I recently wrote a blog post bemoaning the apparent passing of Hannah Newcombe's blog at http://hannahlikessheepbaa.blogspot.com, and suggesting that I should mark the anniversary of the last post with a virtual funeral. Well, it's now a few days (weeks?) on from the anniversary, and I have prodded the corpse to double-check that it really is dead, and guess what? It hasn't twitched. It looks pretty dead to me.
So here goes the funeral!
As a non-relative of the deceased, perhaps I should begin by outlining how I came to meet them. Well, it's Root Hill's fault. I met Hannah for the first time at Root Hill 2010, and found my way onto her blog via her pair of trainers with somebody else's blog address on them (as one does). This conspired together with other elements of RH2010 to inspire the beginnings of my own blog - this one you're reading here right now. The two blogs intermittently goaded each other on over the next year and a half, and a good time was had by all. Or at least by me...
I had suggested that the funeral should take the form of a selection of my favourite posts from the sheepy one's blog, along with an explanation of why I liked them; however, this could present something of a difficulty as there are quite a lot of posts on there (a quick bit of math says 219!) and I've never been very good at picking favourites. I thought about giving it a shot anyway, but soon realised that the sheer number of posts I'd have to re-read and sort through is overwhelming. However noble my intentions, and however much I might enjoy re-reading some of the old posts (which I do sometimes), I just don't have the time to systematically go through all 219 of them. Between the challenges, the ramblings, the huge web of Doctor Who and Hitchhiker's Guide references, the ad-hoc remarks on life as it happened, and the occasional, wonderful moments when my own creative output got put in the spotlight, there are too many posts on there for me to pick out just a few.
Other features of the funeral were going to be a selection of music, and some thoughts on food. Music first:
In a suitably lamentative and funereal mode, and in keeping with the prevailing spirit of sci-fi nerdiness, I nominate This is Gallifrey from the Doctor Who Season 29 / New Series 3 soundtrack, by Murray Gold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-SBNgu1hO4
...followed by Tim's (characteristically baroque) suggestion, the aptly sheepy Sheep May Safely Graze by J. S. Bach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIUCRXMM4pE
Sam suggests Fade To Black by Metallica - I know virtually nothing about rock (you see, I'm assuming Metallica is rock... I could even be wrong about that, for all I know!), so I don't necessarily understand the connection apart from the fading-to-black-usually-denoting-the-end-of-something thing - but I'm sure Sam has some underlying reason for the choice, so here's the link anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4qr3GfTp_Q
And to conclude the musical interlude, something I came across via Hannah's blog, which fits well with one of our shared interests, and also somewhat reflects my feelings over here at A White Horizon now that I'm one of the last two survivors from the little circle of Root Hill bloggers (hannahlikessheepbaa isn't the only one to have gone down over the last year or two; Sam's the only other one still going that I'm aware of): Type 40 by Chameleon Circuit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGqrrmZXtqg
And finally, the after-funeral lunch. Sam remembered something important which had slipped my mind - Zombie Fluxx - and used that as the basis for his food suggestions: Sandwiches, Donuts, Coffee and the Zombie Brains. That's a good game, Zombie Fluxx.
And for my nominations: as a semi-regular repository of Whovian enthusiasms, Hannah's blog absolutely must be commemorated with Fish Custard, a la The Eleventh Hour. I also nominate pizza, in memory of various (usually Root-Hill-related) past events - but not Yorkshire Pizza of Death. I think one of those is quite enough for one lifetime. I'm tempted to suggest lamb/mutton, but really not sure whether that's an appropriate interpretation of "likes sheep".
Hannah, thank you for the blogging. It has been a thoroughly enjoyable... thing. What's the proper collective noun for a period of time during which multiple people write blogs that play off each other? I have no idea. But what I was trying to say is, it's been a thoroughly enjoyable one of those.
Rest in fleece, hannahlikessheepbaa. So long, and - because we can't let you pass into the blogospherical afterlife without cracking some sort of Hitchhikers' joke: thanks for all the fish.
And custard.
- The Colclough
Showing posts with label Memories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memories. Show all posts
Thursday, 14 March 2013
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
One Forgets
Question 11: "What is your earliest memory?"
