Best laid plans

I was gearing up to write up a summary of the trials and tribulations of getting openSuSE and Backtrack Linux up and running on a new Thinkpad x201 series laptop (it has been quite an effort so far), particularly focusing on Linux/vendor hardware support issues and the effect of Lenovo's practice of adding a pciid whitelist check to their BIOS to prevent owners from using hardware from non-Lenovo sources.

Unfortunately, despite the promising start in acquiring the (hopefully) final part necessary to fix the most egregious issue (wifi), UPS has managed to derail this in a spectacular manner ("Well you can't blame us for not delivering the package marked "URGENT!, Rush Delivery, Overnight AM delivery" because we declared an emergency nine and a half hours after it was supposed to have arrived. We'll probably try to deliver it Monday. Probably. No I don't understand why that might be a problem or why you are unhappy about us claiming that we would deliver it tonight hours after we had pulled all of our trucks off the road due to a 16th of an inch snowfall.")

Hopefully the part will arrive in sufficient time that I can actually work on it in the copious free time I have during my week-long certification boot camp. Untill then, fuck UPS.