always missing deadlines

As somebody who isn’t prone to substance abuse, it can be hard to self-medicate, and I’m a person who should almost definitely be medicated in some fashion. Instead of gobbling up pills or drinking so heavily that time no longer holds any meaning for me, I escape from myself by becoming obsessively interested in a variety of fields. Be it old country music records, comic books, regular books or Playstation games, all of these hobbies share the potentially crippling defect of costing money. How I wish I could get excited about hiking or fighting the causes of homelessness. No, my instapassions are consumer by nature and just as disposable. So when I caught the technology bug in a serious way over the past month, I had to stop and think very hard...am I going to spend hundreds of dollars on something that I’m just going to neglect by the time I deposit my next check?

Here’s what happened: I was doing some Windows Phone 7 research, and discovered that Windows had released a developer preview for Windows 8, an operating system platform the company hopes will transcend the confines of desktop/laptop and tablet computing. After discovering the release of this preview, I figured I just had to try it. I downloaded the iso and searched for the best way to use it without overhauling my current machine. The answer, seemingly, was the virtual machine. I was elated, then furious when it came to my realization that my pathetic processor is not capable of virtualization. What was I to do, you ask? Partitioning was the next best option. So I did this (for those who don’t know, the process basically means you wall off an unused part of your hard drive that now acts as a separate drive). I was now able to load the even more recently released Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

Caught up in the frenzy of trying the latest and greatest technological product, there was almost an instant void once my goal had been achieved. Sure, Windows 8 was cool, but it lost its luster within ten minutes. The emptiness was crushing. Faced with the fear of having to examine myself again, I just had to do something. So I researched more. What else was on the horizon in the tech world? Well, that didn’t really matter that much because I couldn’t really take advantage of it with my current laptops. What could I do with my current machines that I had overlooked because I’d never had a need to go beyond my normal use? There were so many options.

After another week of toying around with filesharing, remote desktop access and creating a server on a machine running some version of Linux, I have come to the phase of my obsession where I am going to attempt to repurpose pretty much every outdated piece of hardware I can get my hands on. Either that or take them apart just so I can put them back together again. It’s better than forking over something like six hundred bucks to build a new machine myself...a project I am going to have nightmares about in the near future.