I've got a few early ones, but I can't remember what order they happened in. What I think might have been the first involved waking up in the middle of the night in my bedroom in Bristol, at the tender age of two or thereabouts, and wondering why the lamp on the far side of the room wasn't on. Or it might have been another night, in the same room, where I had a dream that questioned what would happen if the shade fell off my ceiling light. Yes, I've always had a bit of a thing with light and dark. No wonder I ended up as an artist.
There were some other memories from the smaller bedroom, but I'm pretty sure those came later, as I only got moved in there after I stopped being an only child at two-and-nearly-a-half. They included a certain level of paranoia about those little chinks of light coming through the gaps around the curtains (I think I was under the mistaken impression that they were spying on me), an equal if not greater level of paranoia about the cartoon drawing of an x-ray on my alphabet wall chart (I hated that x-ray with a vengeance, or more to the point I was scared stiff of it, and I was enormously pleased with myself one day when I worked up the courage to face the offending drawing and rip it out of the poster. Mum was less pleased with the mess)... and then there was the incident with E.T.
I usually like to gloss over the one under the dining table with the felt-tip pens and little sister's t-shirt. (How was I meant to know that wasn't an appropriate choice of canvas, anyway?) That one aside, my most anecdotable early memory was the one where I woke up one morning to find my room had suffered an overnight alien invasion. I came to, and may or may not have had time to note the disappearance of the aforementioned possibly-conspiratorial chinks of light from behind the curtains before I realised I was being stared at from across the very small room (I maintain that it was about 7 foot by 5) by the most hideous and obviously-malevolent entity I had ever seen.
In retrospect, it turns out to have been a small, stuffed version of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but as far as my three- or four-year-old self was concerned it was the miniature embodiment of evil come to kill me or something. The situation probably wasn't helped by its unexpectedness - the fact that this thing had arrived in my room without a single word of warning or explanation. The big problem was how to escape the room and find someone to help get rid of it, because my head was at the pillow end of the bed (see, I did have some residual scraps of normality!), and that was at the opposite end of the room to the door, with the beast strategically perched on a shelf in between. I dared not get any closer without some sort of protection, as I would probably pay for it with my life.
Thank goodness for the miracle of duvets. In a flash of inspiration, I retreated beneath the cover, and crawled down to the foot of the bed in its shadow. The door handle was now just a few inches away, and if I could move quickly enough, I might outrun the monster. There was probably one of those tense pauses like you get in Westerns, where everybody stares meaningfully at each other's gun holsters and the art department sends a well-placed piece of dry tumbleweed blowing across the street.
I ran. I grabbed my door handle, yanked it open, hurled myself off the foot of the bed and into the relative safety of the landing, saw salvation in the bathroom in the shape of a parent or two, and ran towards it for dear life, as fast as I could possibly manage, shrieking hysterically. I may have invented a new adjective to describe the indescribable horror that I'd just escaped.
The unwelcome alien was duly removed, and peace restored.
Only for him to turn up again in a very strange movie I saw several years later... except that time he didn't scare the living daylights out of me.
Grown-up me's statistics:
- The Colclough
I've got a few early ones, but I can't remember what order they happened in. What I think might have been the first involved waking up in the middle of the night in my bedroom in Bristol, at the tender age of two or thereabouts, and wondering why the lamp on the far side of the room wasn't on. Or it might have been another night, in the same room, where I had a dream that questioned what would happen if the shade fell off my ceiling light. Yes, I've always had a bit of a thing with light and dark. No wonder I ended up as an artist.
There were some other memories from the smaller bedroom, but I'm pretty sure those came later, as I only got moved in there after I stopped being an only child at two-and-nearly-a-half. They included a certain level of paranoia about those little chinks of light coming through the gaps around the curtains (I think I was under the mistaken impression that they were spying on me), an equal if not greater level of paranoia about the cartoon drawing of an x-ray on my alphabet wall chart (I hated that x-ray with a vengeance, or more to the point I was scared stiff of it, and I was enormously pleased with myself one day when I worked up the courage to face the offending drawing and rip it out of the poster. Mum was less pleased with the mess)... and then there was the incident with E.T.
