Computers

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Computers have always been an important part of my life, and they still are. I feel that the technology we're seeing today enables us to care less about the technology, and many are indeed taking the step completely away from it. You don't anymore have to be a programmer [see programming] to use computers. However, I still enjoy the technology in itself, so I guess I'm simply one of those weird people that likes to use my computer to create stuff [see creation] that can't be done anywhere else :-)

Some people say that computing is unsocial or even anti-social. I think that's really missing the target -- a computer is `just' a tool (although a very powerful one). Computers don't make you unsocial -- lack of social contact makes you unsocial. Sure, you can spend a lot of time in front of a computer, neglecting your social relationships, but that is something entirely different. Computer parties like The Gathering [see The Gathering] should be enough to prove that computer enthusiasts (or `nerds' or `geeks' -- those words can definitely both be positive and negative, depending on both the reader and the writer [see communication]...) can clearly be social as well.

My own computer is named `Trofast', which means (ahem) `Faithful' in Norwegian (it's really a dog's name, or at least people used to call their dogs such things some time ago :-) ). I didn't make up the name (my older and younger sister did), but it was cute and it stuck. At the time of writing, it's an Athlon 800MHz in a fully packed midi-tower, with five hard disks (one 2GB, one 4GB, one 10GB (A/V), one 17GB and one 18.2GB Ultra160 SCSI -- no, I don't throw out hardware, but then I seldom buy really large disks either ;-) ), CD-ROM, a CD-burner, video editing card, two video cards, plus a lot of other semi-useful stuff and two 17-inch monitors :-) (And of course, there's stuff like floppy or tape drives which don't even fit in the casing anymore...) It's signed by Illiad himself (maker of User Friendly) at TG99 [see The Gathering], something I'm rather proud of... (There are rumors that Alan Cox, primary Linux [see Linux] kernel hacker after Linus Torvalds himself, will arrive at TG02... ;-) ) I should have gotten a full tower right away, I can't possibly switch casings now! :-)