27 July 2008

farewell to my concubine...

...of ten years. or so.

the desktop.

yeah, i'm junking it. i need the space and a friend offered to buy, so i sold. of course reduced to more than half the price. but life has to go on.

as a writer, it is important for me to have a companion for moments when i need to record thoughts on tangible things. the trusty paper notebooks are still there, but there's nothing like the immediacy of this technology run by zeros and ones. different. digital.

ever since i lived on my own more than ten years ago, the project was to have this digital companion. my first fully-owned desktop computer. we had one at home but there was no way i was taking that with me, so i asked my cousin to create one for me. and he did.

that first model served its purpose. it became my music player and my connection to the world wide web. it produced drafts of manuscripts i published and other stuff that mattered. it was 1998. i was happy. life was simpler then. i was single, and had decadent friends, and trusty partners in crime. life was sweet.

and then came this old guy, my father's high school classmate or something, who also assembled better units. since my father was starting to get engrossed in the technology himself, he asked his friend to assemble a newer one, with a faster cpu and all stuff technically more modern. he then gave that model to me, and got my old one so the guy could chop it up (down?) or something. i was happier. there was a new OS happening that time, a higher pentium number, and more shebangs to play music and video. cool. that was 2001. i was happier. life was starting to get a bit complicated, due to a new presence in my life. again, i had a partner, and it was another chapter of my life being written. life was kind.

along came 2003. i suffered my very first computer crash. i was on my way to a new (revisited) gig when it happened. when i got home, it totally died on me. i wasn't able to save most of what i had from that first model in '98. i felt like i was robbed of property -- intellectual property.
eight month's worth of digital journals were gone, unrecovered. it was like i never existed for eight months, with my words just gone to digital limbo just like that. that was 2003, the time i was reassessing a lot of things in my life. i wanted out of a relationship, and was trying to find my self that got lost in limbo for the past years. things were not that happy. life was tricky.

but we manage, as always. the old unit gets rehashed, given a newer OS, and a newer lease of life. it served its purpose. it was great. still is. that was 2004, and now, 2008, i bid it farewell.

i know it'll be in good hands. stripped it off of things not going to be needed. retained things that will be needed, and enjoyed. a bonus for a friend.

this day and age of the ultra mobile lifestyle, i've decided to rework how i work things around here, to have better efficiency, to get best results, to have a happier time. this shift will serve that purpose. i know it will. still zeros and ones, but not alone, and definitely not lonely. excited is more like it.

we all have to move on, sooner or later.

and this is me, moving on, sooner than later. now.

farewell to a piece of me that never was.

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