This week I found myself waiting. I waited for my home IT
  infrastructure to do things I took for granted before.

  The waiting irritated me. It irritated me because I intended to upgrade
  my home kit ages ago but I never not around to it.

  My 2004 era [1]HP OfficeJet 7210 doesn't print anymore. It only
  sometimes scans and doesn't answer the land-line phone for faxes.

  I dusted off an ancient Acer AspireOne 150 (Intel Atom 1.6GHz, 1.5GB
  RAM) and a medieval [2]HP Pavilion dm1z (AMD E-350 1.6 GHz, 8GB RAM).
  The former, running [3]Ubuntu, I nominated as my Emacs machine. The
  latter, running [4]BackTrack 5r3, remains my ethical hacking box. Both
  machines possess significant shortfalls that make them awful as regular
  use PCs.

  Those two sandwich my mid-2011 [5]MacBook Air on my desk. It's a great
  laptop, but is hamstrung by its measly 4GB RAM. It's my main machine,
  but running [6]Firefox with > 10 tabs and [7]Parallels Desktop can
  bring it to a crawl.

  It wasn't always like this. Up through 2011 my home gear was far
  superior to what my employer assigned me. There were tasks and projects
  I would specifically take home with me. From my [8]Microsoft Trackball
  Explorer (the best pointing device ever) to the [9]Microsoft 4000
  keyboard to the dual 23-inch displays to my [10]64-bit dual cpu Sun
  Ultra60 running OpenBSD as my pf firewall, my home kit kicked my work
  gear in the posterior.

  Then I needed to install a work firewall device. Then I got an
  ergonomic wireless keyboard mouse combo at the office. It went on
  through my work laptop. By then there was nothing better at home and I
  stayed later to do certain tasks.

  I find myself now cobbling together this 2010-era hardware into a
  usable pastiche. Some things like my old multifunction printer are
  unusable. They're en route to the electronics recycle center tomorrow.
  Replacements need ordering, a scary reality when unemployed. The
  remaining functional bits get refreshed, hacked, upgraded, or cobbled
  together.

  I will dig out my treadmill and resuscitate my treadputer. Huge amounts
  of old electronics of all types are on the way out. Old books and
  manuals and DVDs and CDs and, yes, floppy disks now [11]file circularly
  in [12]the bit bucket. I'm slurping data from a surprising number of
  external hard drives into an old [13]Network Attached Storage (NAS)
  server with [14]RAID5 ([15]Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) I've
  resuscitated (I hope). It's unreliable I think, so I'll keep looking
  for a replacement (Drobo 5N, perhaps?).
    __________________________________________________________________

  My original entry is here: [16]Data Center-esque I am not ATM. It
  posted Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:07:28 +0000.
  Filed under: personal, professional, technology,

References

  1. http://h20271.www2.hp.com/SMB-AP/cache/270499-0-0-190-121.html
  2. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375736,00.asp?tab=Specs
  3. http://ubuntu.com/
  4. http://www.backtrack-linux.org/
  5. https://www.apple.com/macbookair/
  6. http://firefox.com/
  7. http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
  8. https://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/trackball-explorer
  9. https://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/natural-ergonomic-keyboard-4000/B2M-00012
 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_60
 11. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/circular+file
 12. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-bucket.html
 13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_attached_storage
 14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_5
 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
 16. https://www.prjorgensen.com/2013/01/18/data-center-esque-i-am-not-atm/