Summer drives

So Fuchikoma's been temporarily revived. I managed to pull a hardcopy backup of everything irreplaceable, though I don't have the infrastructure to take a full disk image backup, so if I had to replace things it'd take a day or two to work up through all the OS patches.

One of the interesting things about geekdom is that the further you go the less you tweak. Well, not "less" necessarily, just different. Program configuration files are trivial to back up and restore; a complicated setup of disk partitioning or where programs of different sorts are installed is much harder to recover without a dedicated backup strategy.

For these reasons one's backup strategy and their installation strategy (i.e. package manager) are the true measure of how much time one's spent around computers. Right now I'm considering migrating from a distributed network backup with the occasional cd hardcopies, to a RAID system with regular backups to dvd or tape. Of course, implementing that will take a fair deal of money I don't have. First, repairing the fuch'.

...

Yesterday was interesting. I took a much needed drive up to the Oriental Food. "Much needed drive", words I never thought I'd hear myself utter, but it's true. I'd wonder if it's a sign of me getting older, were not for the moving party from hell earlier this year. In some ways it was a very suburban experience. But it was nice, calming— another description I never thought I'd apply to driving.

It reminded me of the drives that me and Alicia would go on. Back in highschool we'd go out for drives — it was her car and her license so she would drive and I would ride — almost always at night, warm summer evenings and cool Maryland summer nights. The rides were always calming, if even the reasons the moments were not. It always felt as if time could go on running forever and never changing. Down and up the hills of Fremont and 82nd, window rolled down on a lazy sunday eve; it was a lot like that.

I haven't talked about her much, and I don't think I've talked much about not talking either. But now's not really the time for that. Names are an interesting thing. Names are a marker of reference, but as we go through our lives and change so too must those names change. On an instinctual level I think we understand this, but on an institutional level we're afraid of accepting those changes afraid of accepting the fluidity of life, of letting go. But that too, is an essay for another time.