Yes, I'm one of those types who names inanimate objects. Computers, for instance. Certainly more convenient than saying "you know, that computer in the basement."
We had three.
My wife's computer is Currahee, named for the famous mountain in Band of Brothers.
Our laptop is the 10th Kingdom, named for a tv miniseries (2000).
And then, my old computer . . . the one that I first converted to Debian Linux 8 years ago, then Kubuntu earlier this year . . . the one I mixed at least four albums on . . . .
. . . the machine's name WAS the Bermuda Depths.
Unfortunately, it's now dead as a hammer.
It's sort of unusual to write an obituary for a computer, I suppose, but Bermuda Depths was a computer I definitely knew inside and out. It was an old HP Pavilion -- over the years, I'd replaced the hard drives, memory, monitor, and cd drives . . . in some cases, multiple times. The only thing remaining of the original equipment was the motherboard, the power supply, and the case.
Well, two out of three of those went bad at the same time.
I thought it was a dead CMOS battery at first. Nope. Replacing the battery just gave me more elaborate and more frightening error messages. Each time I rebooted, a new set of complaints would come from the BIOS . . . then the Linux kernel would complain . . . then things like disk writes would fail, cd writes would fail, and complex operations (such as audio encoding) would terminate with strange errors. My cpu was overheating, my hard drives were falling in and out of existence, and system memory was experiencing some sort of cyber-Alzheimers.
Fortunately, I've been planning for this day for years. I make a complete system backup each month, and back up my /home directory each week -- more if something is going on, such as a long project or, in this case, suspicious computer behavior. I didn't lose any data.
Just a computer.
It already has a replacement. I'm calling the new computer Tower of Charm, to reflect the room it was "born" in. It's a computer from science fiction: AMD 64 bit quad core, 5 Gb memory, 750 Gb hard drive . . . .
But I'll miss that old bag of bits. It was my first Linux box. It was born with a bad case of Windows XP, but I cured it soon afterward, and it went on to have a healthy adolescence that included Debian, Linux from Scratch, Fedora, and even a brief fling with FreeBSD. In the end, Kubuntu had the machine running like it was brand new.
Yet inevitably, software must fail when hardware fails.
So today I lay Bermuda Depths to rest.
Comments:
peahayes (July 26, 2008. 01:16am)
RIP. Hooray for Currahee! Band of Brothers got me through a lot of wrist icing in the early days of my carpal tunnel episode.