Less lean and mean, but more green!

Today, last day of the decade, I decided to clean up the garage: a set of boxes conspicuously occupy the center of the third garage (that's for the Tesla when I can afford one) - so they get my attention - boxes with stuff from my earlier jobs, and books, papers, patents and presentations from my research days.

I decided I could no longer decipher the papers and made the hard call to recycle them - cache coherence is no longer coherent, and snooping on the bus seems to be just wrong! Papers on fancy machines, like the BBN Butterfly, Sequent and the Connection Machine (Jurassic Park) went the way of the dinosaur - right into the recycle box! Systems, such as Willow and Dash, V and Presto, passed messages to each other right into the shared memory of the Friday truck. Venerable names, such as Hennessy, Agarwal, Levy, Archibald, Gupta and Goodman, printed on many papers in black and white, had to be bid adieu. Gray and Kennedy caused a moment of darkness ... a moment to ponder the meaning of life...

Fond memories of graduate school - soccer in the rain at Rice with the Calzones (remembering Zefarino, the Mexican math-student-soccer-Jedi-master), parties at the Graduate House, Valhalla, beer-bike, walking with my colleagues to Pike Place in Seattle during a conference, the depressing moments thinking I'd never finish my Ph.D. ...a little smile broke when I saw the graduation documents. Was the degree worth it? That's when my hair began graying!

Projects and presentations went right (recycle), expense reports and old perf evals went left (shred) - a couple of decades left to waste! Oooh - there was a photo of a chip I'd designed! My Chip - with my name etched in the silicon! I have it somewhere - it looks good as a paperweight in the clear MOSIS plastic container.

We spend so much of our lives studying, working and achieving something that's as intangible and transient as ... a network packet! Dunno about you, but it leaves me with a sense of loss. Some gained, so much lost!

Decades pass ... I know less and less ... but now, with so much recycled, it's a greener me!