Is it a bicycle?

Eventually I will port over my livejournal er, journal, but for now, I am kind of enjoying the relative anonymity. Once upon a time, internet land, there was a vax system, and on this vax there were 3 nodes (plus another node for unix, but they were there really weird weirdos). One node was called maple and it was good, most of the time. When it wasn't good, there was oak which was.. ok, but people would only use it when maple was down or, well, maybe there was some technical reason for one class or another, but I don't remember any. And then, there was cedar. There was no reason in this world to use cedar. Once there had been, but cedar was the oldest and the slowest of the machines. Even when maple had crashed, oak was usually not so busy that people went to cedar. So why logon to cedar at all? why indeed? There was nobody there, but the electrons whistling down the corridors. And sometimes, even in the quiet days before the internet, that was nice. I miss the vax community and the playing around with process names[1] on maple, but there was nothing so zen as setting your process name and knowing with near, but not complete certainty, that no one would ever read it.



[1]um, really primitive maybe 12 character status names. There would be these waves that would ripple through the process names (maybe a whole 30 of them!) in which people would follow various themes.