Another night shot to hell

Life stops when you get a new computer. This is why you need to do it at some point in your life where stopping it won’t matter much. Off-season, during the week, at night, in space, where no one can hear you scream…

Loading some things is easy. You’ve got the disk around, you stick it in, and there you are. With Apple, networking was easy too, and I barely batted an eye before I was sharing printers and disk drives like the proverbial house afire. Other things aren’t so easy. First of all, you’ve got to remember them in the first place (e.g., the FTP software), and then you’ve got to remember where you’ve put them, and what your stored passwords are, yadda yadda yadda. I mean, I have records of all my passwords (none of which, if you must know, are obscure Star Wars references), but one accrues logins and pws over time like barnacles on the ship of computing, and you can find them easily enough, but scraping them requires a certain brute force (I have no idea how that metaphor applies). And of course there’s software to download, like good old Tweetie. (All right, make that good new Tweetie.) Then there’s all the photos I’ve been meaning to put on Flickr. Etc., etc., etc. This is the straightforward stuff that nevertheless is a big time suck. And, by the way, you can’t plug two computers into the same socket at the same time: who knew?

Then there’s the less straightforward stuff, to wit, the virtualization software. I thought I’d give VirtualBox a go, being that it’s Open Source and all, but it ultimately defeated me. There is just too much work doing things like getting the USB ports to work and the like, not to mention a warning from Batterman that he couldn’t get printers to work, which might hinder one a tad at the various tournaments one is running, which is, of course, the only reason I’m doing this whole PC on the Mac thing in the first place, to get TRPC on there. Before I even got to the point of dumping VirtualBox I had to go through an incredible song and dance with Windows. First there was the XP disk for the Vista computer; if you opted for XP instead of Vista, the tag on the computer was still for Vista even though they loaded XP on there, which meant phoning home (i.e., registering the perfectly legal software) was a no go. Then I tried some various versions of Windows 98, perfectly acceptable for old time TRPC use. The damned thing hung after an hour of upload strife. Finally I found my own old XP that I was actually able to register with the Redmond mother ship, at which point all the VirtualBox problems became manifest. CP had suggested VMware Fusion, which, for $39 on Amazon, was an immediate no-brainer. I logged in (Amazon not knowing who I was on the new computer didn’t slow me for a second), threw in a copy of Nigel Warburton’s Very Short Introduction to Free Speech (the beauty or burden of having a shopping list) and called it a night. After playing a tad of Civ 4, that is. Damn, but that Civ is still the best game ever.

When all was said and done I went up and read a little Anathem. You would have done the same.

BTW, I’m still open to names for the new little sucker. No obscure Star Wars references, though, please. I just can’t take them, at this point.