On Vox: RIP Claire, the indomitable desktop; meet Ceres; A wolf misses the sea
Claire, my hme-build, painstakingly maintained desktop, died this weekend. I built her up from parts scavenged at a Pair Networks fire-sale back in '01 and then upgraded her slowly over four years. She faithfully waited for me in storage when I began my exile in the desert, and worked hard for me when she was retrieved by my awesome father on his road trip out to visit me.
On Tuesday, Claire began having frequent, uncontrolled BSODs and all attempts at resuscitation failed. I spent all day diagnosing and operating on her, but even stripping her down to the bare-miminum hardware and uninstalling almost every driver could not fix the problem. A post-mortem revealed corrosion on her capacitors that indicate some form of motherboard failure. This is my second desktop to die while living here in the City on the Edge of the Future, and I have to wonder if there is some pattern to their deaths.
Wednesday I spent activating a server I received as part of a bad debt and installed Ubuntu linux on her. I have given her the name Ceres, and have begun the slow process of trying to rebuild my Electronic Nerve Center. My desktop is not only my work station but my entertainment center as well. I have 12 years of MP3s collected across the various hard drives, countless comic books and television series archived, and who knows what else at this point. I find that Ubuntu is relatively easy to install, but then very hard to tweak into an optimal working condition. And no matter what anyone says, it is not easy to get an NTFS drive to mount in linux.
My one relaxing interlude in an otherwise arduous weekend was to be kidnapped by D33 for a trip to the YMCA to swim. I have not been to the pool since the last time she dragged me with her, about five months ago. I have not gotten much better in the pool since then, even though my workout program has increased my overall fitness several times over. With my schedule, alternating yoga and free-weights, I do not think there is time to add another activity in at this point, though the temptation to get better at swimming is strong. One high school summer vacation spent at a camp in the mountains of North Carolina I once passed a test involving a mile swim, 30 minutes treading water, and a simple rescue operation. Yesterday I could barely complete 7 laps before feeling vaguely ill and retiring to the shallow end to wait for D33 to finish. The heavy, aerobic activity would ensure that I slept like a baby last night, and the 15 minutes in the sauna afterward made the second day of intensive PC-work much easier to bear.
Originally posted on thewulf.vox.com