California, 2007

Blew my paycheck on something I’d been wanting for a long time. One more step, one big step back to regaining my old life. Just bought myself a nice little desktop. For work, you know. Sh-yeah, right.

Sure, money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes it a hell of a lot easier to be happy. And deep down, I’m still a little kid. Oh ok, not that deep down - I still have the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old. And the attention span of a child of five.

Still… every kid wants his toys. And I just blew my paycheck on a hella expensive one.

So. Once I get my first paycheck, I go online and go shopping for components. Part of the fun is picking out the various parts. Processors, motherboards, video cards. Pretty soon, I’ve boiled it down to either a high-end Sempron or a low-end Athlon64. (No, I’m not buying Intel).

Price comparisons. Speed comparisons. Drawing crude price/performance graphs, and noticing the price jump between the Athlon 64 3000 and 3100 is pretty big. Deciding on a video card - of course, NVidia-based - and it’s a tossup between the 6200, 6600 and 6800. Realize that I’m not going to blow three hundred dollars on a video card, and go with the 6600.

The rest of the decisions went pretty easy after those two. Then of course, I realize I’m a couple of hundred dollars over budget, so it’s time to cut out some of the things I’d been lusting for, but don’t really need.

Cut memory to half a gig. Find a motherboard that’s on special. Briefly flirt with the idea of downgrading to AGP instead of PCI-Express, until I realize that AGP cards are actually more expensive now than equivalent PCI-E ones.

And go online and actually buy the damn thing. It’s insanely easy to keep dragging things onto your shopping card, until it collapses and crushes your checking account.

Ordered on Tuesday, shipped on Wednesday, and four big brown boxes arrive on Friday afternoon. I am torn between unpacking them and doing the laundry. I decide on both - the rest of the afternoon sees me yo-yoing between the laundry room downstairs and running upstairs to swim happily through a sea of styrofoam peanuts.

And I realize I’ve missed this. Putting together a computer. Figuring
out where stuff goes. The crazy unlabled mess of wires that go from the
motherboard to the front panel speaker, LEDs and switches.

As the heatsink bracket clicks down onto the processor socket , it feels like coming home. It feels like this is finally home, a place where I am safe and happy. I have a computer again.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of throwing the switch for the very first time. You don’t know what’ll happen. You might not have installed the processor properly, or you may have wiped off too much thermal compound. Nothing quite like turning it on, seeing the fans spin up and hearing the beep-beep-beep of the no-video error for the first time on a fresh motherboard.

Oh and the rest of the night is a blur, installing, booting… the sudden terror of flashing the BIOS and realizing it didn’t finish - scrambling to build a boot CD because none of the other computers in the apartment have floppies -  booting off your old Slackware disks (because the ACPI module in the BIOS is screwed up enough that Windows hangs on startup, as well as Caldera DOS) - mount the CD with the good BIOS images, and realizing that the default Slack rescue image doesn’t have enough free space to unpack the image - spending five minutes trying to recall how to create a ramdisk - unpack the image and dd it to /dev/fd0 - pull the CD out and reset, fingers crossed, fingers crossed….

And the damn disk finally boots straight into the flash utility - and it overwrites the BIOS with a good image. Whew.

I guess how I feel about my computers are about the same as how other men feel about their cars.

Everyone needs a hobby. Sure, at some points my hobbies have crossed over the line into obsession, but hey, I can’t help it. I do almost everything I do to extremes.

And I may have to skimp on groceries this week to be able to make the rent, I may have to keep my bank account a little thinner than I wanted, but judging from the two days I’ve had this baby, it’s worth it.

These are the few remaining chances for happiness I have left. And moments of joy like this are few and far between.

This weekend I will be retreating back into the safety and comfort of my geekhood. Because for months I’d had to make do with public library computers and borrowed laptops and for once I am going to have something I want.

This weekend is for quality time with myself. Call it sad and pathetic. I don’t care, ’cause for a change, I’m not worrying about getting a job or making the rent or drinking too much. For a change, I’m HAPPY.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 24th, 2005 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.