Identity Crisis

I've had to get awfully geeky this weekend, far more than I normally like doing. I've even had to find out the names of some of the bits inside the case. I've had to turn myself into the Spaniel for a few hours, and it's not been a good thing for me.

The Spaniel was someone I sat opposite for nearly two years in my second to last IT job, when I was working as a software tester instead of a coder. Spaniel was a dedicated geek; he was installing Gentoo Linux on his computer at home. Gentoo Linux is something that is compiled all the way from source, not from namby-pamby RPM's that lusers of normal linux distros used. And he was building his second machine completely from scratch, buying a motherboard from one source, a CPU from another, memory chips elsewhere. Most of his conversations with me seemed to be rehearsals of his shopping trips as he pondered which component to buy, or sometimes more importantly, from which company to purchase it. Spaniel had gone through a life-changing moment a few years previously, when he had decided one day to scrap his car, in which he did little more than drive the few miles between home and work, and switch to a bicycle instead, and in a similar manner, stop using companies, or the services of companies, whom he considered where not acting in a manner that could be described as 'friendly to the earth'.

Spaniel talked to me quite a lot, sometimes about the machines he was building, sometimes about the programs he was writing at work, and often about Linux. I did my best to keep up with the conversation, even though I was an old coder who worked on machines called Vaxes, digital dinosaurs. I knew a little about PC's, but had no idea what the different types of memory chips looked like or even which way round they had to go. Looking inside computers was something I just didn't do. When I started off building my first computer, there was no concept of inside, the microprocessor and the meagre memory sat on a circuit board in plain view. The thought of reaching in to a mini-tower and extracting the SIMM or CPU was as gory to me as was the idea of reaching through a slit in the abdominal wall and removing an intestine. I told computers what to do, I didn't care what they looked like inside.

But now, with geeks leaving the stage in a mad rush, I'm having to squelch around in the sticky stuff and get my hands dirty. I can't ask Spaniel, he was knocked from his bicycle last year and left dying in the road. My friend who actually built the machine that I'm now trying to sort out has also turned his back on the world of geek, as, of course, have I. It's ironic that almost the first crisis I face in my new life is one that has yanked me back to the old world.

During my last attempt to escape from IT and find a new career I spent quite a lot of time watching programs on the History channel, and became fascinated by the virtual reality simulations of the past that showed what the buildings that were being excavated might actually have looked like, or how the battles fought by Alexander or the Romans might have felt. I wanted to recreate some pieces of the past as well, the old light railways that had meandered through the byways of England where nobody really cared enough about to spend the money on proper rail connections. There were precious few films of things like the Kent and East Sussex, or the Selsey Tramway, and I thought that it must be possible to recreate the landscape and the railways just as I was seeing on the satellite channels.

I found a railway simulation program, and started to learn how to use it. Fairly quickly, I realised that my policy of using out-dated computers running early versions of Windows wasn't up to the task, and got a PC which ran XP and had both graphics and sound. Because I didn't know what internal components it would need, I went to someone and told them what I wanted to do, and what my budget was.

The machine recently began to make a high-pitched screech while it was running, and then suddenly switched itself off. I tried restarting it, with difficulty, and soon had to accept it wasn't happy. The fan which sits on top of an aluminium heatsink over the CPU was making all the noise, and the machine was shutting down or refusing to start up out of a fear of silicone hell-fire.

And so it was that I sat down last night and had to learn the names of things; my motherboard was an Abit A17, it had a socket-something CPU, it had special fan control mechanisms that meant I had to get fans with three wires capable of telling the motherboard how fast they were spinning, and I had no idea who sold such things. It took me an hour to actually get the fan and heatsink off the CPU in the first place. I'm a bit ham-fisted with small things in tight spaces, but the design of this little plastic clip seemed to be that you had to squeeze it almost to the point where you felt it would break before it would suddenly submit.

Finally, just before midnight, I was able to start wandering around the web, typing plaintive little bleats into search fields, asking for a cpu fan for a socket whatever CPU. I found some at a company that I had used before, when I bought some hard disks to go inside the USB cases and store my growing collections of version of the East Kent Light Railway. I had an account with them and after a lot of digging through old emails, managed to get the welcome message telling me what my password was. I logged in to the checkout and started to try and buy the thing. I then realised that, since I had not bought from them since the year in which I sat opposite Spaniel, my card had been re-issued and I would have to enter in the revised details. So I veered away from the checkout towards 'my account', 'managed my cards', got back in line for the checkout, and clicked on the confirm order button. Up came a screen I hadn't seen before when doing online purchasing. The company who issue my card seem to have introduced a scheme to prevent online fraud, and I was going to have to register with them before I could complete the purchase. I got as far as writing down the username they had chosen for me, and was beginning to make up a password to go with it. And then I flipped.

I have over two dozen username and password combinations for various things like ebay, banking, emails, blogging, my websites, and it's already a nightmare keeping track of those. Did I really want another one, that I was going to use infrequently, and did I really want to keep worrying about forgetting them and having to rush around trying to remember just what variation of letters and numbers I had chosen to try and keep track of that particular account? My head is already struggling to remember the pin code for my card that I use to get cash from the hole in the wall or pay for fuel because other codes and passwords are clustered all around the space where I've stored it in my brain, and I worry about forgetting it almost as much as I worry about someone else discovering it and using it to empty my account.

So I made another life-changing decision. I'm not playing the username and password game any more. I've got enough already. I don't need them in the gardens; you don't have to log in to your shears or activate your fork or prove who you are at the gate to start working. I killed the browser session that was still stuck at the checkout for the online shop, got onto ebay, found a fan from Hong Kong that would probably last for a year and was less than half the cost of the English one I had backed out of buying, used my ebay and Paypal username and password combinations, and committed to buy. But that's the limit now, no more accounts, no more email registrations, I'll manage with what I've already got. And if my credit card company tell me that I am running the risk of my card being used for fraudulent purposes if I don't play their security game, then I'll not use their card; you can't get safer than that.

My new life, in the gardens, is face-to-face. I see my customers, I see my labours, I see the money change hands when the work is done. I visit my bank to pay the cheques and cash in to the account, I walk round the shops when I buy my food and clothes and tools, and I don't have to prove who I am at any of those places. Oh, and I haven't even got around to moaning about the hundred or so spam emails I get each day, have I? You don't get that out in the gardens either. It isn't a Brave New World out there in cyberland, it's a confused mess of exploitation, deceit, and vain promises of safety and security. Our powers that be are more interested in cracking down on people who click on images of child porn than they are on clamping down on fraudsters and virus-writers who are clever enough to use fake usernames and passwords in the first place. There's a new breed of criminal around, and they've realised they're above the law, because the law can't identify them, understand how to deal with them, or, possibly, because jailing a certain type of person seems to arouse a more satisfying response from the concerned public than jailing another type of person. Identity theft might be nasty to those to whom it happens, but it doesn't make the great concerned public scream for blood in quite the same way as deviant behaviour does.

See you in the gardens, maybe.