Currently, the other resident of this chaotic technological haven is in quite a few pieces, to put it lightly. Over the course of the last two weeks, Kids has housed three different motherboards, and the prospect of a fourth looms, since the currebt one works only intermittently. When the smoke clears (unless we can get somehow away without frying the power supply, in which case we'll say "when the dust clears,"), Kids will be packing a AMD 5x86-133 with VL-bus, which is apparently the rough equivilent of a Pentium 75 in processing power and 16 megs of RAM. Currently, however, the new motherboard is refusing to cooperate with us, even when powered up without even a video card. In the coming weeks, I'll keep all of you out ther posted.
With this new upgrade comes the need for a new name. At this point, the name "Kids" becomes an inaccurate description of one of the faster systems in the den. Anyone with ideas for new names can e-mail them to me. Who knows, you could even waste your 15 minutes of fame by having your name chosen! Your creation of a name could be forever immortalized right here in the Sledgehammer!!! Give it a whack, and send your names for the newly upgraded system today! (Make up the fine print yourself, I'm to lazy to write fine print today.)
I have had visitors to the den (brave souls who would actually put life and limb at risk to behold this technological anomaly) who have asked me how I can live with such chaos and thrive, even being able to take a sarcastic view of the whole thing? I have decided to write this column to answer some of those people, knowing that several of them are among my five or six regular readers (yes, things are looking up for this site! I'm now up to six loyal readers! Now if only I had some loyal readers who would notify the fine people at Point Communications of the existence of this site...)
Others who have seen the den have demanded that it be cleaned (and unfortunately, these are the same ones who pay for the house the den is located in, so I have taken on the herculean task of cleaning the den once or twice.) Anyway, back in the dark ages when the computers were actually kept in the living room, of all places, I was required to keep them in a somewhat orderly state. Of course, back then, we had quite a bit less computer stuff than we have now, so it was an easier task. Now that the computers have been relegated to their own room, chaos has erupted, with yours truly being the one forced to body surf the wave of the future.
Originally, when we moved into our current house, there was some hope that the den here could actually be used as an office, but as soon as the computers moved in, they quickly took the whole place over, crushing all hopes of this ever happening. Now the floor (which hasn't been seen in almost two years) is completely covered with technojunk, and the tables that hold the computers are so cluttered that cometimes it takes upwards of an hour to dig through the junk to find the keyboard (and another half hour after that to find the power switch for one of the systems on a bad day.)
The decor of the place rivals that of the finest cathedrals in Europe about as much as a whelk rivals a supernova (apologies to Douglas Adams for that one.) The second most horrendous wallpaper trim in existence hangs on the walls just below the ceiling. (The worst ever was hanging in my room when I moved into this house. Suffice it to say that I said "Bu-bye bunnies" pretty quickly, to give some idea just how bad it was.) The various wall hangings are completely mismatched, with a watercolor of Dave Justice on one wall, an Indy 500 pennant dating back to 1992 on another, and an "All I need to know I learned from Star Trek" poster on yet another wall (well, so it isn't a total loss...) Adding a touch of class to the whole thing is a torchiere lamp in the middle of the floor (at this point, a touch of class is about all that could be added to the place.) One of these days I hope to be able to put some pictures of this place up for the world to behold. Maybe I could even start a tourist trap and get rich off this place!
To describe the state of things here in the den in simple terms, gravitational collapse caused by the sheer mass of silicon has been a very real possibiltity for the last year and a half. If this column ever stops getting updated for more than three weeks (I need to allow for some procrastination, Right?) you will know that I have been claimed by a time-space anomaly created by a large pile of technology, both semi-new and old. If you end up being sucked up in the black hole originating here in the den, look for new issues of The Sledgehammer in the alternate dimension beyond.
So how DO I survive among all of this chaos? It takes time to learn to do this. At first glance, computers are packaged in friendly little cases. That way they can sneak up on you if you're not careful. To make sure this doesn't happen, obviously none of the systems in here have cases. I'm remonded of the story of one such computer, which was little more than a pile of boards and wires with a link to the Internet cloud. When someone commented that the whole thing really didn't look much like that overused metaphor (I*********n S**********y, to avoid using it gratuitously,) another person asked if painting a couple of double yellow lines would help.
Of course, I'm not condoning the painting of anyone's computers, especially in yellow (personally, not one of my favorite colors,) but when your computers have nothing to hide, they are much less likely to explode on you. With the way things are in here, an major explosion could go undetected for quite a while. You'll have to experiment for yourself on this one. If you must paint your computers to make them look like they belong on the Infobahn, I would suggest that a sky-blue and magenta combination would look rather nice.
Another thing that scientists are trying to prove about chaos is that it breeds order. So far, this appears to be years away in this place, but eventually, it will happen, although it will probably require an SMP Pentium Pro motherboard in each of the existing systems and one of Cray's deskside systems to act as a server for the whole operation. That way, we may be able to keep up with the current technology for about a month or so before we are forced once again into the rat race of the continuous upgrade process.
If anyone else out there lives with this much chaos in their computing experience, let me know how you deal with it. Maybe a master list could be compiled out of the whole thing and we could all learn from the experience how to survive when the computers are running your life.