I usually like to gloss over the one under the dining table with the felt-tip pens and little sister's t-shirt. (How was I meant to know that wasn't an appropriate choice of canvas, anyway?) That one aside, my most anecdotable early memory was the one where I woke up one morning to find my room had suffered an overnight alien invasion. I came to, and may or may not have had time to note the disappearance of the aforementioned possibly-conspiratorial chinks of light from behind the curtains before I realised I was being stared at from across the very small room (I maintain that it was about 7 foot by 5) by the most hideous and obviously-malevolent entity I had ever seen.
In retrospect, it turns out to have been a small, stuffed version of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but as far as my three- or four-year-old self was concerned it was the miniature embodiment of evil come to kill me or something. The situation probably wasn't helped by its unexpectedness - the fact that this thing had arrived in my room without a single word of warning or explanation. The big problem was how to escape the room and find someone to help get rid of it, because my head was at the pillow end of the bed (see, I did have some residual scraps of normality!), and that was at the opposite end of the room to the door, with the beast strategically perched on a shelf in between. I dared not get any closer without some sort of protection, as I would probably pay for it with my life.
Thank goodness for the miracle of duvets. In a flash of inspiration, I retreated beneath the cover, and crawled down to the foot of the bed in its shadow. The door handle was now just a few inches away, and if I could move quickly enough, I might outrun the monster. There was probably one of those tense pauses like you get in Westerns, where everybody stares meaningfully at each other's gun holsters and the art department sends a well-placed piece of dry tumbleweed blowing across the street.
I ran. I grabbed my door handle, yanked it open, hurled myself off the foot of the bed and into the relative safety of the landing, saw salvation in the bathroom in the shape of a parent or two, and ran towards it for dear life, as fast as I could possibly manage, shrieking hysterically. I may have invented a new adjective to describe the indescribable horror that I'd just escaped.
The unwelcome alien was duly removed, and peace restored.
Only for him to turn up again in a very strange movie I saw several years later... except that time he didn't scare the living daylights out of me.
Grown-up me's statistics:
- Twenty Questions status: 17 down, 3 to go
- Days until Root Hill: 3
- Latest book read: Operation Mincemeat
- Latest film/TV watched: Red Dwarf 1.5
- Latest music listened to: How to Train Your Dragon OST by John Powell
- Latest edible item eaten: coffee
- Predominant colour of clothes: black
- Programs and web pages currently running: Microsoft Office Word and Outlook 2007, Firefox (tabs: Fort Paradox offline archive; A White Horizon; Blogspot Create Post; www.imdb.com), Windows Media Player 11
- Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1338
- The Colclough
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
Notice is Hereby Served
...of my intention to quit Facebook.
Because I can, is why. If I can live without Facebook, I can live without it. If I can't, then there's a problem, and I need to fix it - by the cold turkey route if necessary.
TBH, I think I can live without it quite easily. I did for years and years, and I only got roped in to having an account because people at FCOT wanted to use it for coordinating college-related meetings and stuff. So, now that FCOT is over, I've decided that for the sake of maintaining my individuality, free will and principles (yes, those), I shall deactivate my account. The aforementioned principles are mostly to do with the fact that FB is a massive time-waster. The vast majority of what goes on FB is a load of *beep*.
I've got a two-week timeframe. There's a Root Hill reunion a week on Saturday, which is being coordinated via FB, but once that's over I shall quit.
If you want a more philosophical-sounding reason, then how about this: because your life should be more than the sum of your websites. If you find yourself at the point where you couldn't survive without any given site, then that site has become too dominant over you, and you need to get rid of it. I'm not ditching FB because I think it has come to that, but to prove that it hasn't.
I've just shut down my account on another site too. That was Tailcast, past tense.
Because I can, is why. If I can live without Facebook, I can live without it. If I can't, then there's a problem, and I need to fix it - by the cold turkey route if necessary.
TBH, I think I can live without it quite easily. I did for years and years, and I only got roped in to having an account because people at FCOT wanted to use it for coordinating college-related meetings and stuff. So, now that FCOT is over, I've decided that for the sake of maintaining my individuality, free will and principles (yes, those), I shall deactivate my account. The aforementioned principles are mostly to do with the fact that FB is a massive time-waster. The vast majority of what goes on FB is a load of *beep*.
