Fare Thee Well, My Little Monsters

The Wife just took a bunch of old computers to the recycling center today. This means that I am finally able to park my car in the garage. I should be happy that I can use the garage again and some of the clutter is out of my life, but I must admit to having just a touch of melancholy.

For a somewhat technical guy, I am really quite cheap when it comes to computers for my home. Most guys who are technical poseurs like myself have impressive computers at home. At least they have machines that were impressive sometime after 2000. Not I.

I put together those behemoths from scraps. They were all cobbled together like Frankenstein's monster. A floppy drive from here, a hard drive from there, an Ethernet card from this machine, a modem (yes, some were that old) from that machine. Some of these machines had gone through several makeovers like a West Palm matron who just doesn't know when to give it up and accept the aging process. Others were organ donors again and again. By the end, a couple of the machines were little more than a case, a power supply, and a 10BASE-T Ethernet card.

Nowadays, for the price of a decent case, motherboard, and hard drive a la carte, I could get a machine at Circuit City that includes everything I need including a flat panel monitor and printer. It's sad to realize that my days of tinkering with computers are mostly behind me. I still have the last monster here under my desk. It is running Ubuntu Linux and is a total mishmash of pieces from here and there, but it's decent and it's my last vestige of control over my computer hardware.

I'll get rid of this last monster as soon as Jocelyn Wildenstein goes back to her original face, buys a minivan, and becomes a soccer mom.

The Day

• Workout: long run
  
• Music: Miles Davis, Matisyahu, Modern Jazz Quartet, G. Love & Special Sauce, Franz Ferdinand, The Crystal Method
  
• Thomas Dolby - Budapest By Blimp