Charlie's "100 Things Posts About Me"
#5. My wife and I own five computers between us.
Actually, it used to be more. We cleaned out a couple of crappy old paperweights-with-floppy-drives when we moved, and ditched an old monitor while we were at it. We seem to just accumulate useless techno-junk. I've got two machines I'm not really using, and she's got a Man laptop that's collecting dust. Unless I can talk her into letting me hook them up on a LAN for a kick-ass Quake Arena party, then we're just wasting space with these crap-boxes.
Still, I'm a computer programmer. And the first thing you're taught in a technical job is, '
Never give up hardware'. There's this feeling, however wrongheaded, that someday, you'll be able to
use that old box, or switch, or antiquated Jaz drive. Forget the computers -- I've got two
boxes of peripherals and internals just taking up room. Cables, disk drives, Zip disks, adapters, boards, mice... you name it. If you can install it into a computer, or hook it up, or plug it in, then I've probably got three of them, in various shapes, sizes, and colors. I could daisy-chain serial cables to the corner store and back. I could build a serial-to-USB-to-serial-to-parallel-to-serial-to-USB-to-FireWire-to-seral adapter, using male or female adapters at any point in there. I could plug a monitor in in my attic, and string cables down to hook it up to a computer in my basement. Okay, I don't know why I
would, but I
could, and that's what's important. We have the technology.
Anyway, I look at this crap, and I
know that in the end, I'm just gonna end up chucking ninety-eight percent of it in the trash, once it's
obviously obsolete. It's just that I don't know
which two percent to keep. There's simply no way to predict or determine which of the cables is going to come in handy when we buy a new printer, or which drive will actually fit in an old case to let me stock up on MP3s. And so, I keep it all, banking on the slim but real prospect of needing something --
anything -- in the tangle of wires and chips, and finally being able to say to my wife, '
Aha! See? And you wanted me to throw this away! Tsk.'
In the meantime, I'm still working the Quake Arena angle, or maybe multiplayer Half-Life.
Then all that shit will come in handy. It'll just be a shame when I get my guts scattered while I'm playing in the basement, and I gotta go all the way to the attic to see my fragged self. That's gonna be a
bitch, man. Talk about lag time. Those stairs are
hell.
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