I've got a two-week timeframe. There's a Root Hill reunion a week on Saturday, which is being coordinated via FB, but once that's over I shall quit.
If you want a more philosophical-sounding reason, then how about this: because your life should be more than the sum of your websites. If you find yourself at the point where you couldn't survive without any given site, then that site has become too dominant over you, and you need to get rid of it. I'm not ditching FB because I think it has come to that, but to prove that it hasn't.
I've just shut down my account on another site too. That was Tailcast, past tense.
It began life as a social-networking-esque thing with an artistic slant. The focus was on writing, drawing, painting, photography and music, as opposed to the "here's a pointless update on the banal stuff I did today" ethos of most Facebook posts. A search through my old emails tells me that I joined on the 24th of May, 2008 – nearly two and a half years ago. That sounds about right. It feels like a long time.
While I was there, I uploaded 81 visual pieces, and 27 written. In total, over 100 expressions of myself, including some of the most personal and intimate things I have ever published. The written pieces included my first blog (A White Horizon is my second).
But something went wrong – the seeds of it snuck in by the back door a long time ago, like so: “wouldn’t it be cool if we had a ‘shop’ feature, where you could buy cards and wall art and stuff featuring the artwork uploaded to TC?” Well, fair enough. But as time went by, and the site kept getting more and more polished, there was a gradual but definite shift in emphasis, away from the community spirit that made Tailcast what it was in the old days, and towards commercialisation. At the beginning of September, I got an email telling me that any artwork which did not meet the minimum resolution for creating products would be forcibly set to ‘private’, effectively removing it from my profile unless I put in the effort to re-upload newer, higher-resolution versions. Well, out of my 81 visual uploads, a mere 7 were deemed high-res enough to stay online, and the other 74 have vanished from my profile without a trace (unless I log in and click ‘manage profile’ – then I can see them, but they’re greyed out).
Now, having the option to make cards and wall art and stuff is all very well and good, but most of the time that’s not what people want to do. Mostly, people just want to look at stuff. I, for one, just wanted to look at stuff, not stick it on a mug. And for the webmasters to make the unilateral decision that “low-res artwork is unworthy to stay online, even just for looking at” seems to me like shooting themselves in the foot.
I had been gradually (and unintentionally) drifting away from Tailcast anyhow, but that bizarre and unfriendly decision was the final nail in the coffin for my membership. As of a couple of weeks ago, I have gone through all of my written material on the site and copied it all to my hard disk for posterity – didn’t need to do so for the visual stuff, as that was all on my HDD already – and about half an hour ago, I finally shut down my account.
Strange thing is, the whole website went HTTP 404 on me when I was about three-quarters of the way through copying everything. It’s almost like the servers could sense my intention, and were making a last-ditch effort to stop me leaving. But it didn’t work. The site came back from the ashes, and I continued my exit procedure.
So, that's over. And soon, FB will be too. Not that I'm completely parting company with the internet, mind you - I've still got email, this blog, and my YouTube channel, among other things. I'm just pruning off the sites that aren't contributing anything worthwhile to my life.
And who knows what else I'll come across later. Watch this space!
- The Colclough
Friday, 29 October 2010
Do I have ze Papers?
Semi-random philosophical question: what are the most important pieces of paper in your life? Books don't count, because if you included books, the list could get really enormous really fast. So, just loose bits of paper. Hmnnn...
I present, for your consideration, a list of candidates:
I haven't actually picked one myself. I just felt like having a philosophical ramble.
But then again, having been given a piece of paper at Guildford Cathedral yesterday which says something about Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours, I might just go for that one as my current choice for the time being 8]
I could take this as my cue to go tangential on the architecture of the Cathedral, but I'll leave religious masonry for another day.
