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dumped non-Windows computer
Sunday, October 12 2008
Those who read this know that when I work on a project I tend to get obsessed with the minutia. I knew this greenhouse would be a massive undertaking, and I've made it harder on myself by insisting on doing the digging and masonry entirely by hand. Working with your hands allows you to proceed gently and cleanly in a way that's impossible with big machines. Using a mattock and buckets, I was able to punch a sixty foot trench averaging over two feet in depth through forest without banging into trees or disturbing many roots (I actually tunneled beneath a few large roots, as well as the trunk of a small White Ash that stood in the path). With drainage ditches, at least in the places where they collect water from perforated pipes, cleanliness is important. You don't want dirt and small pebbles getting into the pipe and clogging it up. There's a rectangular ring of perforated drainage pipe around the greenhouse foundation footing, and I've been careful to surround it with clean rocks. Since most of the rocks in my greenhouse rockpile are still dirty from having been buried in clay-rich soil, cleaning them has proven to be a fussy, labor-intensive job. So today I decided to get a bucket of pre-cleaned gravel stones from a part of the Stick Trail subject to frequent flooding. This part was only several hundred feet away, a not unreasonable distance to carry a five gallon bucket, even one filled mostly with heavy bluestone gravel.
Using my enormous square made of two by fours, I also began laying out the orientation of the walls atop the foundation footings, which I'd laid out somewhat imprecisely.
Last night when I'd driven to Penny and David's house, I'd found a computer that someone had tossed onto the side of Dug Hill Road about a quarter mile from home. Wondering if it might help explain the mysterious box of librarian study materials I'd found yesterday, I'd taken the computer back home and tried to read from its hard drive. The drive seemed to be healthy, but it refused to mount on my Windows machine. Today I figured out why. It had been formatted in the Ext3 file system, which is Linux. I don't know which is weirder, finding a box of documents belonging to someone I know tossed into the woods near my house, or finding a Linux computer a quarter mile down the road. Let me remind you: Linux computers are incredibly rare. Indeed, the dumping of computers on the side of the road is also a rare phenomenon despite the fact that nearly everyone has a computer they'd gladly get rid of. So what are the chances that a Linux computer would be dumped near the house of someone who not only has an appreciation for free computer equipment, but also understands what Linux is?
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