Monday, December 01, 2008

farewell, my queen

tonight, I finally shut down my old HP Pavilion. On our network at home, her name was Amidala- I know that her namesake would eventually give up her role as queen and serve as a senator- but when i bought this tower, Amidala was a queen.

It's hard to believe that I bought this HP Pavilion nearly 7 years ago, but its true. I was separated that year, and I needed a computer that I could use to manage my affairs. I shared a house with a roommate, so it was my bookkeeper, my confidant, my DVD player, and my connection to the outside world. I drafted my divorce agreement on Amidala and emailed it to my lawyer.
Amidala was the sole stewardess of my 1400 strong war chest of HVAC-related outlook contacts.
I met Mel in 04, and eventually moved in with her, and Amidala moved with me. Mel wasn't used to all the computer hardware, but Amidala became a print server for Mel's laptop when I brought comcast and a router to the house. Later, I bought a Dell which started out as a Windows Media machine hooked up to the TV in the basement, so Amidala served faithfully as a print server for a few years in our office- which is now the baby's room.
When the baby was born, Amidala was packed up and moved downstairs, to sit alongside the Dell, and continued to faithfully sit on the network so I could pull files, or other useful information as needed from her hard drive.
Last Christmas Mel got me an external HD, so we began backing up Amidala, and the other 3 computers on the network (my Dell Tower, and our two laptops) last year, and I moved all the files from Amidala to the new Dell tower. At the same time i noticed that Amidala was choking on boinc, so i wiped her hard drive, doubled her RAM and loaded Ubuntu, and she went back to happily boinc'ing away- and that has been her sole purpose since June or July.
Lately I've been thinking that Amidala was more of a drain on our electricity at the house, than her benefit looking for ET (It was taking a day and a half to complete a task) so I finally decided to shut her down tonight.
Goodnight Amidala, you were there for me through some pretty tough times. 7 years was a pretty good run. Maybe you'll make a good Ubuntu evangelist for a local non-profit org.

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