kill vehicle

Okay, it’s not really morning anymore. But I ran across two things this morning over coffee and pancakes that intrigued me.

First, Boing Boing points to a post elsewhere about preserving the Ultima games. Finding out about Ultima Classics made me happy — I bought the boxed Ultima Collection years ago in a fit of nostalgia, but it was too much of a pain to get some of the old DOS Ultima games to run on a modern Windows machine. Ultima Classics does all the hard work and gets the emulation right, which is great. If you want it, it’s floating around on various BitTorrent sites. I kinda wish there was a smaller-download version so I didn’t have to download all the game files that exist on the Ultima Collection again, but it’s not all that bad.

Second, Salon has a good article by Dan Savage about gay marriage — how people are assuming that gay marriages should just be like traditional straight marriages even though so many straight marriages aren’t actually like the traditional image, and how more widespread acceptance of gay marriage may help us come to terms with the difference between our idealized image of marriage and the actuality. It’s always nice to see reasonable non-fiery commentary on the issue.

So, I have this laptop.

I like it, but it’s getting a little senile. I’ve had it for about three and a half years now, which means that in computer years it’s about 87. The case is getting creaky, the keyboard’s starting to wear, the battery is shot, and every now and then it just locks up hard for no apparent reason. It’s still fast enough for my purposes (mail, web crap, movies, games), though, and when it isn’t malfunctioning it’s an excellent machine.

All the same, I’ve been window-shopping a new laptop. I like shiny new things, and a new PowerBook is about as shiny as they come. Every now and then I’ll go to Apple’s online store, configure my ideal machine, check out the price, and look wistfully at the feature set. I’ll think, “Gosh, I kinda hate using Windows. It’ll be cool to play with OS X! I can’t wait until it’s time to buy one of these things!” and then go back to happily using my Thinkpad. It’s a pleasant way to pass time, like any sort of window shopping, and it lets me distract myself from the various annoyances of windows. Thinking “I bet a new PowerBook wouldn’t crash like that” while waiting for Windows to boot again after a hard lockup takes a little sting out of losing whatever I was working on.

Last night, though, my laptop shifted from “senile” to “not long for this world” — the screen started acting up, flickering and ghosting and distorting. It stopped after a while, but that can’t be a good sign. Laura’s old Sony laptop died the same way — the rest of the machine worked fine, but the display conked out and would have been stupidly expensive to fix.

Suddenly, the PowerBook switched from an idle window-shopping fantasy to a “maybe I’ll need to order this tomorrow” possibility. It’s a lot less fun this way. The features are still attractive, but I find myself cringing at the sticker price, worrying about whether I’ll be unhappy switching from the IBM 1400×1050 screen-of-love to the crisp-but-lower-resolution Apple 1280×854 display, unsure I’ll be able to deal with using a trackpad instead of a trackpoint. I’m dreading having to move all of my data over, configure a new machine, adapt to a new operating system’s quirks. I expected all of that, but it’s still not any fun.

What I didn’t expect, though, is a vague feeling of guilt about the whole process. I have this strange loyalty to my current laptop. Intellectually I know that it’s just a hunk of plastic and electronic components, but I’ve had it so long that it almost feels like I’m cheating on it by scoping out a new laptop.

It’s dumb. I work with computers all day. I understand their internals. I know perfectly well that they’re just machines. I scoff at people’s superstitions about how their computers “don’t like” or “don’t want to” do various things. Despite all that, I’m sitting here worried that I’ll somehow offend a chunk of electronics by upgrading to a newer model.

Modern middle-class consumer life is hard sometimes.

So I’ve been playing with WordPress for the past couple of days.

It’s kind of refreshing, really. I write filesystems for a living, so I spend my day worrying about low-level details and failure recovery and latency and microseconds of execution time, etc, etc, etc. The PHP web-tool world is so radically different that it’s almost another enterprise altogether. I like being able to just toss things together and see if they work. There’s no exhaustive regression testing. There’s no line-by-line code review. There’s no worry about debugging obscure failures from customer sites. All there is is some short but clever code that makes pretty things happen on the screen.

I’m starting to like PHP itself a lot. I’d never used the language before Sunday, and I still haven’t read any references or documentation, but the subset I’ve seen in the WordPress files and the plugins is almost stunningly straightforward and obvious. I just write little snippets and they work. That’s very very pleasing.

I started fiddling with this stuff so I could set up a food weblog for Laura, but I’m enjoying the nuts-and-bolts details of it enough that I’ll probably keep hacking at this weblog. I dunno whether I’ll end up with interesting things to say, but at least it entertains me.

And, uh, it’s a nice way to procrastinate things at work. I should probably get back to the worrying-about-data-integrity-on-shared-file-accesses problem I’m avoiding.

I dunno whether I’ll really use this or not, but it’s a neat toy.