Post date: Jul 10, 2011 9:45:20 PM
I upgraded my Linux server for the last time today. I then played a few games and shut it down. Since ancar.org is gone, my music production work is done on Reaper running on an x64 Win 7 box, and I switched to a dedicated file server box a few years back, there isn't much reason to spend the power to keep it running. So we're down to three operating household machines - my wife's Macbook, an XP laptop I'm lending my daughter, and the Win 7 box I use for music production. All of them are set for autoupdate locally. Google makes sure that the mail and web services keep going. And I have another half hour or so each week.
"But...," everyone says "now Google has your data!". So what. I really don't care. I've been using my own name on the internet for the last thirty years. I've never hidden behind a handle or a fake name. I figure if I couldn't say it, I was either saying something I shouldn't or I had put myself into a situation where I shouldn't be. Granted, I'm not a particularly flamboyant personality, but I think that most people know of my Socialist views and that I play in a band and, that in the past, I have imbibed alcohol and illicit drugs. None of these activities have made me a bad engineer or manager thereof and, if I've lost job opportunities due to those activities, they were probably job opportunities better lost. Similarly, I still have friends who are Libertarian, mainline Republican (like most of my family, BTW), conservative Democrat, and hardcore Liberals (and, though I don't know a lot of anti-propertarian Anarchists, it's probably because I haven't looked that hard) - none of them really hold my political beliefs against me. Nor have I ever been so paranoid that I thought that my views and/or activities would lead me or those I love to be a target of violence. As such, Google can file, look at, or distribute anything of mine that they want - blog postings, websites, whatever. Yeah, I still keep my bank and brokerage account numbers on local storage and the songs I'm mixing, too, but that's about it. Everything else is in the cloud, based with big enough vendors that I shouldn't need to worry about losing it (at least an more than I'd have to worry about disk failure and backup here).
So my days as the sysmin of the house are over. Other than an occasional toner cartridge change or recommendation for computer upgrades (and probably to Macs, wherever possible), I foresee little work in this area beyond this point. And it's about time...