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Okay, I take back everything I said about not really being a computer person.
1. Who, instead of waiting five days for Windows 7 to arrive in the mail, got Debian running off a USB thumb drive when the Debian installation CD couldn't detect his hard disk? This guy.
2. Who used old SATA cables and a power source from an old screw-stuck Windows XP machine to do hard disk bypass surgery on his new computer while installing ATI drivers on Kubuntu on a different external USB hard drive? This guy.
3. Who recompiled the Linux kernel from source to get the proprietary video card drivers working, and then rolled back manually from said USB stick when stuff broke? THIS GUY.
4. Who defused a hostage crisis with a hairpin and a pair of tweezers?...okay, this guy, but IT COULD HAVE BEEN ME.
I've installed Linux six times on three different storage media in the past seven days. This week's catchphrase might as well have been, "Why don't you install Linux on it, Kevin? THAT'S ALL YOU EVER DO." Don't get me wrong, I'm upset that my laptop was destroyed, along with my entire music collection, every piece of software I've bought in the past two years, and all the Nintendo DS code I was going to show around at the New York game industry meetup tonight. (Most of my working manuscripts, including "Null String," and the current drafts of my resumes are thankfully all backed up online.) I should be frustrated that every time I get on the Internet for a few minutes and everything goes fine, some ancient piece of hardware I've MacGyvered together collapses or some unreported bug in either the free or proprietary ATI video drivers for Linux causes my machine to go apeshit and refuse to boot. And you know what, I am. I am frustrated and pissed off that I spent the last week fixing my computer instead of coding or writing because I can't do much in terms of coding or writing if I don't have a fully operational machine. But at the same time, oddly enough, I feel like a champ. A normal person would have thrown up his or her hands and spent $1000 on a new computer and spent a week doing nothing waiting for it to arrive, but I dove into the fray with a fistful of jumper pins, circuit diagrams, and instruction manuals and I Millenium Falcon'd that hyperdrive back to lightspeed, with methodologies that voided warranties that haven't even been written yet and would have made an entire Best Buy Geek Squad shit their pants. I turned this piece of garbage back into a working computer--a string-and-duct-tape working computer, but one that should last just long enough for me to set up a more permanent solution. And it feels great.
Let it not be said that those four years spent getting that computer science degree were for naught. This week, I am Roast Beef Kazenkakis. A computer is basically a piano sometimes and I am all up ons.
And oh man, I can't tell you how good it was to assemble this machine. It was easy, far easier than getting it all to work--they've really idiotproofed hardware these days; it's not like 1993 where you had a separate sound card, modem, and network card, and an incorrectly inserted jumper or power configuration could leave them fried--but it was like assembling an installation piece. Goodness, my new motherboard and video card--early Christmas presents from my dad--look so beautiful. A far cry from the dull green-and-black of all the other circuit boards I've ever owned. You don't have to be a geek to appreciate how gorgeous they are. With all the power and case cables removed they look like they belong in a grooved wooden frame, illuminated by a tasteful array of soft yellow lamps. I'm no electrical engineer, not by a long shot, but even I can appreciate how amazing this design is. I actually stopped installing the motherboard for about twenty minutes just to admire how elegant it was, with its radial blue heatsink and its circle of L3 cache chips around the CPU and its neat little row of SATA ports along the southbridge. I even took pictures.
It's strange that it took a crash this devastating, in terms of both magnitude and potential repercussions, to get me to finally remember what I so love about computers in the first place. I remember the day my dad got the Windows 95 beta in the mail, and I stayed up all night waiting for it to install. I refused to go to bed, and sat down on the carpet by my father's desk watching the thousands of then-incomprehensible registry entries and file paths flash across the screen, ready for dialog boxes to pop open so I could select "Yes." The study was dark except for the cathode-ray flame of the monitor, and quiet but for the hum of the tower fan. I don't remember falling asleep, but I must have, because at some point during the night I woke up in a duvet my father had draped over me so I wouldn't get cold. There was a strangely calming sense of peace, lying there with my glasses off, watching that glowing progress bar with one open eye. Like falling asleep to the flickering of a campfire.
Three nights ago, I let the Debian installer run all night, lay down on my bed next to the computer, and had the privilege of replicating that experience. (It even woke me up when it failed violently halfway through the night, just like the Windows 95 beta. Hard drives don't die any more gracefully than they did fifteen years ago.) It was very special. Like revisiting an old friend.
Six reinstalls, a distro change, and about a hundred reboots later I am back in business. I've learned more about Linux and systems administration in the past week than I did in two years with Debian at work. My window manager is shinier, my hardware is faster, I have Emacs 22 and gcc and palib and DevkitPro's libnds libraries all set up and I am ready to code the shit out of shit.
