Most commodity computers come with too little RAM.  Manufacturers don’t deal with your data, they deal with price points.  So, your new computer most likely came with just enough RAM to boot up and run whatever demos the vendor bundled.

At Chaos Central, the Unix Curmudgeon (and the nice person he lives with) run mostly Linux and Solaris.  But, we do have one machine running Windows XP for those got-to-have programs (like Internet Explorer, for testing CSS code and fixing IE bugs in it, and some other programs that use Microsoft’s DLLs to read/write database files).  The desktop machines and servers aren’t much problem, because we build them to order, but laptops and other preloaded systems have the lowest-bidder issue with RAM.

Recently, after installing Google Chrome on our Linux laptop, we started noticing a bit of thrashing going on with 30 or 40 tabs open in Chrome, along with the usual and customary background of MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache2, and other trappings of a developer’s system.  The aging HP-Compaq came with Windows Vista, which we used long enough to download and burn a copy of Ubuntu 7.04, and 1GB of RAM, which did not make Vista look like something you could actually use, but was adequate for Ubuntu, pre-Chrome.  But, finally, the upgrade-or-replace issue came to the fore, and, with recession in full recovery and housing sales not so much, we elected to upgrade, bumping up to 2GB.  Aha, that is the sweet spot.  I can now run for several days before Chrome or Firefox gobbles up enough memory to initiate that feeling that your computer is executing machine code off the disk, which it essentially is when swap space gets used up.

The Windows machine, we pretty much ignored, putting up with performance so slow that the disk light stayed on all the time and wire-frames of applications that promised to open “someday” hung on the screen behind the “hourglass of death.”  However, with Tax Day only a month away and Turbo Tax freezing whenever we went to find yet another receipt or IRS form, we shelled out $100, about 1/3 of what we paid for the refurbished, off-lease box in the first place, to bump RAM from 256M to 2GB.  Hey, Windows actually loads fast enough to mellow the Curmudgeon from hating XP absolutely to merely loathing it.

Meanwhile, the nice person’s Linux box is running 64-bit on 3GB, and doesn’t even slow down when the Curmudgeon lights off yet another virtual machine in the background.  In fact, XP runs even faster in a virtual machine on this box than it does on the upgraded stand-alone machine.  Next year, we’re doing our taxes on a virtual machine.  Hmm, now that the designated Windows box runs better, just think of how snappy it will be when we reload it with FreeBSD or CentOS.

The title of this article is taken from a 1909 science fiction novella by E. M. Forster, better known for his novel “A Passage To India.” In the early sci-fi story, humanity has somehow ruined the environment and is forced to build underground, where automation has brought about a Utopian age where no one wants for anything.  Except, in this pampered world, society has forgotten how the technology works, and when it breaks down, “civilization” ends.  Hence, the subtitle: keeping up with maintenance, something we fear is becoming a lost art in the age of throw-away planned obsolescence, but something we need to do to survive the recession and age gracefully while still doing the things we love to do, which, at present, don’t involve being pampered and sedentary.

Today, we are on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada, planning a few days of bike riding on the popular rail-trails around Victoria, despite predictions of cold winds and occasional rain.  Our steed for the occasion is “Leviathan,” a 1986 Santana Arriva XC mountain-bike-style tandem, which first rolled onto these shores in September 1986, when we rode one of the American Lung Association’s first Tri-Island Trek fund-raising rides.  The old bike has been through a lot in the 24 years since then, countless sets of tires, new rims, several sets of chains, a set of chain rings, a freewheel cluster, several sets of pedals, and had fenders and bar-end grips added.  But, somehow, we expect it to just keep running.

