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[wanderingworms]

I’ve always wanted a laptop.

I grew up wanting a laptop, partly because of the movies I have watched as kid, and because of the cool things that you can do with it. I’ve been introduced to computers as early as I was seven years old. I was tinkering with it, taking out it’s components and rebuilding it then trying out different configurations. At one point, I’ve even destroyed my sound card, although details on why that happened are all too distant now. If only I’ve focused all that curiosity into learning how to code at that point, things might have been a lot better now.

Back to laptops.

I’ve always wanted one. But it’s so expensive that we cannot afford it. I could go as far as to say that even the 90% of the population can’t afford one. Even my parents, having decent jobs, can’t afford one for them to share on. All we have is a clunky desktop computer. If I remember correctly, it got a 650MB hard drive and 16MB of RAM.

Fast forward to 2008.

I’m 20 years old, working as an offshore Technical Support Associate for a US based ISP. I still cannot afford to buy a laptop. At this point, I already know how to code and do some stuff, but it’s still limited to the basics. Programming is still pretty obscured here by that time, and there’s no rush to learn how to code. No coding New Years’ resolution. No “I <3 Geeks” shirt with scantily clad female ‘idol’ as visuals. Companies are reluctant to sponsor mainstream tech related gatherings.

But I’m several days away from owning a laptop.

Or something close. I skipped several meals to get the newest consumer hype at that time: netbooks. These are like miniature laptops. And they costs far less, about a fraction of the price. Underpowered yes, but it looks like, feels like and works like a laptop sans a lot of moving parts. That’s where I learned Linux and where I learned a lot of programming. On a 7.9” netbook.

It’s now 2013.

At this point, I got a 14”. Compared to what we can have now, it shares the same old feeling as my clunky desktop that I used back in the days. Sure it has a two 2.0GHz CPU cores and a 4GB RAM, but you get the gist of it.

This post was supposed to justify my sudden fascination with tablets that I haven’t felt when iPads first went out, but I guess I’ll write it some other time.

[wanderingworms]

Payment methods might be the problem here. I'm willing to support this site (and a dozen more sites and services that I use, too) if only there's a much more flexible and global payment method (like debit cards).

Last month I put out a call for feedback, and you all responded!

I’m in awe of the generous, thoughtful, and supportive community that has sprung up around 750 Words. It’s crazy and fascinating to me how that has happened around a site devoted to solitary writing. That’s weird, right? :)

Now that Kellianne, Niko, and I are settled in Berkeley, and have mostly moved into our new place, where we hope to stay put for a good while, I think we have come up with something of a plan, at least for the near term.

[wanderingworms]

First and last time I'm going to reblog something. This article made me real sad and nostalgic. Damn. You should know why.

As anyone who has responded to the “PS” at the bottom of the daily nudges knows, I have been pretty bad terrible at keeping up with the day-to-day at 750 Words for the last… oh… 2.5 years.

The fact that the site has stayed up at all has been due to the enormous generosity of a good friend who has...

[wanderingworms]

nothing to see here. move out, trolls.

anon

[wanderingworms]

going back

So, social network habits down from everyday to once every two/three days. Not even forcing it. It just lost its "charm".

— John Crisostomo (@arscariosus) November 18, 2012

Might be back to good old weblogs from now on.

[wanderingworms]

For the #webgeekdevcup, I decided to get rid of my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (which has Unity, and is the first OS that I have installed on this laptop since I bought it last year) to install LinuxMint 13 (XFCE). Haven't used XFCE since 2008, and it is still extremely fast.

There's no need to constantly reformat in *nix systems, but several upgrades and quick hacks have collected a lot of mess in obscure places. And besides, nothing makes me more productive than having a brand new installation to tinker.