1. Who, instead of waiting five days for Windows 7 to arrive in the mail, got Debian running off a USB thumb drive when the Debian installation CD couldn't detect his hard disk? This guy.
2. Who used old SATA cables and a power source from an old screw-stuck Windows XP machine to do hard disk bypass surgery on his new computer while installing ATI drivers on Kubuntu on a different external USB hard drive? This guy.
3. Who recompiled the Linux kernel from source to get the proprietary video card drivers working, and then rolled back manually from said USB stick when stuff broke? THIS GUY.
4. Who defused a hostage crisis with a hairpin and a pair of tweezers?...okay, this guy, but IT COULD HAVE BEEN ME.
I've installed Linux six times on three different storage media in the past seven days. This week's catchphrase might as well have been, "Why don't you install Linux on it, Kevin? THAT'S ALL YOU EVER DO." Don't get me wrong, I'm upset that my laptop was destroyed, along with my entire music collection, every piece of software I've bought in the past two years, and all the Nintendo DS code I was going to show around at the New York game industry meetup tonight. (Most of my working manuscripts, including "Null String," and the current drafts of my resumes are thankfully all backed up online.) I should be frustrated that every time I get on the Internet for a few minutes and everything goes fine, some ancient piece of hardware I've MacGyvered together collapses or some unreported bug in either the free or proprietary ATI video drivers for Linux causes my machine to go apeshit and refuse to boot. And you know what, I am. I am frustrated and pissed off that I spent the last week fixing my computer instead of coding or writing because I can't do much in terms of coding or writing if I don't have a fully operational machine. But at the same time, oddly enough, I feel like a champ. A normal person would have thrown up his or her hands and spent $1000 on a new computer and spent a week doing nothing waiting for it to arrive, but I dove into the fray with a fistful of jumper pins, circuit diagrams, and instruction manuals and I Millenium Falcon'd that hyperdrive back to lightspeed, with methodologies that voided warranties that haven't even been written yet and would have made an entire Best Buy Geek Squad shit their pants. I turned this piece of garbage back into a working computer--a string-and-duct-tape working computer, but one that should last just long enough for me to set up a more permanent solution. And it feels great.
Let it not be said that those four years spent getting that computer science degree were for naught. This week, I am Roast Beef Kazenkakis. A computer is basically a piano sometimes and I am all up ons.
And oh man, I can't tell you how good it was to assemble this machine. It was easy, far easier than getting it all to work--they've really idiotproofed hardware these days; it's not like 1993 where you had a separate sound card, modem, and network card, and an incorrectly inserted jumper or power configuration could leave them fried--but it was like assembling an installation piece. Goodness, my new motherboard and video card--early Christmas presents from my dad--look so beautiful. A far cry from the dull green-and-black of all the other circuit boards I've ever owned. You don't have to be a geek to appreciate how gorgeous they are. With all the power and case cables removed they look like they belong in a grooved wooden frame, illuminated by a tasteful array of soft yellow lamps. I'm no electrical engineer, not by a long shot, but even I can appreciate how amazing this design is. I actually stopped installing the motherboard for about twenty minutes just to admire how elegant it was, with its radial blue heatsink and its circle of L3 cache chips around the CPU and its neat little row of SATA ports along the southbridge. I even took pictures.
It's strange that it took a crash this devastating, in terms of both magnitude and potential repercussions, to get me to finally remember what I so love about computers in the first place. I remember the day my dad got the Windows 95 beta in the mail, and I stayed up all night waiting for it to install. I refused to go to bed, and sat down on the carpet by my father's desk watching the thousands of then-incomprehensible registry entries and file paths flash across the screen, ready for dialog boxes to pop open so I could select "Yes." The study was dark except for the cathode-ray flame of the monitor, and quiet but for the hum of the tower fan. I don't remember falling asleep, but I must have, because at some point during the night I woke up in a duvet my father had draped over me so I wouldn't get cold. There was a strangely calming sense of peace, lying there with my glasses off, watching that glowing progress bar with one open eye. Like falling asleep to the flickering of a campfire.
Three nights ago, I let the Debian installer run all night, lay down on my bed next to the computer, and had the privilege of replicating that experience. (It even woke me up when it failed violently halfway through the night, just like the Windows 95 beta. Hard drives don't die any more gracefully than they did fifteen years ago.) It was very special. Like revisiting an old friend.
Six reinstalls, a distro change, and about a hundred reboots later I am back in business. I've learned more about Linux and systems administration in the past week than I did in two years with Debian at work. My window manager is shinier, my hardware is faster, I have Emacs 22 and gcc and palib and DevkitPro's libnds libraries all set up and I am ready to code the shit out of shit.