Okay, I'll bite.

BIND is finally up and running on my home box after many a night of struggling, and 'blockade', the noble box that handled my web serving and NAT has now been retired after about a 18 months. For one and a half years, his little Pentium 100 heart chugged, serving pages, shuttling mail and crunching packets for Distributed.net. DNS was the only reason he has been in service for the past 2 weeks, all his other functions having been inherited by another box or two.

He will be missed. He was slow, old, quirky and I never could figure out how to get his cd-rom drive to work right. He'll now be put out to pasture indefinitely until, perhaps, I need to invoke a reincarnation. A moment of silence.

Serving in his stead will now be 'Hanna', a bright, young, optimistic K6-2 500mHz with easily 10-times the effective speed and storage of her predecessor. I only hope I treat her with more respect than I did 'Blockade'. He had been acting up lately, no doubt because I tortured him by making him wear 'Windows NT' all day. I wanted to use a *BSD for Hanna, but her IDE chipset only had UDMA support in 9x or Linux, and since I need speedy database access times, Linux kernel 2.4.0 was the number.

Of course, this isn't sad. After all, Hanna was built using one or two parts from the box that was in charge of NATing in the years before Blockade came along, so it is certainly in the cards that his soul and hardware will live on in another incarnation.

I'm superstitious that way. I never built or used new machine... they're never completely 'new'. Call it ancestor worship if you will, but I have a custom that, whatever machines I use, they will inherit parts from those who came before. Maybe a Video card, memory, or even something small like the keyboard. It's a way of preserving their soul in the same way that you live on through your children. Blood is important. This way, the new youngster will inherit the life of her parents, maybe become better for it. And when her time comes, she too will live on through her children.

I'm too sentimental, I know, but it's one of my vices. I can't stand to have a machine that served me so well being pushed aside so easily. So much accumulated life and wisdom, I refuse to waste it. Everything has a soul, everything lives. My parents' computer is still using the original case from it's first life when they bought it in 1989, then a lowly 286, since upgraded by me to a feisty Pentium-II 450. If I were to draw out the pedigree chart of all the machines I've had, the amount of inbreeding would be extraordinarily amusing.

A song for the dead. A prayer for the departed... and a dream for the future.

A certain kind of twilight
echos in your sleep
turning into velvet
she pushes in so deep
sorrow you call sadness
close upon your day
darker than this dreaming
an empty passion'ed play.


...Christabel is sleeping
she doesn't want to play...