I snagged the web downloader, selected all for Win32 except the mail/news and IRC clients, and sucked down a copy and installed it in seconds. I remembered my Netscape heritage. I was home.

I have gigabytes upon gigabytes of data on my workstation at home. Four years of having the same OS installation and working on innumerable projects causes that to happen. Old projects, graphics and movie files, music, entries, writing, old resumés, recordings, chat logs, files sent to you by friends (many gone)... it's quite a lot to fathom storing all these years.

Now, here I sit, stooped over this old crate, backing some of it up to CD-R. Marilynn has long since gone to bed; I am foregoing some sleep and a little crankiness at work so that I can get some of this stuff moved off my drive.

Having a new browser makes me want to test it out. It's like when I got the Restlessmobile II - I wanted to drive a lot. Right then, I wanted to browse (and the OC-3 helps, too, 'specially considering I am still broadband-free at home).

I began visiting some sites that can be funktacular to render, including our intranet site that I maintain (someday I should tell you the Hell I went adding NTLM authentication to Apache 1.3 under Win32 - it was a comedy of errors and not being given the time I need to do my job, or should I say the vast number of jobs I actually perform). Mouth agape, I saw it connect without NTLM authentication problems and render the IE5.5-tweaked styles properly.

Duly impressed I ran off to visit some sites I used to frequent, such as Deviantart and Domesticat. The more I looked over Domesticat, the more I felt the urge... nay, the need, to work on a website. Any website, as long as it was mine.

Some things need to be done before this can happen. I have to clean up this machine, or rather, I have to blow it away. A four-year-old installation of Windows 98 isn't much on stability. Also, speed is lacking (yes, I know that's almost funny to say these days, but 400 MHz isn't so little, really).

Thus, first I have to back up all this data. I have a spindle of a hundred CDs next to me, and while I know it won't take nearly that many, I am ready for all eventualities (I hope).

I've decided to go ahead and rebuild and throw Windows 2000 on here. Everybody at work leans on me to put Windows XP on my machine, but I don't have enough machine to do that. Also, something about XP just rubs me the wrong way. I don't trust Microsloth, and I probably never will.

My third goal is to keep my files together for a change. Really organize. Ideally, I would do this through just saving them on a server, and once I get a new machine to put Windows on, I plan to do just that (I'll be making this P2-400 into a multi-purpose Linux box, including storing files). However, for now I just need a consistent structure and to back it up occasionally.

Last, but not least, I need time. This is something that I find is in short supply, but nevertheless I would love to find a cache of it somewhere. Often times I feel like I have let so much of my life pass me by, and I need to make up for lost time. Perhaps it's not the case, but it feels that way all too often.

Is it possible to live by the law of averages? After you've lived too slowly, is it okay to live more quickly to catch up?

Sometimes I think I am doing that. Other times I feel like things are at a standstill.

restlessmind