I am giving serious consideration to removing the kiosks from DNA Lounge.

This would set off a minor internet freakout, I'm sure, since the web is full of bloggers who have never been to DNA Lounge but who think that the kiosks are our single defining characteristic.

In 2001, we started off with six kiosks in the club. We managed to maintain those until about a year ago. I guess we upgraded their CPUs and power supplies around three times each in that period. We've gone through about 30 keyboards, and a dozen trackballs. But today, we are down to two kiosks that are still working, the others being victims of dead power supplies and/or motherboards.

For the first five years or so, I had an employee who did the routine maintenance on them (replacing motherboards, de-gunking keyboards, bolting enclosures to the wall, etc.) and he was great at it, but sadly moved on to greener pastures. My second guy quit recently, too, but that guy was terrible at it, and very unresponsive. But hey, it's a crap job that doesn't pay much, what do you expect? It's not like a "real" sysadmin job: since it only requires a few hours a week, it ends up being a rock-bottom priority, as said person's day-job sysadmin gig actually pays.

Which means, I have to do the repairs myself. And I hate doing that kind of crap, so I don't. Which is how we ended up with only two working kiosks.

Recently an anonymous benefactor generously gifted me with a stack of 1U servers from a decomissioned data center, and I've been halfheartedly trying to install the kiosk software onto them, without making a whole lot of progress. (Basically: using a stock LTSP on a stock Ubuntu results in the client machine killing init, and have I mentioned that I hate debugging this kind of crap? So I manage to put about ten minutes into it at a time before getting fed up.)

Plus, even if I got them working, I'd have to be the guy standing on the ladder with the drill, trying to figure out how to bolt a 1U to the wall. I have no one both competent and willing to whom I can delegate this work. And the new machines' fans are louder than a hair dryer, so I'd have to find a replacement for those. (Seriously, I think they are loud enough that you'd be able to hear them over the music!) And so on. These things are not things I enjoy.

So that all puts me in the state of mind of, "my life would be more pleasant if there were not kiosks in it."

I want to convince myself that everyone who would care to use the interweb at a nightclub is already the owner of an iPhone or similar dingus which has an adequate web browser on it already. I want to believe that time has marched on, and relegated the kiosks to mere historical curiosity rather than something that is actually useful.

That way I can throw them away and believe I'm doing it for a good reason.