Lately, we have been thinking about a new bike: “Leviathan” is heavy and slow, and, at nearly eight feet in length, not feasible to take on public transit, except ferries, without complete disassembly, and sometimes not then.     The bike still works, though we worry about touring, since most of the parts that are prone to wear out have not been manufactured for nearly 20 years and are hard to find.   On the other hand, we’re not getting any younger, ourselves.  This bike has served us well for over 20 years, are we going to get as much use out of a new one?  Probably not, since I will be 90 by the time any replacement has served that long.  There are a few folks out there, touring into their late 80s, but it’s been a hard winter for aging aches and pains and we don’t have any illusions about living fit forever.

This has always been a problem of aging: we become accustomed to the familiar.  New is no longer exciting; we take comfort in that old pair of boots, that old jacket, despite a touch of mildew here and a rip there.  Cars and bikes become old friends, and they age with us.  Just as we adapt to creaky knees, thinning and graying hair, and a few aches, we overlook the peeling paint, the window that won’t roll down all the way, or a bit of chain skip.  In retirement or planning for retirement, we become more and more reluctant to invest in new things we might not wear out, and we have less and less discretionary income to indulge in new things for the sake of slight improvements.    And, let’s face it–our modern machineries are better than the old ones:  because they aren’t meant to be overhauled, but replaced after a year or two, they are made reliable enough to run trouble-free for that “market life,”  so much so, that they will often last five to ten times longer before becoming completely unusable.

So, us old folks hang on to those obsolete items until replacing them becomes both sticker shock (a new tandem of equal quality is twice the price of the old one) and a huge learning curve from new technology (a bike we test-rode a couple years ago had brake-lever shifters, something I had never heard of and which weren’t intuitive, resulting in a less-than-enjoyable test ride).  But, those old items that have lasted so long risk sudden and final failure– since they aren’t meant to be overhauled and parts may not be available–or  gradually become impaired so they are no longer safe to use.

Just a few days ago, I was doing some practice rides on “Rocky,” my old faithful commuter bike that has carried me through several rainy seasons in Seattle and ten years of Montana winters, when I noticed the left pedal had a lot of play in it.  Being of a certain age, and a member of the “old school,” I took it apart (it clearly wasn’t meant to be disassembled–the “dust cap” had no designed-in means of removal, but I improvised), put the bearings back in the races and adjusted the cones, then took a 15-mile ride, by the end of which the pedal had nearly seized up.  I remember doing the same thing to one of Judy’s pedals when riding the San Juan Islands many years ago, but that was on the first set of pedals on “Leviathan,” and they had screw-on dust caps and easily-adjusted cones, so I was able to repair them well enough to get us home, though the races were scored and the pedals had to be replaced.   This time, I hesitated, because this bike is 14 years old, has been abused, left out in the rain, and had most everything replaced on it at least once.  I’m no longer commuting to work (the Internet is my office now), so, do I need this bike?  Do I need to replace it?   I looked through the glass at one of the new carbon-fiber road machines at an upscale bike shop in Olympia, still dreaming–40 years too late–of 22-mph time trial runs, but in the end, I ordered a new set of pedals, the third set for this bike.  It’s not fast–it’s a hard-tail, no-shocks mountain bike that I don’t ride in the mountains and it’s too slow for road riding, but I’ve ridden my “birthday miles” on it the last two years anyway, and might for many more.  A five- or ten-pound lighter bike is not going to take 30 years off the rider.

These thoughts linger with us as we prepare to head out on the trail this morning: we aren’t as strong as we were the last time through here and we have slower reaction times.  The bike is just as heavy as it once was, a couple years older than on the last long ride, and a few hundred miles further from its last tune-up.  We’ve been busy, focussed on other aspects of our lives.  Are we ready?  Will the machine stop?  Will we be capable of seeing that end coming in time to act?   Meanwhile, our 16-year-old Jeep was making protest noises while inching onto the ferry today; it, too, has its issues: cracked windshield, windows that don’t roll down, leaky weatherstripping, missing and broken door stops, peeling paint.  Maybe the bike will get us home if the car doesn’t.  If only the rusty bolts on the bike rack don’t give out on the way home.