Hidden underneath the snow

My first keyboard

Robert Broberg, a Swedish artist, once wrote a song with the following paragraph “Det som göms i snö, kommer upp i tö” which roughly translates to “What’s hidden underneath snow, will show in thaw.” Since we actually have a white Christmas this year and most everything in my dad’s garden is covered in snow I thought it would be more wise to do some cleaning in my old room. It has basically been aggregating stuff over the years I’ve been living on my own, of which a large part is old computer hardware that’s been rendered unusable.

In the cleaning process I uncovered my first computer keyboard, later elegantly marked “UBC-Router 1″ short for United Broadband Clan which a friend and I created sometime in the very very early broadband days. This has been the keyboard for my router ever since the 28kbps modem served our house. (Yeah, for those older than me there was a time before 28kbps too but I’m not that old!) The router has been running various versions of GNU/Linux, including Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo (for a long time) and when the hard disk crashed, it was replaced with FreeBSD which it ran up until this summer when a lightning finally killed the whole thing. Poor bastard.

Dual CPU Sockets

There was also an old web/mail server running on a Pentium Pro. The motherboard supported two CPUs, however, I only ever acquired one, but it was definitely a killer. This machine was running Gentoo from the start to the very end. I hope to recover the data on these disks when I get back to Göteborg, who knows what crap I’ve been storing on them over the years?!

Today, my so called server room was transformed to its original purpose again. Its glory days are well exceeded, but it will be remembered as the place where I began experimenting and for taking me into a field in which I’m studying today. Who knows what I will uncover in years to come?

What have you found beneath the snow this Christmas? Do you already know where it has taken you or are you still waiting to find out?

A Christmas Carol

Gifts exchange owners at SEM Christmas Party 2009

Uni is relatively empty today. There are only a few members of my project group here although I have seen some lonewolfs around too. Christmas is coming as fast as the snow is falling. Most projects are over for the SEM students, thus there was a great Christmas Party last week. Photos from the event can be found here: http://event.quandoo.se/photos/christmas2009/

Just because uni is empty does, however, not equal to nothing to do. Our research project (studying the relationships between organisations who have introduced Free/Libre Open Source Software and communities) continues with a second, somewhat weird, deadline on the 4 January 2010. The 4th may not seem so innocuous at first, but the course requirements tells another story. A story where students aren’t singing Christmas carols, snow is replaced by heavy rain and days are turned into nights. In this story, students are visiting their grandparents accompanied by their laptops, frantically squeezing a minute of typing in between Kalle Anka and the Risgrynsgröt.

In an attempt to rectify the problem and possibly give 50 students a white Christmas we composed an e-mail to our course coordinator giving two alternatives. One where the deadline is postponed to match the requirements, and a second where the course requirements are corrected to match the absurd deadline. Now all we can do is to hope for some sympathy.

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
let your heart be light.
From now on,
our troubles will be out of sight.”

Merry Christmas everyone