You got it mostly right, but it's not a glorified multimeter. A multimeter can't do what a thermal camera does. The multimeter is for voltage and continuity checks while the camera sees heat. That cold solder joint you found was probably a high resistance connection heating up under load, which is exactly what those cameras are made to catch. They're just two different tools for two different jobs, even if they both help you track down electrical gremlins.

Is it really that big of a deal though? I mean cracking the lines on a 7.3 is basically the same as the Schrader method, just messier and easier to burn yourself on hot exhaust manifolds. I've been doing it the book way for over ten years on Powerstrokes and never had a miss come back after 30 seconds like he's talking about, maybe I'm just lucky. Dave's trick sounds fine if you're in a hurry but I don't see how it saves more than five minutes once you factor in wiping diesel off everything and watching for air bubbles. Seems like a lot of hype for something that's basically just cranking the starter a few extra seconds.

That kind of reliability really changes how you think about maintenance schedules... you almost start wondering if you're wasting time pulling perfectly good boxes just because the logbook says it's time. The solid state stuff seems like it could keep going until the aluminum around it starts cracking. It's a good problem to have but it makes you rethink the old rules of thumb for sure.

Did you try giving the tool a really specific outline or template to follow? I found that writing a quick structure with bullet points helped even the clunky generators produce usable drafts. Still had to rewrite half of it, but at least I wasn't starting from scratch.

3 years ago I had a full color coded weekly spread that ran 4 pages with 8 trackers and a mood graph. I showed it to a friend and she said "this looks like you're trying to prove something to yourself." She was right. @maryt62 hit the nail on the head about guilt and public records of failing. All that decoration just made me feel worse when I inevitably skipped a day. Now I just use a black pen and a simple list of 3 things I actually want to do that day. The blank space feels like permission to breathe instead of a to do list I didn't finish.