Progress

Time to pull 6Gb of files off the Butterfly laptop onto a new 1Tb portable drive: about three hours.

Time to copy the same files from the portable drive to the Dragonfly laptop: about ten minutes, including time to change the permissions and ownership on the files.

I'm not sure how much of the discrepancy was read vs write times, and how much was the difference in the laptops, which is three or four years and a couple of Gb of memory; I'll get more idea of that when I finish copying the other 10Gb or so of files I want, and run a backup.

August

I could almost believe, as I came home tonight in dark and drizzling rain and relative coolness, that summer is ending. Except not; today's high was 104.5 on campus, before an afternoon storm dropped us in to the 80s. (The webcam was registering 69 at one point, but that must have been just a splash of cold water on a local sensor; the 'official' campus temperature at the same time was about 85.) It rained -- with interludes of hail -- most of the afternoon, and at some points the intersection outside the office was ankle-deep in water, but the power stayed on. It's still trying to rain out there now, come to that. I think we're getting into the late phase of the monsoon season, when the storms are mostly Pacific hurricane remnants. It should start cooling down properly in an another month or so.