because ... well ... why the hell not ...?

it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Saturday, June 14th

_20:04PM

Sandy to the Rescue (again):

Sandra Turcotte and I have a sort of symbiotic relationship. Among other things, she helps me make stuff go away. That's often a harder task than you might expect, especially when you have a life that's chock full 'o servers and network equipment.

Being a terrible packrat doesn't help a bit and, to make it worse, so many of these servers are just so darned cute. Keeping a few around as spares can work as an excuse when you're talking about two or three times as many as you actually need, but having ten times as many is definitely starting to stretch things.

I hate throwing stuff away when there's still that lurking glimmer of hope that somebody could use it...and fortunately Sandy has a talent for finding those elusive somebodies.

Plus, I do have a lot of nonprofits and charities that I work with already, which also helps a lot. At least that gives me a head start when it comes to finding a home for some stray equipment that has overstayed its welcome at my house.

Last week I'd gotten a call from Alex Weimer at the Bug Theatre looking for some video equipment, and he was kind enough to come out and help me clean a vanload of older video gear out of my closets. They even wanted one of the extra turntables I'd accumulated. That was a surprise, since I've gotten so used to people looking down their noses at the fact that I have several hundred vinyl LPs and three of my stereos do include turntables. Personally, I'm sure I have worse faults than an enduring attachment to vinyl, so I think I'll just keep hanging on to my record collection, no matter what they say. I also managed to get some more equipment hauled off to Little Voice Productions, so that helped to get me some extra space in my closets and in the home warehouse.

I have tried other approaches to housecleaning. Garage sales, for example, but those haven't worked out too well. I think the fundamental problem is that there just isn't enough drive-by traffic these days looking for an old Vax 11/750 to take home. I think that's because nobody wants to decorate their homes in traditional DEC color schemes any more. I bet if I could replace the side panels with plexiglass and add some flashing multicolored LEDs onto the main blower, then there'd be lots of people wanting to take it off my hands. Well, maybe. It's a thought, anyway.

(Trying to clear out the garage a bit)

Most nonprofits aren't all that accommodating about taking hardware that's older than most of what's in my fridge. Quite a few will only take donations of new, current model equipment, which isn't generally the sort of thing I'd be giving away. Or they'll have specific requirements that don't make a lot of sense, like the program I was setting up with computers which didn't have any working computers at all, but they also weren't allowed to accept any donated computers that didn't meet a long list of criteria. Most of their list wasn't hard to accommodate (it just required checking the model numbers of all the component parts and verifying that they did meet the minimum standards on their list), but they weren't allowed to accept computers if they didn't include speakers. In order to be allowed to donate computers to this particular program, I ended up running around town the night before, trying to locate a store with a reasonable sale on computer speakers. It got handled, but it still strikes me as silly that the powers-that-be who make up these rules would rather have had the program continue with no computers than have computers that didn't include speakers.

With Sandy, on the other hand, I can just point to a large pile of computers and she'll find a way to get them out to nonprofit groups and individuals, even if they don't all include speakers. Pretty amazing, and lots less work on my part. I do manage to scare up things that she's looking for, too, like these portable CD players for her Christmas program. This way I can have the fun of finding stuff without always having to worry about what I'm going to do with it or where I'm going to put it all.

A few weeks ago, Sandy accomplished the near-impossible. I'd had about a dozen office desks to dispose of, and absolutely nobody would take them. Even the places that keep calling all the time to say that they're going to be in my area and would I like to schedule a pickup wouldn't accept office furniture. They'll take desks, but they can't be office desks. Somehow, though, Sandy was able to locate some places that would accept office desks, miscellaneous office supplies, and the rest of the assortment of chairs and stuff I needed to make go away. Took a whole day of driving around (and a bunch of gas) on my part to get them delivered, but after that they were gone. Whew!

