I've been having some money problems lately. I'm sure that this is a pretty common problem these days. My wife doesn't work. She is trying to get a job, but I don't need to tell you that the job market is less-than-stellar lately.
Sure, there is the fear of losing our house, our cars breaking down, not having enough money to pay bills. That stuff I try to take in stride. We can handle it. Being a geek however, might have resulted in a unique problem. No friends, I am not worried about the things that I should be worried about.
I have an AMD Athlon 64 Fx 51 as my main machine at the house. It has served me well, but it is getting a little long in the tooth. First, it uses REGISTERED MEMORY. So adding more than the current 1GB of ram is very cost-prohibitive. It has an Nvidia 7600 gs, which is ok, but the motherboard only has an AGP slot. So that's pretty much the end of the line as far as that goes. The socket is 940, so a CPU upgrade is pretty much out of the question.
My home server, which I have bragged about on this very blog, is a 1Ghz celeron with 384M of ram. It has a bunch of smallish IDE drives. It runs ok for a headless box, but it doesn't quite do everything I want.
I don't even have any dedicated *nix boxes anymore. They have either been sold or broken or just plain too old to use.
So what does this have to do with my money situation? Well I have plenty of financial issues hounding me, but I have no money to upgrade equipment. And its killing me. I mean, it really makes me depressed. Its kind of sad and sick in a way, that I am more worried about buying new hardware than losing my house. I wonder if any other geeks have had similar experiences. It is well documented that geeks often develop addictions; just look at the WOW zombies, the porn junkies, the guys that would rather code than have sex with their girlfriends (or FIND girlfriends for that matter).
Is it possible to be addicted to computer hardware? Have any other geeks craved upgrading their old stuff so badly that they cannot get it out of their heads? I constantly think about the cheapest ways to build a new box, but I just can't seem to find the money.
Do non geeks do this too? Do normal people have similar desires? How do they deal with it? I tell myself that I won't be broke forever, but I just keep getting more and more broke. Even my wing phone and my psp were given to me by my parents and my sisters. You know what I gave them? Framed pictures of my little boy. We just couldn't afford anything else.
How does one shake the nagging feeling of failure; of longing every time I stare at my old dusty hardware? How exactly does one be a broke geek? Does anyone have any advice?
If you are feeling generous, you can hit the donate button on this page. It doesn't have to be a lot, a buck will help and clicking some of the sponsors would be appreciated as well. Thanks for listening to this rant.
PV
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