Life Among the Geeks

[nonelvis]

columbina is assembling his new computer this evening, so I did a quick census of all the various working and non-working computers in this home. Officially, there are two computers for every man, woman, and cat in this household, and only two of us are equipped with the opposable thumbs necessary to use the machines.

All but two of the computers (an aluminum PowerBook with a fried logic board, and columbina's freshly dead Win98 WinMe machine) are still functional. If you count the various PDAs in the house, we have three more "computers," all of which are also still functional -- a Palm V, some newer Palm thingy, and the Newton 2100 MessagePad you will pry from my cold, dead hands. (I don't use it anymore, but neither am I willing to let it go. It has sentimental value.)

For those of you who may have lost count, that's eight computers, plus three computer-like objects, for two humans.

I don't even want to get into what the boxes full of cables look like, but at least I think I finally dumped the AppleTalk boxes a couple of years ago.

Comments

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

We have twelve? for three adults. Plus three PDAs or equivalent. But four are mine, six are Indy's, and two are T.'s from work. All of mine work, and both of T.'s, but Indy has 3-4 working and definitely two broken. Sysadmins skew the numbers, it's not really fair.

Does that make you feel better, or not at all?

[nonelvis]

Slightly better, I think, since even though we have four computers per human, only six of them actually work. And really, even though we have all these computers, only four of them ever see any serious use.

It's really time to find someplace to recycle at least one system, and I am about a year behind on posting the aluminum PowerBook to Craigslist, since its RAM, hard drive, AirPort card, and enclosure are still perfectly fine; it's just the logic board that's dead. (Hey, if you know anyone who wants to cannibalize a system, let me know.)