Tuesday 11 October 2011

Times, they are a-changin'

Isn't is sad when your largest referrer is a Russian bot? I haven't been that prolific as a blogger lately and it shows.

Things are changing. We are moving to Syracuse in January and I've been busy packing things up to ship out before the end of October. We'll have to be ready to teach and work as soon as possible when we arrive, so all our stuff has to be there.

That means that I have had to go through all the old computer equipment I've had sitting around, and decide what is usable and chuck out the rest. Of course, there is all the old nostalgia attached, like putting my first "super-computer" back together. "Super" meaning an Athlon 1333 RAID with as much RAM as I can cram into it. I'll need to use it for Score and then throw it out or sell it in December ... or possibly give it away.

It's almost like giving away your first born. I mean, it's old news now, and it can't even run Windows 7, but there is a certain bond that I have to break. A harder break will come when we take our first computer to the tip. It's a US MacPlus from 1987. JD and I gave it to each other as an engagement present instead of a ring. It seemed much more useful at the time. The keyboard is missing a key and the box hasn't even been turned on in at least a decade. It's useless, but it will be sad to see it go. Two more Macs are going, too. Our Powerbook is dead, and our Performa 630 won't run anything recent, and won't even connect to our network, being one of the last AppleTalk Macs. It is the last non-PowerPC Mac. Again, that makes it completely useless, except that it has JD's dissertation on it. Somehow, we need to retrieve it and put it on something that a PC can read, in a format that a PC can understand. (It was written in WriteNow, which I hope has an RTF export. Otherwise, it would probably be better to scan it ... over 1000 pages of heavily formatted text.)

As you might guess, not much writing is happening. Once all our stuff is gone, I might start going with my laptop again. We'll see how manic things are.