market to get some keurig green mountain coffee and cuties mandarins, both on sale.

i came in the morning hoping it'd be empty, but there were 5 people ahead of me in line only one clerk working behind the desk at the post office. i was still lucky, because while i waited in line, at least 7 more people got behind.

so the problem was the mailman took my package notice tuesday afternoon. i should've never given it to him, but luckily i had the foresight to take photos of the postcard beforehand. it'd been 2 days and i still haven't received the package, that's why i was paying the post office a visit. i prepared for bad news, that they couldn't find my package, that it was probably lost in some delivery van. the clerk went back and spoke with someone, and this other person helped me finally tracked down the package. i was happy they had the package, but annoyed that the mailman who took the postcard never did anything about it since the package was just sitting at the post office.

the package was larger than i expected, felt like there were 2 things inside. i snapped a photo outside and sent it to alex to confirm i finally got it. from there i biked down to the cafe.

i dropped off the coffee and one bag of mandarins. i was also there to pick up my sister's macbook pro. i was going to try making the 1TB SSD work one last time. a part it was not wanting to return the thing and have to pay the 20% restocking fee. the vendor didn't seem to want to handle my return, from the message they sent me it sounded like chinese vendors, who are notoriously resistant to returns and not making any kind of profit off of sale. i remember a chinese ebay solar panel vendor who absolutely did not want me to return a panel i didn't want anymore, and bargained the price down to where i got a 50% discount.

i returned home a bit after noontime. first thing i did was to open alex's package. inside was a gyroscopic wrist exerciser. i had two of these back when i worked at SRM; i remember james used to come by and play with them, and i think he managed to break both because he'd always mash them across the carpet on the floor to start the gyroscope, and it wasn't design for that level of stress. this one was much cooler though: my old ones used a string to start the gyroscope, while this one was autostarting. this one also had magnetically-induced led lights that flashed when the gyroscope was spinning. after playing with it for just a minute, my wrists were already pretty sore.

i made one more bagel sandwich with the last of my avocado. pan-searing the leftover christmas ham is what enhances the umami as the sugar caramelizes. afterwards the house smelled of fried ham but it was worth it.

i started working on my sister's macbook pro. i had a few new strategies i wanted to try out. first, i updated her system so it was the latest version of mojave. i then erased anything that'd add bulk, like leftover installers in the download folder. next i made a new time machine backup with a different external drive, so it'd do a complete backup. i tried using one of my sister's external drive but it had to be in APFS format, so i ended up using my own external time machine backup drive (it had 200GB left, my sister's backup only needed 100GB). i then rebooted with a bootable installer and ran disk utility to see if there was any damage on the disk. it warned me about "found orphan dstream id object" but didn't think it warrant fixing. i looked up the error, had something to do with corrupt time machine snapshots. so i restarted the MBP, used the terminal tool to erase the snapshots, and ran disk utility again; this time the warnings were gone. i restarted the MBP one more time, made one last time machine backup, before shutting down.

i then opened up the MBP and swapped out the old 128GB SSD with the new 1TB SSD. this was my third time doing it, each time i work a little faster.

this 1TB SSD already had a brand new copy of mojave installed on it. i did it as a courtesy for when i thought i was returning the SSD. it hadn't been registered yet - after i finished the macos install, i simply shut down the computer - so everything was pristine, like a brand new mac. it asked if i had an apple id, i put in my sister's; it sent her a passcode that she forwarded me to as part of its security protocol. it asked me if i wanted to copy over data, i said yes, and that i wanted to use a time machine backup. it managed to find the time machine backup without problems - that's because i this was a new local backup, one that created a Backups.backupdb folder instead of a disc image (if i made a network backup). it masked me to create a new password for my sister's user account, i used the same one she used on her old SSD.

i then let time machine do its migration, holding my breath the entire time, moving the mouse cursor every so often so the machine wouldn't try to go to sleep and possibly crash time machine. i'm not sure how long i monitored the migration, i want to say an hour. it spit out a few errors about incompatible extensions it'd disabled, but it didn't crash, and everything seemed normal.

i rebooted the MBP, fingers crossed. a screen came up saying it was finally the migration, updating the incompatible software list. once that was done, i was in the desktop, and everything looked like my sister's old SSD. i opened up safari, all her bookmarks were there. i opened up mail, it said it was updating 40,000 mails, but that seemed like a promising sign. at the very least all her mailboxes were there, and everything was just the way it was before. the migration was 100% successful!

i wasn't very hungry for dinner, and perhaps a bit lazy. i just heated up a hot pocket and finished the rest of my smashed cucumbers.