It's a bit weird to find myself looking back on my graduation as a past event, after well over three years regarding it as something in the future. Guildford may have one of the country's most minimalist and austere cathedrals, but it's a cathedral nonetheless, and being there with most of the other people on my course, all in matching superhero capes and funny hats (yes, we threw the hats afterwards) is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that sticks with you. I think it will be, anyway. It's interesting to question which aspects will be remembered - the determination of my cape to become asymetrical... the commentary on last month's haircut (which most of my coursemates hadn't seen yet)... the endless, hand-numbing applause... the long, oddly smug-yet-awkward walk down the aisle after shaking hands with the principal... the mildly inappropriate but not overly depressing weather... the funny puddings back at the college afterwards... or something else altogether? Only time will tell, I suppose.
Some of the other guys have already got jobs - Steve said his mostly involves watching lots of Irish film trailers, which somehow seems inherently funny - and others (myself included) are still looking. Or in my case, looking a bit, and writing monster movies on the side - as you do.
We didn't get professional photos taken. We've got a Nikon D80 DSLR, and we adopted the tried-and-trusted digital photography method of keep-on-pointing-and-shooting-until-something-works. Well, more or less. It wasn't quite point-and-shoot per se, but you get the idea. But it was a heck of a lot cheaper doing it ourselves.
*long pause*
Uh... that didn't really feel like a properly-written ending, but I'm not sure what else to say, so I'm going to leave it there for now. Photos maybe coming sort of soonish.
- The Colclough
I present, for your consideration, a list of candidates:
- A letter? Could be, if you're in the habit of sending and/or receiving letters on paper. Not for me though, as mine are nearly all in electronic form. Haven't had a letter on paper in... uh... no idea actually.
- A cheque? Depends on your financial situation 8p
- Something you wrote or drew? I have thousands of these, and if push came to shove, one of them might win out - but a lot of them are pretty negligible.
- Your birth certificate? Obviously important, but not that exciting. After all, practically everyone has one.
- Your marriage certificate? Much more exciting... if you have one. Which I don't.
- Your death certificate? Not really - you don't get one of these until your life is over, so it can't count as an important piece of paper *in* your life.
- Your driving license? Could be a winner for petrolheads, but from my point of view it's more a practical tool, rather than a thing of emotional significance. Well, I say that after having had it for more than three years, with the trauma of failing my first test long since lost in the sands of time. You might regard your license as your most important piece of paper for the first few months after you get it.
- A certificate of academic achievement? Quite possibly, especially if it says something about first class honours.
I haven't actually picked one myself. I just felt like having a philosophical ramble.
But then again, having been given a piece of paper at Guildford Cathedral yesterday which says something about Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours, I might just go for that one as my current choice for the time being 8]
I could take this as my cue to go tangential on the architecture of the Cathedral, but I'll leave religious masonry for another day.
It's a bit weird to find myself looking back on my graduation as a past event, after well over three years regarding it as something in the future. Guildford may have one of the country's most minimalist and austere cathedrals, but it's a cathedral nonetheless, and being there with most of the other people on my course, all in matching superhero capes and funny hats (yes, we threw the hats afterwards) is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that sticks with you. I think it will be, anyway. It's interesting to question which aspects will be remembered - the determination of my cape to become asymetrical... the commentary on last month's haircut (which most of my coursemates hadn't seen yet)... the endless, hand-numbing applause... the long, oddly smug-yet-awkward walk down the aisle after shaking hands with the principal... the mildly inappropriate but not overly depressing weather... the funny puddings back at the college afterwards... or something else altogether? Only time will tell, I suppose.
Some of the other guys have already got jobs - Steve said his mostly involves watching lots of Irish film trailers, which somehow seems inherently funny - and others (myself included) are still looking. Or in my case, looking a bit, and writing monster movies on the side - as you do.
We didn't get professional photos taken. We've got a Nikon D80 DSLR, and we adopted the tried-and-trusted digital photography method of keep-on-pointing-and-shooting-until-something-works. Well, more or less. It wasn't quite point-and-shoot per se, but you get the idea. But it was a heck of a lot cheaper doing it ourselves.
*long pause*
Uh... that didn't really feel like a properly-written ending, but I'm not sure what else to say, so I'm going to leave it there for now. Photos maybe coming sort of soonish.
- The Colclough
Monday, 27 September 2010
You wait and wait and wait and then...
This one starts all computery, and then drifts into philosophy. You have been warned.
***
Today seems to have gone mainly on waiting for stuff.
