Leaving some stones unturned

My laptop and I have been everywhere in our 5+ years together. It has served me well; and I have brought it through the valley of the shadow of death several times already. But this past month it has looked like this quite a few times. The hard disk crashed in March, and once the thrill of cracking open a tiny laptop had faded, merely replacing the disk didn't seem interesting enough: I had to make some ... improvements. So I spent some time researching alternatives to traditional disks. The potential for geek cred was high: solid-state flash memory -- sturdy, silent, and speedy -- is coming of age, and this was an opportunity to join the (non-mechanical) future of data storage.

Real solid state storage is still a bit pricey; but I'd read that high-end camera cards could do just as well for a good bit less money. So I ordered a Lexar Pro 300x and an adapter from some place in Hong Kong. When the new gear finally arrived, I plugged it in and reassembled everything, booted up and was poised to shout "Yes! I am eenveencible!"... but the laptop couldn't even see the card. Turns out Lexar "cheats" slightly on the interface standard. OK; I ordered a SanDisk Extreme IV card. Another week's wait; more dismantling and reassembly; this one the laptop could see ... but only as a removable disk, unsuitable for an operating system. I ordered a Kingston Ultimate card: same story, no matter how many obscure boot permutations I tried or how much trivia I learned, late into the night, about flash memory, data interfaces, or Linux filesystem details.

Fortunately I'll get most of my money back on eBay. Those cards weren't all that cheap.

In the meantime, I've been running the laptop without a disk, using a Linux LiveCD for (in-memory) software and a USB stick for storage. This is a precarious existence: if the machine ever fails to wake from sleep, or the battery runs down, I lose all my preferences, security updates, and bookmarks -- not to mention any work I haven't explicitly saved. It's the "Memento" laptop.

There is a fourth kind of camera card that (I read) would definitely work. But it eventually dawned on me that this was turning out to be a poor return on my time; and that the knowledge I was acquiring was increasingly specialized, decreasingly useful, and quickly becoming obsolete anyway. So, I've conceded defeat: a mechanical hard disk will arrive in a few days. Old wine for old wineskins. Actually I didn't really give up; it was a deliberate choice to leave some stones unturned. So, what was supposed to be another tale of fearless ingenuity -- eclectic research overturning conventional limitations -- turned into a lesson about the diminishing returns on knowledge and mastery. "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?(*)" The pursuit of cleverness can be addictive, crowding out much better things -- rest, family, friendships, peace, charity, etc. -- and must be surrendered like every other entanglement if I'm at all serious about seeking "the most excellent way."

(*) Interesting: Bono's writing NYT op-eds now. His piece yesterday ("It's 2009. Do you know where your soul is?") riffs on this same challenge of Jesus.