Going Rogue

Off the Reservation

This past summer I did two things that have profoundly changed my world view. I successfully passed a 29-hour examination to earn my 1st Dan and I picked up the 50th Anniversary Edition of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Since the exam my training in the martial arts has begun in earnest and opened a new world of study and possibilities. So far I have only made it through one-third of the 1000+ pages of Rand's magnum opus, but each page contains such exquisitely-worded theses that I need a few days to unravel and digest individual passages. Both events have emphasized the tyranny of the status quo.

Like other early 40-somethings, my love affair with computing started in high school with courses like "computer math" and data processing in accounting. Learning to program in FORTRAN, BASIC and COBOL on the TRS-80, IBM PC, WANG, and IBM VMS was more than a subtle hint that computing was important and something to be looked into. In college, the IBM PS/2 lab was the sparkling wonderland over which all of us geeks volleyed for time. DOS was something that everyone spoke fluently along with PEEKs and POKEs on the Commodore-64. Every new advance in hardware and software brought blazing increases in execution speed.

That was until graduate school. I was busy writing instrument drivers and data analysis software in FORTH under DOS while we all awaited the day when our research group could afford to upgrade to Windows 3.0. This new "WIMPy" operating system using windows, icons, menus and pull downs looked like "the future" and just had to be awesome. I remember huddling around the Gateway2000 PC as we fed it the 5.25" floppies containing WordPerfect for Windows. And then... SLOOOOOOW. This couldn't be possible. Windows HAD to be awesome. DOS had to suck. MS wouldn't intentionally release a product that took us backward in productivity. Ahh... the loss of innocence.

So here I am working on a centrino-powered laptop sporting a "Designed for Windows XP/Microsoft Vista Compatible" sticker. The only thing worse than the performance of this system is my abject fear of actually trying to install Vista on it. Running Windows XP SP3 and its system tray menagerie of anti-virus software, memory manager, disk defrager and malware security sentry results in having to wait 3 - 4 minutes for it to come out of suspended mode, being constantly harassed to remove unused icons from my desktop and installing yet another update to the Windows Genuine Advantage software. YES! I'm running a purchased and licensed copy of Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 - the same Office package that takes 60 seconds to import a .docx file.

I've played around with Ubuntu and even had a dual boot instance of it a while back. But not having a few of my important Windows-only applications at the ready prevented me from taking the plunge. Well, no more. I am so far into the cloud that I only use my hard drive to store photos and music. And most of that is co-located on dropbox anyway. My OS is now the Browser. Anything that stands between me and my Internet interface is the enemy. I don't want to defrag. I don't want to virus scan. I don't want to dynamically modify the size of my virtual memory. I want to open the top of my laptop and check my email, glance at my iGoogle page, see what's trending on twitter, upload some photos to facebook, rant on my blog, add the next paragraph to Myebook, review comments on my knols, watch my Youtube subscriptions, check my Adsense account, work with my Google Docs, and add content to my Google Sites.

I'm out. Color me gone. I've taken a train on the John Galt line. I'm grabbing my Ubuntu install CD and reformatting my hard drive. I'll be sure to write from the cloud...