Infinite State

I left my old HP Laptop for a shiny new Mac early this year, and have barely used it since. I have fond feelings for the old slab, ugly and utilitarian as it was, for all the work it did for me. But I wasn’t prepared for the nasty smell of something burning coming from deep inside it when I finally plugged it back in yesterday. If you’ve worked around computers, you know that is a truly bad smell because it conveys the sense of painful loss and mortality that digital living is so good at obscuring.

But this story has a happy ending, honestly. And through a miraculous combination of technologies I now have that dear old laptop running perfectly right here inside my new Mac, whenever I need it. It’s hardware can never fail again, and it will never get old and die.

Here’s what I did:

• I’ve been using Acronis TrueImage to maintain a full backup of that laptop’s drive image for a few years
• It turns out that VMWare Converter can now take Acronis images directly, and the Converter is free
• I couldn’t seem to install the Converter inside a VMWare Fusion vm on my Mac, so I recommissioned an old Linux box as a temporary XP box (installed XP, didn’t activate it)
• The images took up a few hundred gigs of space on my NAS and it’s a slow connection, so…
• I took the USB drive that backs up the NAS and plugged it right into the new XP box, installed the ext2 IFS for Windows, and there they were, ready to go
• About an hour later, I had my old laptop in a new vm, like magic.

What’s really amazing about this is that even though the laptop’s hard drive presumably was fine, I never even used it to resurrect the machine. This is the way it’s supposed to work but never seems to when you need it. The end of loss. Eternal life for your old devices.

Of course the irony is that you never really go back to use them…

I came back from a really nice ride (bike) around the North end of Manhattan, restored by crisp Fall weather and the pleasure of stealing an escape on a Sunday afternoon. At times, on a bike, the city opens up and the waterfront offers beauty while the streets offer vibrant life. I lost count of the delicious smells I went by, and after 90 minutes I was really ready for something satisfying back at home. But I was totally unprepared for what I found when I walked in to the kitchen. Milo handed me an aluminum foil package and said “I made this for you.”

Inside was a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on a toasted english muffin. Still warm, with ketchup. Like some kind of little dream from every time I’ve come in from the cold, the wet, the mud, tired and hungry and ready to eat everything in the fridge, here was my own son handing me a delicious sandwich he made and saved for my return.

There are many frustrations and challenges of parenting, and there are many unexpected joys, too. Teach your children to appreciate food, to cook it, and share your pleasure in it with them. And some day, they may just hand you a delicious surprise.