Obsolescence

Another successful weekend has come and gone. I went to a fun barbecue of my co-workers yesterday (which is to say that my co-workers were present, not that I ate them.)

On an unrelated note, I have two specific areas of obsolescence I was thinking about this morning.

Area 1: Floppy drives. A 3.24 inch floppy disk can hold 1.44MB of data, which is about the size of one medium-resolution digital photo. Floppy disks have been utterly, blitheringly obsolete for about 8 years now. Any computer worth the name can boot to CD, DVD, or USB flash disk, and by all rights the floppy disk should have vanished from the computing scene years ago.

AND YET!

Two things require the continued existence of floppy disks/drives: BIOS updates and SATA drivers. There are utilities to update BIOS versions in Windows sometimes, but they're a little sketchy and a lot of the time they just don't exist; if you want to upgrade your motherboard, you have to download the little utility, install it to a floppy disk, and boot to it. Likewise, Windows is far too stupid to know what to do with SATA-based hard disks* (which are like every single modern hard drive out there) and you have to hit F6 at the start of the installation and feed the machine a floppy with the disk controller drivers.

This, my friends, is totally retarded. This would be like buying a brand new car and having to use one of those old Model-T hand-cranked shafts to start the engine the first time.

Area 2: On a more human level, I was thinking about the feeling of walking past or through a place where you used to work. I've got a little over a month left at this job and then it's just as likely that I'll never have the need to return to Natural Sciences II or Interdisciplinary Sciences, which is almost a little sad since I've had such a good run here. It was always disappointing to me that the last day of a given job was never the huge celebration I wanted it to be; after years of toiling at some horrible hell-hole for crap pay, I wanted there to be fireworks and hi-fives and parades with retired astronauts when I finally earned my freedom. Instead, there was usually a couple of guys going out to lunch.**

I guess my point is that it's kind of tragic that our experiences, particularly in terms of what we do all day to earn a living, become obsolete so quickly. The feelings of ownership and partnership, of being invested in a place, are quickly proven to be completely ephemeral.

My suggestion: give astronauts something productive to do after they retire.

* Naturally, Linux doesn't have this problem.
** At least there was usually beer involved.