Reborn

When I first went to the University I bought myself a laptop. Put a little extra money into it and got a (at the time) powerful machine, capable of handling PhotoShop CS2, which was crucial to me. It was my trusty companion for over 4 years when it one day just died on me, leaving with the dreaded blue screen. I took it the doctor, but the prognosis was bad. No chance of revival; its heart, the hard disk, was beyond help. Nothing could be done, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to throw it on the dump. I kept it in the cellar.

Then there was my daughter's laptop, who also said goodbye to us, but in a more physical, obvious manner. I have absolutely no idea what she did with that computer but it was sort of dismembered. That one too I kept in the house, but for no particular reason at all.

By now you'll probably see where I'm going with this. I decided to play surgeon, and perform a transplant. With no respect what so ever I went to work with the tools I had, spirited by the idea that I would run this hybrid on Linux if I succeeded to breathe life into it.

I did. But it wasn't a straight forward operation, I'll tell you that. I soon found out that the latest edition of Linux - Linux Mint 9 "Isadora" - wouldn't work, as the first try at booting resulted in an error message telling me I needed another CPU. As I wasn't planning on equipping this little baby with any purchased parts, I realized I'd rather had to find an edition that would work with the old processor. So I browsed through the options and settled for the previous Long term support release, which meant Linux Mint 5 "Elyssa". I must stress that I actually don't know what I'm doing, but with a lucky combination of educated guesses and inspired intuition I've now got a functioning laptop. Still have a lot to do though. Like learn not to think Windows. I'm a Linux-newbie, and I owe this to all the dedicated people who are making this possible. I've written about them before, in essays at the Uni, and I have the greatest respect for all of them. And when I get my first pay-check I'll even make a donation.

Have a feeling I'm always semi, bordering on something complete. I'm almost grown up now, but still childish. I have a degree, but could have gone further. I play with technology and feel at home with geeky slang and humor, but wouldn't stand a chance at MIT. I write a lot, but I'm not a writer. I could go on here, but I won't.

But maybe a whole lot of semis make a whole world in the end, and maybe complete is the total of everything, not the completion of a single thing. In that case, maybe I'm ultra complete... My next plan is to harvest the computer's intestines and make jewelery out of it. Have you ever seen a shinier thing than the actual disk in a hard drive? I'll show you next week.

You can't tell, but this post is written on my Reborn, the Resurrected one.