08:22 – Costco run and dinner with Paul and Mary yesterday. Ordinarily, we do that on a Sunday because it’s so much less crowded at Costco on Sundays, but Paul and Mary had plans for today. They are attending–and I am not making this up–a documentary film on sushi making at River Run.
I’ve said before that when I was a kid most of my friends read Sherlock Holmes and wanted to be Holmes; I wanted to be Moriarty. I suspect Mary would also pick Moriarty. Barbara and Paul, both of whom are inexplicably law-abiding, would definitely choose Holmes.
So, yesterday I told Mary I had an idea for a new book to pitch to O’Reilly and asked if she’d be interested in co-authoring Illustrated Guide to Home Forgery Projects. Mary said there was no way she’d be willing to have her name on that book. When I asked why not, she said because some day we might really want to forge an expensive artifact and put it up for auction, and it wouldn’t do to have our names associated with forging stuff. I like the way Mary thinks.
11:11 – The end of an era. This week is bulky-item pickup, the one time a year when the city will haul off items too large to fit in the trash bin. (Well, except in the ghetto area of East Winston, where the city picks up bulky items every normal trash collection day, including items like televisions that they won’t pick up elsewhere.) So, after Barbara and I hauled out the old propane grill (which some passing scavenger stopped and picked up before we could even get it to the curb), I decided to see if there was anything I could put out for bulky-item pickup. My eye settled on an old 17″ monitor, the last CRT monitor in the house. I was keeping it “just in case”. So I carried it out the front door, but Barbara pointed out that bulky-item pickup doesn’t allow computer equipment and monitors. So we hauled it back down to the garage and put it in the Trooper. Barbara’s going to haul it and a bunch of other stuff to Good Will. Presumably they’ll bundle it with a working PC and some poor family will have a usable computer system.
I always thought Watson was underrated. Sure, Holmes is a lot more intelligent, but Watson is fairly clever. Watson’s also much happier with his life.
RBT wrote:
“When I asked why not, she said because some day we might really want to forge an expensive artifact and put it up for auction, and it wouldn’t do to have our names associated with forging stuff. I like the way Mary thinks.”
That way of thinking isn’t so uncommon. One of my pals liked to mock people who claimed to have a Machiavellian streak. If you do have such a streak the last thing to do is to advertise. Just do it.
I’m with eristicist on Dr. Watson, who I preferred to Holmes, an insufferably arrogant snot among whose few saving graces is a smidgeon of a sense of humor. I read all the stories as a kid and enjoyed them, but I really got off on Kipling, and when the flick “The Man Who Would Be King” came out, I was overjoyed. I still watch it once a year, one of my top five favorites. Maybe I will do a script for “The Phantom Rickshaw” one of these days.
As a sometime medieval scholar, long ago, I preferred Machiavelli’s “Florentine Histories” to “The Prince” and also enjoyed Baldassare Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier,” and his very interesting letters. Guys like Rove or Cheney or Larry Klinton and The Prophet probably read Cliff Notes of “The Prince.”
What about the Decameron? Some quite, ah, titillating stories there… 🙂
You may not be able to pawn off your CRT monitor on Goodwill. Around here, they won’t take them. CRT monitors are toxic waste and must be disposed of through a recycling center here.
Rick in Portland
Yup, read Boccaccio, and a bunch of Italian guys from back then; used to know medieval Latin and medieval Italian pretty well, but like everything else, you snooze, you lose. (MA thesis was on Dante and Virgil, and even gave a little talk at Yale, in both of those languages, such was my claim to scholarly fame back in the day, not much use now among the Red Hat clusters)
63 and still climbing here today…will we hit 70? Meanwhile I can still see snow, and plenty of it, on Mt. Mansfield.
And Mrs. OFD should be be-bopping on through the Carolinas this afternoon with MIL, stopping for the night in Jamestown, Virginia, home to several more of OFD’s ancestors circa 1609. OFD still wants to know where the lost colonists disappeared to…
I fear Rick’s going to be right. Governments (and, I guess, charities) suddenly got scared of tubes. You might be able to give it to someone by posting on Freecycle.
Maybe so. But it’s an NEC AccuSync 17 with almost zero time on it. I bought it as a spare back when Barbara and I were running 19″ and 21″ CRTs on our main systems, and kept it on the shelf. I think we used it a couple of times in the kitchen while we were building systems, but that’s about it. It’s a shame if they won’t take it. It’d probably run fine for years.
