We had just moved to the nicer part of Berkeley. Our previous spot - on Ashby, near San Pablo - had bars on the doors and windows. They say good fences make good neighbors. Maybe so.

This laptop, at the new apartment, was pretty rough … a refurb HP, if I recall. The year had to have been 2005 and I think the body of this laptop was sortof translucent, downstream from the Apple aesthetic at the millennium. I was yet to migrate my daily driver to a MacBook Pro. But I was experimenting. Linux: 99% pure; however I needed UNIX.

This refurb was rough indeed. The display cable - a ribbon stuck together with metallic duct tape - was probably part of the repair. I think it had some thermal problems, too. If you weren’t careful, the LCD would glitch. And if you made it think too hard, it would lock up; no kernel oops or anything.

Windows just wasn’t workable on that one. To their credit, that could do wonders on some very sketchy hardware. I think we tried Windows 2000, which was solid. It had shipped with Windows ME when it was fresh in 2002; these were grim times.

I think my reasoning was: if we get closer to the metal, we can mitigate the heat. And maybe so. I don’t know why BSD; it was probably that we lived in Berkeley. But I would only run a few processes; and pick and choose carefully.

And indeed, this thing was running FreeBSD. If I ran it heavily, it would hard lock; the thermal problems were real. I was able to run Audacity on it to record live music, which was cool. I could control the fans and the clock speed. This could work.

So one day, I went to work on campus, then came home during my lunch break. The place was a bit of a mess when I went inside - but I thought nothing of it. Later on, I realized someone had entered the apartment and stole the laptop. And I felt very little because that sore beast could not be tamed by software alone.

I think about someone opening up that laptop - in 2005 - and this smiling devil greets them at boot time. Beasty, the BSD daemon. And the deeper they dig, the more cursed the laptop is.

They would have tried to sell it in San Francisco, the police said. It would have to be formatted, then some workable OS imaged … I can’t imagine what that would be.

I think there’s a decent chance, however, that the person who actually booted that device might have known: this one was weird and unlike the other hot laptops. When they went to format the hard drive - a platter, 2.5 inches, IDE - their experience would be shaped by the typical distribution of consumer choice; at the time, mostly Windows. If a Mac, then it would be obvious from the outside. A Linux laptop would have been rare; certainly under 1% at the time.

But a FreeBSD laptop? In 2005? What were you thinking? No self-preservation instinct? Fearless; and yet, a coward.

Windows ME is the best you would have managed on that hardware. You’ve been judged. But all these years later, I’m not even mad; I’m just disappointed; dumbfounded by the choice. And a little sad, like, for people and humanity generally.

Maybe you went on without a second thought. For the most part, I did too. But understand that a specific, twisted logic had been poured into that laptop - and it was completely cursed. For me, on that day, a curse was actually lifted.