astradele

The brain of my computer is a “vintage” Pentium 4 (Prescott) 2.8 GHz processor, from an era before there were “cores”, and the only measure that mattered was the “Gigahertz”. As the cliched story goes, it was “top of the line” when I got it, but it’s time to upgrade.

Actually, while I was tempted to get a “top of the line” at the time, I reasoned that I was better getting “second place”, which is what I got. In terms of life, I’m surprised it’s lasted me this long. Moore’s Law is often cited to mean that computers double in processing power every 18 months (or so). I had always thought I would end up doing full upgrades every 2 years. At work, we require servers to be upgraded after 3 years. Instead, this old rig has lasted me four years! The purchase date was easy to remember, too, as I upgraded back then for a very specific reason: to play Final Fantasy XI to its best looking.

Since then, upgrades have been minor. The hard drives had to be replaced early this year due to harassment by overweight felines. More RAM was added. The DVD burner replaced. And perhaps most key to my workstations’ longetivity, I gave up PC games and switched to Linux full-time; the former reduced my computer resource demands, the latter applied that available computing power in a more efficient manner.

While a craving for new toys certainly fuels my desire for a brand new workstation, what really sparked it was downloading via bittorrent and watching videos. Running bittornado for only 5 torrents consumes most of the CPU time. Watching an HD video is jerky. Coincidentally, the driver for my last major upgrade was similar: jerky video when playing FFXI. I’ve very particularly about my computer’s responsiveness to me; control issues perhaps.

Thus I’m forced into upgrading my computer. All of it. To the “top of the line”. Didn’t really want to, but … yeah, I’m not fooling myself either. I need to polish my credit card.

Once upon a time, there was ICQ.

Then came Yahoo Messenger, which could work through the university firewall, and linked into stock quotes.

Briefly, a fling with AOL Instant Messenger, which was regionally popular during my sojourn to Seattle.

MSN Messenger then became another, as nouveau “Netizens” used the instant messaging client that was preinstalled on Windows.

When Trillian appeared, I was overjoyed to consolidate all my messaging clients into one.

On and off, I toyed with other clients, like Miranda, but it wasn’t until the appearance of Gaim that I switched again. Gaim, with its simple interface and resource friendly ways, appealed to me much more than the flashy excesses of Trillian.

Also around the time of GAIM, I got second accounts for Yahoo and MSN: one for work contacts, one for personal contacts.

Then came the AJAX revolution, and I discovered Meebo. At last, everything I wanted: instant messaging for all networks, no installation required, centralize all my chat logs!

Except now… lost messages! I don’t know if it’s Meebo’s fault or the MSN network, but I’ve been sending messages that I later discovered went unreceived. So time to backtrack to the last known good state (Gaim, now called Pidgin) and see what else has changed besides the name.

Initial impressions are good. Smooth install, logical interface, and certainly more responsive than using a web-based IM. Since I still want all my log files in one place for searchability, and Pidgin doesn’t support remote logging yet, I put together a script to commit the local log files (plain text files) to a revision control system every night.

On a lark this past Friday, I managed to:

1. Bowl a couple sets of cosmic bowling before midnight.
2. Karaoke in a karaoke room (first time!) until about 3am.
3. Tweak my computer (I don’t even remember for what!) until 7am.

It’s fun to do an all-nighter every so often, even though I pay the price over the subsequent days. I’m not really sure why I enjoy it. I didn’t even feel particularly tired until I forced myself to bed. At least this time it wasn’t an entire night programming or playing games!