08:42 – We made a lot of progress yesterday getting the inventory/workroom cleared out and organized. The shelves are up, and there’s stuff stacked on them. It’s not properly organized yet, but it’s up off the floor and it won’t be difficult to get it arranged. We still have to move furniture downstairs today and move a work table upstairs, but we’ll get that done.
The lead article in the paper this morning was about one of the most annoying aspects of our society: taxpayers taking the risks and losses while corporations reap the profits. Of course, the article didn’t state it that way. Instead, it praised Wake Forest University scientists who’ve come up with a new lighting technology that may generate half a billion dollars a year in patent licensing revenue. As I’ve said many times before, there needs to be a simple rule: any university or individual researcher that accepts federal research funding cannot benefit financially from the results of that research. The rewards from that research should flow to the people who paid for it. The taxpayers. It’s not a new idea. Any scientist working for a corporation signs a document that grants the corporation all rights to that scientist’s work.
11:47 – All of the furniture we needed to move is moved. I emptied out drawers and cleared the tops of the dressers totally without ruth. Barbara was probably shocked. I’m sure she was pleased. At one point, she shouted “I’m so happy!” She’s not used to me throwing anything out. As a side benefit of all this discarding, I found not one but two unused tobacco pouches. So now the inventory/workroom is pretty well cleared out. All that remains is to get stuff up on the shelves and organized.
We used three boxes: keep, trash/recycling and Goodwill. A lot of stuff that I almost trashed ended up in the Goodwill box–obsolescent/obsolete motherboards, memory, processors, PATA optical drives and cables, video cards, and so on. But then I realized that Goodwill builds/rebuilds computers for people who can’t afford current models, so some of this stuff might actually be useful to them.