Barbara’s going to haul it and a bunch of other stuff to Good Will. Presumably they’ll bundle it with a working PC and some poor family will have a usable computer system.
Won’t happen. Goodwill, and other agencies, will no longer take CRT monitors or glass television sets. In fact Goodwill will generally not take any computers because as people upgraded they would donate their old computers and take a tax deduction for about three times what the item was worth. We have people that drop off old computers at the church expecting a receipt for tax purposes. We tell them we don’t want them and to take them back.
Truly poor families, even those that are poor because they are lazy, have access to computers. They may not a bed in the house but they have a large screen TV and a computer.
In Knoxville they occassionally have a couple of days set aside where people can bring old electronics and drop them off for recycling. Generally run by some charitable organization that basically gets the money for the scrap value. A few semi-trailers parked on the lot, lots of large cardboard containers on pallets, and several eager young people to offload the stuff.
It’s not that way here, or at least it wasn’t the last time Barbara took computer stuff to Good Will a few months ago. They have a trailer set up in the parking lot near Walgreens, and they were happy to take any computer stuff we wanted to donate. They didn’t even care if it worked, which all the stuff we donate does.
If she still has the monitor when she gets back, we’ll just put it at the curb. Even though bulky item pickup won’t take it, I’m sure a scavenger will haul it away.
Incidentally, we’ve never even asked for a receipt for anything we donate. Years ago, I donated several PCs and quite a bit of other gear (DDS tape drives, scanners, and the like) to Senior Services locally. These were new systems that we’d built for the first edition of Building the Perfect PC. (Seagate, Intel, Plextor, Crucial, and all the other vendors who’d sent us free eval units had no problem with this as long as it was a legal charity.) Senior Services offered to give me a receipt for whatever I thought was fair. I asked the guy what he thought was fair, and he said maybe $5,000. I told him that might be fair except that I hadn’t paid a cent for most of the components and had only maybe $300 of my own money in it all told.
We’re switching from analog to digital TV here and there’s going to be lots of people wanting to dump their tube monitors and TVs. I for one. I have a 32 year old small TV (just in case) and a 13 year old 70 cm I want to ditch. Plus 1 LCD that died and 3 CRTs. It’ll cost me heaps to take that stuff to the dump to be “recycled”. There’s talk of a free pick-up in the next year, not sure if it’ll happen.
In line with Ray’s observation above, we have noticed up here that even in houses that are literally falling apart, with yards full of junk and clunkers up on blocks in the front yards, that they by jiminy will have a nice large-screen TV right smack there in the living room and often more in other rooms, with full internet access for whatever. The clunkers and trash bags are filled with fast-food and frozen food wrappers and truckloads of beer and soda can empties.
We only got a large-screen TV last year, on sale at Big Lots, and only watch recorded stuff on it. Yeah, our house is falling apart, but it’s 206 years old, and we drive a ten-year-old Saab station wagon and a sixteen-year-old Dodge Ram 2500, both of which we keep maintained. No vacations and rare is the lunch or dinner out.
Just a small pixel on the giant screen here of how half the country works and pays for the other half.
I’ve seen the same as OFD and Ray regarding “poor” people who “need” handouts living pretty well. The one that gets me is the fairly new giant-ass SUVs many “poor” people drive. The insurance premiums alone are probably enough that they wouldn’t “need” foodstamps.
From one perspective I admire and agree with your honesty.
From another perspective, I disagree. Perhaps the North Carolina state government is different, but the US Federal and the New York State governments are criminal organizations operating contrary to their constitutions, largely secretly, and largely against the will of the governed. “Cheating” them out of “their” tax dollars is a moral act.
I also admire the honesty exhibited, but am otherwise with SteveF on the resistance to the criminal entities which rule us now, esp. after having just now come to what looks like might be the light at the end of the tunnel of our own anabasis with the (partially quoted from The Urban Dictionary)
“…satanic cabal of bureaucrats that believes in plundering the wealth of taxpayers to fund projects like the ghetto school program, Iraq reconstruction and other forms of income redistribution from the middle class to the government.”
No honesty involved; just enlightened self-interest. Although it’s pretty common for reviewers to sell free eval units, the vendors really, really hate that. If they find out, you can kiss any more free eval units goodbye. Granted, there wasn’t much chance that Intel or whoever would find out that I’d gotten a financial benefit via a tax deduction, but I believe in playing things straight.
