I've been travelling over the weekend.

    -- When  you're  not  using  a  network  manager,  WiFi  without (!)
       encryption can be a little tricky. Some kinds  of  tools  (namely
       dhcpcd)  tend  to  run wpa_supplicant automatically -- which will
       block the connection to an unencrypted network. Hence,  you  must
       make sure that it does not get started. Resort to a simple "iw wl
       connect foo". Took me quite a while to figure that out.

    -- HTTPS (and encryption in general) is much more important  than  I
       thought.   At  the  very  least,  every  web  site which requires
       authentication *must* provide some kind of  encryption.  This  is
       crystal  clear  to  me now, but I honestly did not think about it
       that way before. Usually, I only use my  internet  connection  at
       home.  As  a  result,  I  have  forgotten  that  a  lot of people
       can/could read my data. When you're in a hotel  with  unencrypted
       WiFi  (where  everybody  can  even sniff your data streams to the
       access point), you suddenly realize: "Whoops. I'm  not  alone  on
       the wire."

    -- I  didn't  want  to  take  my  large  notebook  with  me (on this
       particular trip). Instead, I used my  older  netbook.  The  great
       thing  about Linux is that you can remove a hard drive and simply
       put it in another computer -- and it'll work. That's awesome. So,
       I used my older netbook but with my current SSD.

    -- While  changing the SSDs, I was in a hurry and I accidentally cut
       off the power to my laptop. It took me a moment  to  notice  that
       I've  lost  some data. Luckily, it was in a Git repository, so it
       was easy to repair the damage: I reset "master" to  some  commits
       back,  fetched  the  recent  history again and then merged. Done.
       "git fsck" was clean again.