On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 11:44:23PM -0600, singletona082@ctrl-c.club wrote:
> Deadline is Nov 30th (next thursday.)

Hi, I hope this is useful for you. It's just before 7p here, so if there's
anthing you'd like re-done, I could look at it tomorrow morning if you'd like.

Best wishes
Richard

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This is my fourth laptop, and each time the old one has died, or been retired, I have keep the harddisk, copied a lot of the config, and files that are important to me across, and carried on. This laptop is new. My wife bought it for herself, but with the Windows that it came with it was glacial. She tried Ubuntu for a while, bravely and with fortitude, and then bought a better model and passed this on to me.  With Artix, it is now the fastest machine in the house, and with 800G of storage, I feel like a king!

But now much stuff I have accumulated over the past 20 years of computer ownership. Enough material to keep me in reading for the next 150 years, enough software and libraries to bootstrap the next 3 or 4 IT revolutions, if I only knew know, enough junk to stop me somehow to ever doing anything really creative. Somewhere I read recently, "My Collector's Fallacy Pile of Shame".

I'm sitting in a café in Morocco. It's not particularly touristic here: there's a busy road and I'm surrounded by men with there smartphones, although some are talking. I drink lemon verbena when I'm out, and smell the coffee, and coffee at home in the early mornings. I trying to stop, but it's difficult. Perhaps it's got something to do with all the files stacked up on my harddisk. Why should that be? Who knows, but, why not? The computer gives me so much pleasure, but somehow it's not quite helping me to write.

Here's a poem I wrote the year we arrived in Morocco, 2016 I think it
was.

   Through the Medina

   Re-reading old poems from the Welsh hills:
   valleys with mist, autumn leaves and gales,
   the patter of rain on a tin roof,
   and refreshing these memories with Youtube,
   videos of scrambles up mountains,
   campfires and nights on the high moors.

   It is very strange to feel so at home
   in Morocco, in a city
   on the morning bus to work,
   weekends walking though the Medina,
   never alone except for a few snatched minutes
   with a txt file and a poem ...