Daniel, Laura, and Nora
15th July 2001, 15:14
My wife Laura and I leave tomorrow for Costa Rica on our first vacation ever without our daughter. Nora is in Argentina on a high school exchange program so we are busting out. My beloved and bedraggled home computer will continue crunching genes while we are away, and I'm hoping you guys will keep a watch out for its little contributions.
I have the same feelings about the computer as I did about a certain special red 1972 Oldmobile Cutlass Supreme with a white vinyl Landau roof and opera window. I grew up in California, a car culture if there ever was one, but only one of my friends had it together enough to pay for a car (the ten-year old Cutlass) in high school--he worked full time at Baskin & Robbins to do it. We all loved that car and its vestigial seat belts, cracked dashboard, and push button AM-FM Delco radio. It had Bakersfield 460 air conditioning, which means 4 windows down at 60 mph. Turn on the actual AC and bad things would happen. Nobody ever made that mistake twice.
It didn't have the biggest engine and it ran on the cheapest lowest octane gas available for three counties, but if you floored it at the corner of Alma and Rinconada and hit the bump just right, you could catch air with all four wheels. We did that regularly, just like in Bullitt or Starsky and Hutch.
My computer is sort of like that car. It's a reconditioned Dell Pentium II 400MHz with no modifications except extra memory (192, wow is memory cheap now). It has been thoroughly suboptimized with about 6 re-installations of AOL (you try taking that away from Nora, just try), several games (Alpha Centauri almost brought my marriage to a halt), the shards of various weird programs that never installed properly and could never be properly removed, all running on the original W98. Nevertheless, it works and we love it.
Keep an eye out for it. If it is still pumping out workunits in two weeks, hoist a glass in its honor. If it stops, well, hoist a glass anyway.
Daniel
I have the same feelings about the computer as I did about a certain special red 1972 Oldmobile Cutlass Supreme with a white vinyl Landau roof and opera window. I grew up in California, a car culture if there ever was one, but only one of my friends had it together enough to pay for a car (the ten-year old Cutlass) in high school--he worked full time at Baskin & Robbins to do it. We all loved that car and its vestigial seat belts, cracked dashboard, and push button AM-FM Delco radio. It had Bakersfield 460 air conditioning, which means 4 windows down at 60 mph. Turn on the actual AC and bad things would happen. Nobody ever made that mistake twice.
It didn't have the biggest engine and it ran on the cheapest lowest octane gas available for three counties, but if you floored it at the corner of Alma and Rinconada and hit the bump just right, you could catch air with all four wheels. We did that regularly, just like in Bullitt or Starsky and Hutch.
My computer is sort of like that car. It's a reconditioned Dell Pentium II 400MHz with no modifications except extra memory (192, wow is memory cheap now). It has been thoroughly suboptimized with about 6 re-installations of AOL (you try taking that away from Nora, just try), several games (Alpha Centauri almost brought my marriage to a halt), the shards of various weird programs that never installed properly and could never be properly removed, all running on the original W98. Nevertheless, it works and we love it.
Keep an eye out for it. If it is still pumping out workunits in two weeks, hoist a glass in its honor. If it stops, well, hoist a glass anyway.
Daniel