"Make do with what you got."

"Make do with what you got."


The words echoed through his head as he delved into the disaster that was his closet. Batting away cobwebs and skeletons revealed the prize: A old Pentium IV from '02. 256 Mb of RAM, 40GB HD, 2.00Ghz Pentium IV, Intel graphics more then enough for his needs. Tenderly removing the case cover he gingerly blew away the dust of the past years using his favorite can of canned air. Save for missing some RAM the box looked as if it may just get past POST.

A quick delve and touch of desk-acrobatics later a myriad of cables connected the box to an old 1024x780 CRT monitor and equally decrepit USB keyboard and mouse. Unconsciously holding his breath he depressed the power button. The box whirred to life, disks turning, buzzers buzzing and fans blowing. A chill ran up his spin and wave of nostalgia washed over him, this was the sound of his childhood. Hours spent playing Halo & Quake III, his first Linux install, his first gateway to the Internet and current self. All tied to this inanimate box of wires and circuitry.


The familiar black on white text of the POST test scrolled past, giving way to the venerable GRUB bootloader and ultimately the OS itself. Text whizzed by, faster then his brain could possibly comprehend becoming a blur of Arch Blue, White and Grey on Black. And then it all screeched to a halt.


"Disk has not been checked in 400 days, check forced"


Had it really been that long since this box was thrown into the closet, deemed a worthless hunk of metal? To him this number was an incomprehensible length of time. He lives in a world where events happen on a micro-second scale. 400 days might as well have been an eternity.


Through the night he toiled to get the box running. Delving into his brain to retrieve long lost passwords, scouring manpages, tweaking the environment to his liking, updating long-stale binaries. At the end of it all, the Arduino blinked that LED and it was the most glorious LED that was ever blinked. Looks like he will be developing for the next week after all.


-=-=-=-=


Buggered my MacBook (Sent for repairs) and was out a machine to work with so I decided to repurpose a long forgotten friend of mine from my closet. Working surprisingly well for an older box, even boots faster than my MacBook. Stock Gnome even feels better then the MacOSX interface. Incredible.


Geek needs sleep, Badly.