ThoughtfulChaos

I got my good old computer 3 months back from home. Everything except the monitor. I was carrying 2 heavy bags then and decided to bring my PC to Pune in 2 stages. So the cabinet, keyboard, mouse etc came in stage 1. I go home about once a month and I thought it would't be too long before I got the monitor too. Moreover my brother has to pass through Pune when he goes from Ahmedabad to Bangalore and I reckoned that he too could bring it during 1 of his umpteen trips.

But that was not to be. After Holi (end of March?) I did not go home for 3 months and even during my latest trip home I was going to Delhi afterward so there was no scope of bringing the monitor with me. So my trusted old companion that has weathered thousands of experiments, hundreds of formats, tens of operating systems, many crashes (software and hardware) and whatnot resided silently in a corner of my room still packed in the box that I used when I brought it here.

By a stroke of luck my friend Mini had gone home for the weekend and she finally got the monitor for me all the way from Ahmedabad (Thanks Mini!). I eagerly woke up at 3:30 AM today and was at the station by 4:15 Am or so. The train arrived 10 minutes before time at 4:35 AM (it _always_ arrives before time and I had expected this) and finally my PC's monitor was reunited with its rightful owner.

Mini and I sat for 2 hours on platform no. 1. In return for lugging the heavy thing all the way from Ahmedabad she got a cup of weird station tea and also had to endure me for 2 whole hours. We talked about life at DA-IICT, life at our respective companies and life in general.

At around 6 we said bye to each other and went out own ways. I put the box in the back of a rick and asked the rickshawaala to quickly drive me home. I was eager to set up my system and boot up my PC after so many months. I am not aware of how octroi rules (or other taxes) work in Pune so I was a bit apprehensive the whole way. I did not have any bill with me to show that the monitor was actually more than 5 years old. Nothing happened and I reached my room safe and sound at around 6:30 AM.

Any sane person would have gone to sleep and left the installation for later but not me. I unpacked everything (kudos to my Dad for his excellent packing), retrieved my hard disk and CD Drive and RAM chips and started putting everything together. I did not have any tools with me so I had to make do with a spoon, a knife and my bare hands but I finally had everything in place. I finally booted her (? :-) ) up... I never thought the list of operating systems to boot displayed by GRUB could be called a 'joyous occasion' but it was !!

Yippee! Gaia was finally up and running...

Now all I need to do is install the latest software on it so that I can get cracking. Not an easy task considering that it is PIII 600 MHz machine with 256 MB RAM, an 80 GB HDD and bus speed of 100 MHz.

The name Gaia is inspired from Asimov's book Foundation's Edge. The Foundation Series is one of my all time favourite SF books. Read up more about Gaia from the Wikipedia entry on Gaia.

I like to name my computer after anything nice that pops up in my mind when I am doing the installation. Maybe next time I will call it Hogwarts.

I have decided to go back to my basics for the next few weeks and code up something in C or C++. It will be a nice break from Java and I also want to catch up on some features of C/C++ that I still don't know.