Introduction
Everyone together now: “Hi Moe.” Being that I have no other tech-related things happening in my life today I’m going to take this opportunity to discuss rituals in computing that I’ve become accustomed to. What do I mean when I say rituals? Well, I consider a tech ritual something that is done repeatedly, sometimes without even thinking, which may cause a sense of well-being in the techie. Here I’ll explore mine.
I've used computers basically since birth, being of the generation who came into the world around the time of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Apple IIgs, and Zack the Lego Maniac. I’ve been telling computers what to do since my dad brought home a copy of Turbo Pascal and a Packard Bell SX/33 and said, “Have fun.” I was nine.
In chronological order, I’ve used Apple DOS, MS-DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 98 (first and second edition), Mac OS 6 through 10, Windows 2000, Windows Me (yes, I admit it), Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Somewhere right after Windows Me I also started using Linux as well, but the types and versions I’ve used are far too numerous to list.
My point is, with every OS I picked up, I also picked up a set of habits, or rituals, surrounding them. Some of these rituals I do for practical reasons; others I just do when I’m bored or because perhaps I’m just a little OCD.
Installation
Perhaps one of the most basic tech rituals I''ve performed time and time again is that of the install. (Cue heavenly music.) Songs have been written about it. If you've ever experienced the euphoria of unboxing a new operating system (or downloading a new ISO for Linux fans), backing up your important documents, and diving into a new world of icons and dialog boxes I don’t have to sell the appeal of it to you.
There is, of course, a collection of after-rituals that accompany a truly new install. In Windows, there’s device drivers to find, favorite applications to download, and personal files to transfer. In Linux, there’s codecs to download and personalization to do. In both there’s included software to remove or replace. Over the years I’ve honed down my post-install ritual to about an hour and a half on both systems. Cutting out the virgin sacrifice really saves you some time overall.
Maintenance
When I first discovered “defrag.exe” in Windows, I started a ritual that has followed me to this day through every permutation of Windows I use. I defrag, quite vigorously. I defrag in private, I defrag in public, I defrag in my office regularly. Sometimes I throw in a little “Disk Cleanup” utility first just to spice things up. Seeing the little red lines turn into blue (and on 98, the little colored boxes) gives me a feeling of restoring order to my harddrive. It’s relaxing.
You might think that I’d go nuts using Linux, then, since the file systems Linux uses don’t necessitate the idea of defragmentation. They, to put not to fine a point on it, simply don’t fragment. Fear not! There’s plenty of room for ritual in the open-source arena. Allow me, oh curious traveler, to enlighten you to the ever-present package update!
The first thing I do when I launch a Linux distribution is run an update utility of some sort. I have a compulsive, probably unhealthy fascination with having the latest stable package available. This has burned me in the past, considering the propensity of some package maintainers to completely gut and rewrite an application between updates. I’ve had many a “What the Hell?” moment after updating a program only to find out the developer decided the DELETE button needed to be moved, colored fuschia, or replaced with a shaming dialog that speaks in the voice of HAL 9000.
Back in the Windows world, a ritual pioneered by Microsoft is antivirus and malware scans. Much like defragging, I find myself doing virus scans and definition updates quite regularly. These don’t have quite the rewarding feeling a defrag or mass drive cleaning would. They’re more a necessary evil. Of course, like any other good practitioner (grudging or otherwise) I have my favorite tools. Athame, chalice, goat’s blood, hair of old and young priest. Err.. wait. That’s my Saturday night kit. Computers! That’s what I was talking about. **Looks around shiftily**
I have developed favorites over the years. Piriform’s CCleaner is a staple along with RegCleaner and (believe it or not) Microsoft’s own Security Essentials. Order from chaos, clean bits from dirty, it’s probably very Zen if you’re into that sort of thing. Tending your digital rock garden.
“But Moe!” says the imaginary audience in my head, “What about the Mac?” Ah yes. My old friend Macintosh. Though not nearly as high-maintenance as past girlfriends from Redmond, there are things to do. Apple Update for one. On the legacy Mac OS I was rather fond of a program called SpringCleaning, from the makers of StuffIt! for Mac. In fact, I just discovered it still exists.
In my Golden Age of Mac, I would religiously scour the contents of MacAddict CD-ROMs once a month for demos, sound bytes, and screensavers. I’ll never forget the look of perplexity on my father’s face when an error dialog spoke to him in the voice of the announcer on Mortal Kombat, “It’s official. You suck!”
Electronic Exorcism
Some of this is found in virus scans and malware removal, but as I’m pretty careful to perform those on a regular basis, my most frequent source of computer demons are the kind I summon up all by myself. So well-worn are the metaphysical paths to these creatures that I can call forth legions of them with a simple thought, “What if?”
I've wrecked more than one installation with that thought. Hi, I’m curiosity. I am the destroyer of worlds. What would happen if I ran this Norton Disk Utilities floppy on this loaned PC? What if I tried to change the background to my startup splash in Windows 98? Just what would happen if I played around with SYSTEM.INI? Why do I need this Linux kernel file? What if I didn’t replace that smoking piece of RAM?
Exorcising these Demons of Momentary Stupidity sometimes requires the Venerated Ritual of the Clean Install, or at least the minor song and dance of the System Restore. In very rare cases I’m called upon to consult the Holy Book of Replacement Parts (Newegg Chapter 3, verse 15). Deus Ex Machina indeed.
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