Our new PC was supposed to arrive this morning, but it wasn't delivered until after 4. I think everyone got a bit tetchy waiting for the doorbell to go. But it did arrive in the end, and now it's all set up and ready to go.
It's got Windows 7, making it the first computer in the family to move beyond the Windows XP paradigm. Not that I have anything against XP - it still holds up remarkably well for a 9-year-old operating system. But there is something rather shiny about 7.
I've also been waiting for an email or two which really ought to have been here a long time ago, but neither of them has arrived yet.
*Gets distracted* I've just become aware that the several-decades-old clock in the lounge is bonging obsessively - nay, almost psychotically - I'm talking several dozen chimes in a row, which is (of course) far beyond the call of duty for any clock. *Investigates* Turns out someone wound up the chimes mechanism, and now Mum's winding the hands round and round in an effort to wind the chime spring down again. But if you didn't know that and you just heard the noise, you could be forgiven for thinking that the clock had gone mad. It's been known to happen, you know - we've got a cuckoo clock in the dining room that went mad, and once it starts cuckooing it won't stop. It's been counted doing well over fifty cuckoos in one go. It does stop eventually, but only when the weight on the cuckooing gizmo hits the floor, a good six feet down from the clock.
Anyway, back to the point. The new PC - dubbed 'Bolt' for its speed - isn't a new addition to the Colclough computer fleet, it's a replacement. Its arrival means the decommissioning of an older machine - one running Windows 98 SE - and now that the old thing is sitting on my floor with no controls or monitor attached, one side panel missing, and looking a bit sorry for itself, it's really feeling like the end of an era. We acquired the machine in question in 2001 or early 2002, and shortly afterwards upgraded it with a video card, which was in many ways responsible for the beginning of my career as a filmmaker and animator. Years' worth of my life history have passed through the processor of that PC, and it's put up with so much that I'm almost amazed it's still running at all. In its later years it's been affectionately nicknamed 'Crunchy', because of the horrible noises the fan motor and hard disk make whenever it's switched on. I've moved on - in addition to a 4-year-old laptop and my own 2-year-old 64-bit quad-core, 'Beastie', the new arrival makes three computers in the house which all easily outclass old Crunchy, and it really doesn't have any useful function any more.
I've still got an original Windows 95 installer disc (which I suppose must have arrived with one of Crunchy's two predecessors), and I'm rather tempted to format Crunchy's C drive and install Win95 on it, just for the nostalgia trip of seeing the 15-year-old OS in action one last time. And when that's done, I'd also like to format the disk again and then see if the decrepit box will run Ubuntu.
And when I've finished playing with the corpse, there are two other things I'd like to do. One of them, in fulfillment of a long-standing ambition, would be to take the machine to the top of a tallish building and throw it off the roof, just to watch it smash at the bottom. I've been wanting to do that to a computer for a very long time.
But the other thing is very different: part of me wants to give it a hug before it finally meets its end. Yeah, it's weird. I know. But as one of those people whose IT skills far outstrip their people skills, I don't just look at a family computer as another piece of hardware, like a washing machine or something. It's a friend, of sorts - or at least it used to be, before it went senile and started arbitrarily destroying important files. That's what the hug is for: not because the metal and plastic is anything special in and of itself, or because the old box is still valuable (let's face it, it isn't), but for auld lang syne. For the dozens of films and videos which I edited there, for the hundreds of comic strips I wrote there, for all the emails written and received there - my best friends live 120 miles away, and a lot of our conversation is conducted via email - and for everything else that the machine and I did together over the last eight or nine years.
Having said what I said about people skills... I'd still hug a human friend goodbye too if I knew there was an ending in the offing. Unless they didn't want it, of course, in which case I wouldn't. But you don't go through the same process with humans, of deciding that their end has come, formatting C, saying a ceremonialised farewell and then throwing them off a rooftop. Well, I don't anyhow. I hope you don't either. (Do you?)
Still, the point remains: it'll be sad to see the last of Crunchy.
Now, if its successor matches its longevity record, then we won't be saying goodbye to Bolt until at least 2018...
***
See, I told you I could blog on other days of the week besides Thursdays!
- The Colclough
***
Today seems to have gone mainly on waiting for stuff.