Now, the latest oddball problem that Sandy helped me take care of was all because standard rack-mount hardware is 19 inches across. Doesn't matter whether it's a server, professional video gear, or audio equipment, the front is 19 inches wide. Some telecom stuff is 23 inches, but I don't deal with anywhere near as much of that. Shipping boxes, at least at the local stores that carry such things, tend to be 16 inches or 18 inches wide, just too small for anything rack-mountable.

Which usually means I either reuse boxes or order them in from Uline, which does carry suitably-sized boxes, but what happened this time is that I got a call telling me that a place up the highway wanted to get rid of a whole lot of unmarked boxes that were a good size for shipping rackmount hardware. I don't usually go driving around in search of cardboard boxes, but this time I did.

But it turned out that there was a catch: they were unmarked brown shipping boxes all right, and they were perfectly well-suited for rack-mount equipment shipping purposes, but they were full. Not full of something bad like gerbil droppings, live spiders, or Windows Me documentation; no, these boxes were filled with new, individually wrapped granola bars. (Which was much better than if they'd been used granola bars; trust me on this.)

So, I found myself with a whole truckload of shipping boxes and a few hundred pounds of granola bars. Now, I don't know if you've ever had to deal with a few hundred pounds of granola bars before, but, having had the benefit of this experience myself, I can now tell you with a considerable sense of certainty that even one hundred pounds of granola bars is a lot.

...There's no proof, to be honest, that the food disappeared into Jackie....

I could have availed myself of the obvious solution, which would have been to use the boxes in question while merely eschewing the use of packing peanuts in favor of granola bars. While tempting, this did, nonethless, have the drawback that granola bars are significantly heavier than packing peanuts. Though they are also somewhat larger, the difference in size is not sufficient to make up for the difference in weight. For that matter, we are getting towards the summer months and maybe that's not the best time to be nestling one's network equipment in anything that includes chocolate chips among its ingredients.

Quite some years ago, I knew a woman named Jackie who could have helped out with a problem like this. You see, if any form of food was left in the same building with Jackie overnight, all instances of said food save one would be gone by morning. It didn't matter what it was or how much there was of it: if you started the night out with a cake, there'd be one piece left in the morning. If the evening saw a gallon jar of pickles, the dawn would greet a gallon jar of picklejuice and one lone floating pickle. This never caused Jackie to gain any weight, at least as far as I could tell, and the food didn't disappear while anyone else was awake and watching, so the whole thing was really quite mysterious. There's no proof, to be honest, that the food disappeared into Jackie. Nevertheless, disappear it did. I'm sure that if I could but have located her in time, the granola bar problem would have diminished to a single bar by morning, which wouldn't be much of a problem at all.

But I really have no idea where Jackie had gotten to in the intervening years, which brings us back to Sandy and her miracle powers of making stuff go away. As always, she was happy to oblige, and the process of loading the granola bars into her car while leaving the plain brown shipping boxes behind had a further added benefit, which was that it made the cabinet under my kitchen sink accessible again. (Why do I save plastic grocery bags anyway? I'm sure I couldn't have been anticipating a need to bag hundreds of pounds of granola bars all this time. And now that I can see the pipes in there again, why am I going right back to my old habits of filling it up with plastic grocery sacks? We may never know the answers to these questions; but, then again, we may never care either.)

So we transferred all the granola bars into the grocery bags and piled those into Sandy's car. Fortunately, we even had enough room left over in the car for Sandy herself, which made the next phase of our plan (Sandy driving away) that much simpler.

And so it came to pass that Sandy got the granola bars distributed amongst the good people of southern Colorado and I ended up with a large supply of shipping boxes suitable for rack-mount gear.

...and then I came back from an afternoon of stunt practice to find the door to the sunroom was blocked by boxes of stuffed animals that had been dropped off while I was away.

oh, um, Sandy! Could you come back here for a moment?

Trygve.Com sitemap what's new FAQs diary images exercise singles humor recipes media weblist internet companies community video/mp3 comment contact