Caution: Platform Shifting

For the first time in nearly seven years, I have a full-time job again. The job sucks, and the pay is nothing great (it's basically rolled my "career" back about 10 years), but it means I finally have enough money to actually spend some of it on hardware and (when necessary) software.

OK, I don't actually have the money at this point. Fact is, thanks to A) living on part-time wages for five years, B) the cost of going to school part-time for nearly seven years, and C) getting laid off a year ago, I'm already in debt (by several thousand dollars). The only other time I've ever been in debt was when I bought my first car, so I don't really like being back. But by continuing to live my part-time-job starving-art-student lifestyle, on my new full-time-employed income, I figure I can afford some very-short-term high-interest consumer debt before I pay off the low-interest student debt I already have. As long as the job holds out and I don't have any surprise expenses, I should be out of debt again by year end. My finances suck, but the end's in sight.

So I'm overhauling the local data center. It's currently a hodgepodge of aging, underpowered machines, some of them performing a single function because that's all they're capable of handling reliably. So by introducing some new gear at the top end, I hope to trickle down some performance to the rest of the fleet, and consolidate functions somewhat.

The key piece of gear is an Apple PowerMac G5. (The slowest single-processor one. At education-market pricing. I'm not going apeshit wild with the spending here.) This will be replacing my old first-generation iMac as the place I run Mac software. It will also let me switch some of the CPU-intensive apps (e.g. Photoshop) that I still need to run on my 700MHz Windows machine, over to the Mac. Since it can also run most of the software I'm currently running on my web/mail/file server, I'll be able to configure it to take over temporarily any time I need to take the main one offline (planned or otherwise). Finally, since it's going to take a lot of the burden of day-to-day sit-at-the-computer-and-do-stuff work, I won't need separate Linux systems for my server and my workstation, and I'll be able to consolidate those two.

So this one machine will allow me to sell or give away the old iMac (still pretty useful as a web/mail/chat/word-processing system), it will let me put the Windows machine off in the corner where I won't need to use it much, it'll free up a mid-sized CPU that I can experiment on with another operating system (I'd really like to take a look at FreeBSD), and I'll finally be able to retire the poor little cobbled-together 150MHz Pentium with the 17-year-old power supply that's my current spare server. HermitNet will get a little smaller - with fewer nodes - for a change.

I'll still have a big old CRT hooked up to the PowerMac as a second display, and I have a cute li'l B&W VGA monitor that's handy for monitoring a server console, but the rest of my displays will be sharp, energy-efficient LCDs.

I'll still have some pokey, ancient digital electronics in service. I'm using an old 486 running a Coyote Linux as a firewall/router, and I can't see any reason to retire that workhorse. I'll keep my out-of-production Psion Revo in my hip pack, with its monochrome display and 33MHz CPU but peerless software, until it stops working. And I keep a quaint little DOS-based Poqet PC handy for when I want to spend an afternoon writing, off in the park somewhere. (Not that I have time for that anymore... even if Michigan winters permitted it.)

But I'll be one step closer to freeing myself of the obsolete technology of the 1990's (e.g. low-end Pentiums, MS Windows, CRTs), and one stop further along in adopting the technologies of the near future (64-bit CPUs, Linux/BSD-based OSes, LCDs). It'll probably take me several months to finish the transition (particularly since I'm now juggling both school and a full-time job), but I'm on my way.