Our new PC was supposed to arrive this morning, but it wasn't delivered until after 4. I think everyone got a bit tetchy waiting for the doorbell to go. But it did arrive in the end, and now it's all set up and ready to go.
It's got Windows 7, making it the first computer in the family to move beyond the Windows XP paradigm. Not that I have anything against XP - it still holds up remarkably well for a 9-year-old operating system. But there is something rather shiny about 7.
I've also been waiting for an email or two which really ought to have been here a long time ago, but neither of them has arrived yet.
*Gets distracted* I've just become aware that the several-decades-old clock in the lounge is bonging obsessively - nay, almost psychotically - I'm talking several dozen chimes in a row, which is (of course) far beyond the call of duty for any clock. *Investigates* Turns out someone wound up the chimes mechanism, and now Mum's winding the hands round and round in an effort to wind the chime spring down again. But if you didn't know that and you just heard the noise, you could be forgiven for thinking that the clock had gone mad. It's been known to happen, you know - we've got a cuckoo clock in the dining room that went mad, and once it starts cuckooing it won't stop. It's been counted doing well over fifty cuckoos in one go. It does stop eventually, but only when the weight on the cuckooing gizmo hits the floor, a good six feet down from the clock.
Anyway, back to the point. The new PC - dubbed 'Bolt' for its speed - isn't a new addition to the Colclough computer fleet, it's a replacement. Its arrival means the decommissioning of an older machine - one running Windows 98 SE - and now that the old thing is sitting on my floor with no controls or monitor attached, one side panel missing, and looking a bit sorry for itself, it's really feeling like the end of an era. We acquired the machine in question in 2001 or early 2002, and shortly afterwards upgraded it with a video card, which was in many ways responsible for the beginning of my career as a filmmaker and animator. Years' worth of my life history have passed through the processor of that PC, and it's put up with so much that I'm almost amazed it's still running at all. In its later years it's been affectionately nicknamed 'Crunchy', because of the horrible noises the fan motor and hard disk make whenever it's switched on. I've moved on - in addition to a 4-year-old laptop and my own 2-year-old 64-bit quad-core, 'Beastie', the new arrival makes three computers in the house which all easily outclass old Crunchy, and it really doesn't have any useful function any more.
I've still got an original Windows 95 installer disc (which I suppose must have arrived with one of Crunchy's two predecessors), and I'm rather tempted to format Crunchy's C drive and install Win95 on it, just for the nostalgia trip of seeing the 15-year-old OS in action one last time. And when that's done, I'd also like to format the disk again and then see if the decrepit box will run Ubuntu.
And when I've finished playing with the corpse, there are two other things I'd like to do. One of them, in fulfillment of a long-standing ambition, would be to take the machine to the top of a tallish building and throw it off the roof, just to watch it smash at the bottom. I've been wanting to do that to a computer for a very long time.
But the other thing is very different: part of me wants to give it a hug before it finally meets its end. Yeah, it's weird. I know. But as one of those people whose IT skills far outstrip their people skills, I don't just look at a family computer as another piece of hardware, like a washing machine or something. It's a friend, of sorts - or at least it used to be, before it went senile and started arbitrarily destroying important files. That's what the hug is for: not because the metal and plastic is anything special in and of itself, or because the old box is still valuable (let's face it, it isn't), but for auld lang syne. For the dozens of films and videos which I edited there, for the hundreds of comic strips I wrote there, for all the emails written and received there - my best friends live 120 miles away, and a lot of our conversation is conducted via email - and for everything else that the machine and I did together over the last eight or nine years.
Having said what I said about people skills... I'd still hug a human friend goodbye too if I knew there was an ending in the offing. Unless they didn't want it, of course, in which case I wouldn't. But you don't go through the same process with humans, of deciding that their end has come, formatting C, saying a ceremonialised farewell and then throwing them off a rooftop. Well, I don't anyhow. I hope you don't either. (Do you?)
Still, the point remains: it'll be sad to see the last of Crunchy.
Now, if its successor matches its longevity record, then we won't be saying goodbye to Bolt until at least 2018...
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See, I told you I could blog on other days of the week besides Thursdays!
- The Colclough
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