My Linux server has been my trusty friend and companion for about the last 12-13 years - with only a couple of down days to replace power supplies and perform system upgrades. A year ago, you would have been reading these pages on that same box. It's seen me through good times and bad. Rich and poor. Oh what times we've had. Any time - day or night; it was always there to greet me. And from there to reach out to the larger world. All of my thoughts and ideas have passed through it at one time or another.

But it's time to turn it off and pack it up to ship away. I've handed off the task of serving up web pages. I've handed off the task of receiving my daily spam. But the Linux box has still remained at the center of my world. It's my development workstation, where I try out all my new ideas and test them before I unleash them on you folks. It's also my gatekeeper, keeping the bad guys out; and the hub around which I built my wired household. 

But something else happened in the last ten years. All of my favorite development tools have been rewritten to run on Windows. The whole LAMP stack (minus the 'L' for Linux). Apache, PHP, MySQL. Emacs. The GIMP. Even bash. That's all I need to create webapps. And I've even got awk and sed for when I need to get down and dirty. 

So I can do all my web development from a PC running that horrible operating system from Redmond and not miss a beat. Any old laptop will work. At least it's enough to get me by until I can boot everything up again half a world away.

But the sadness slowly drifts over me. It's time to unplug.

Sigh...