I’m annoyed.
I’m staring at my laptop watching the cursor blink and i had to question myself “how many times does it blink per second? per minute? per day.” put the ben and jerrys down and slowly back away.
You see, I have a 486/66 laptop that i have lovingly restructured by hand. it runs (well it did!) winders95 and it served my purposes for when I did light travelling. and i had decided to “fix” it (for whatever reason) and i ended up toasting the drive as well as losing all information on it. did i mention that the floppy is flaky and only works half the time? did i mention there is no cd-rom. now i have a computer with no OS on it and I need to have it up and running before I move within the next two weeks.
Sometimes I hate technology. I abhor it with a passion that makes grown men crumble to their knees. I suppose i could tell you about when i first got into computers. i was 8 or 9, and i had gotten a TI 99/4A for christmas. I remember sitting there happily for hours writing BASIC to play games and then dumping it after i had finish writing it. my mother wouldn’t spend the cash for a 300baud modem and i had no tape backup. It was just me, bored out of my gourd doing BASIC all day.
Then high school came and we took a “computer literacy” class which basically had us write-up documents and I ended up playing solitaire.
In college, I remember asking a friend of mine “What’s used more so in the business development? IBM PCs or Macintosh?” She told me PCs and away i went. I took a few classes on programming (got bored) but the internet really fascinated me. I remember showing this guy in my calc class how to grab REM lyrics using gopher and Archie and the whole world just opened up.
A lot has happened to me in the last few years since that makes my head spin. Dorothy, we are not in Kansas anymore.
Many people assume, rightly, that I’ve been doing this for years. not so. i started playing, full-time, with computers in 1994 and haven’t stopped since then. It’s been a short five years from that point and i’m amazed at my knowledge that is growing and leaping.
The thing is, honestly, I wonder in a lot of ways if I am all that better for it. I’ve been thinking for the last few years this is not something i want to do. I can’t fall into the same patterns as other geeks because i don’t follow the same rituals or patterns as they do. It’s just not me. I hate star* (star wars and star trek), I don’t get into cons that much, I don’t game that much (unless it’s quake — I’ve been hungering for some quake), and I don’t code.
What the hell do I do?