Incidentally, Good Will happily accepted the AccuSync monitor. They weren’t open when Barbara was heading over to her sister’s house, so she ended up donating that monitor plus another old CRT monitor that her sister was discarding. They told Barbara they happily accept monitors and any other computer equipment. Good Will is going through tough times lately. Even well-off people who used to donate lots of stuff are now selling it on Craigslist or eBay instead of donating it.
Hey! Good work, Good Will. It’s nice to see someplace stave off bureaucracy.
asked if she’d be interested in co-authoring Illustrated Guide to Home Forgery Projects.
Wouldn’t the idea be to publish it under someone else’s name? 😉
It’s not that way here, or at least it wasn’t the last time Barbara took computer stuff to Good Will a few months ago.
Maybe Goodwill in your area is doing the recycling and claiming the money. If so, excellent for you. The last time I tried here they were not taking any computer equipment. Perhaps they changed here and I am just not aware.
I ditched my first PC, a P200 MMX (?I don’t remember the details now, I got it in 1997) in about 2004, after I’d given it to a friend to use for a few years, and he returned it when he could afford something better. I just put it in the garbage. Made a very satisfying CLUNK when the garbage truck hoisted it on board. Did the same with an old laptop I spilt Bourbon and Coke on – to which it didn’t react well. Just binned them. The dump where I should have taken this stuff if I was a good, environmentally conscious citizen, is just too far away and they want me to pay to “recycle” it. Put a couple of old HP scanners in the garbage bin a few weeks ago. I mean, who wants a 1998 and 1999 model HP scanner?
Even Tiny Town won’t take old computers or CRT’s without a fee being paid. And the line to drop them off once a year, can be well over an hour long. Most of ours went at auction; people will buy anything for the right price. Only one Viewsonic CRT and a desktop remains to be disposed of — both belonging to the desktop setup built for our son from our host’s first ‘Perfect PC’ book. At the time our son got it, that computer screamed faster than all his dorm mates’ PC’s, but just a few years later, it was eclipsed by newer stuff on the market. I built an identical PC for Jeri, which became our daughter’s college computer when we moved to Germany. Daughter was in the graphic arts area, and needed a better computer — also built from one of our host’s books. Again, that computer was so noticeably superior to what her classmates had, that she had a hard time parting with it when she ultimately switched entirely to a laptop. Except for NAS storage, I do not see the need for anything but laptops into the future, having already spent the last 12 years using only laptops. Upgrading to the biggest laptop drive on the market every 2 years, made that work perfectly.
What’s wrong with laptops? Keyboard size and screen size. I have to have a large screen and I have big, clumsy fingers, so a laptop keyboard is far from optimal.
I have two laptops now, one I just turned on after several years powered off. I used to love them, now they’re just expensive paperweights. I may install Snort on one and use it to monitor the home network.
I agree with Greg, though I do have a large monitor for my laptop and a stand so I can still use the laptop monitor. I use a “proper” mouse and keyboard when at home and type slower on the road.
The desktop PC isn’t dead, but it is on the ropes. The other problem with laptops is their battery life, which is advertised as more, yet always seems to deliver less.
Yeah; using a laptop without a power supply is unpleasant. But it’s nice to have something so easy to move from one location to another. Most of the quick tasks that need to be done without a power supply can be done on a smartphone — though they’re not great for anyone with vision problems, arthritis etc.
Plugging in an external monitor and keyboard is what I have done since I switched to laptops-only back in 2001. At home, I have the big keyboard, external monitor, and mouse plugged in and only use the laptop screen and keyboard when on the road. In fact, when I first started using an external monitor and keyboard, people would look around and ask where the tower was, and I pointed to the laptop hiding behind the monitor. Lots of “wow’s” back then, but nowadays, laptops are so ubiquitous that it is no longer a surprise.
In fact, a smaller screen works better for me, because I put the whole thing in my backpack — a Deuter style that includes a laptop pocket — and carry it easily to wherever it needs to go — power supply included..
Well, my eyesight isn’t good enough for a small screen. And I need a good GPU for the game I play.
Oh, MSI makes laptops that scream — specifically for games. I was talking only about the laptop screen size (which I really did not make clear). A 15″ screen is just dandy for the times I am away from home (not that often) and makes the laptop a manageable size. Actually, I would go with a 14″ screen, but they do not put the biggest processors in those units. The larger external monitor screen is exactly the same as one would combine with a desktop.