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I like time capsules
Thursday, May 16 2002setting: five miles south of Staunton, VirginiaI toiled with my mother's PC for most of the day, trying to install a working, reliable operating system on it. But it was running extremely unreliably. Working installations would spectacularly fail and then I'd go to reinstall and the process of installation would crash in various unpredictable ways. I tried lowering the speed of the CPU and that helped a little, indicating that perhaps the CPU sustained some lingering thermal damage during the months its fan was frozen.
I did my best to enjoy myself and break up the repetitive monotony of my computer work by doing other things, such as plucking dozens of ticks off my old dog Fred (he's 12 years old and still healthy and happy). Later, in an effort to rid Fred of his pervasive greasy dog funk, I gave him a full-body shampoo, his first in years. In the process, I found a number of burs burrowed into his inner-fur; they'd been there since at least the Fall.
Another project I'm working on is the building of a little technological time capsule containing beautiful-but-worthless artifacts of the information age. These include 386 microprocessors, 387 FPUs, 1 megabyte 72 pin SIMMs, and 16K EPROMs (featuring glass windows over the silicon chips). I've buried a number of time capsules in the soil near my "temple" (across the road), though these usually contained coins and old keys. I'm a firm believer in deliberately leaving behind things for future people to discover. In the walls of my Shaque, for example, there are old newspapers and at least one LCD calculator.
I leave behind time capsules with no anticipated date of discovery; doing so places too much emphasis on a particular moment in the future, and the future should be allowed to be less predictable. Besides, most attempts to retrieve specific time capsules fail. My time capsules are buried more in the spirit of the Egyptian mummies. Sure, eventually they may be found, but if not, that's okay too; like the oil under ANWR, they'll be there for an even more-distant future.
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