Raining Soup

Here's the situation. I have about three cubic meters of obsolete computers, peripherals, and other electronic crap sitting in storage. A couple of ancient Macs (including a pair of PowerBook 2400c "netbooks"). Miscellaneous printers and scanners. Disk drives. A fax machine. At least one stereo system. A handful of Handspring/Palm Treos. Probably a dozen wireless phones. Other stuff. And cables. Bozhe moi, the cables. I could tie down King Kong with the cables. Mostly pre-USB... Apple ADB, and power cables, and SCSI cables as thick as your thumb.
 
Most of this stuff worked when I put it into storage a couple of years ago. (A couple of the Treos have display problems.) It offends my soul to just take it all into an electronics recycling place. But I certainly don't have time to do anything else with it.
 
So... I need an archaeologist to (1) take it all away, (2) sort through it and figure out what's what, and (3) post it all on eBay. You keep two-thirds of the net proceeds after shipping; I get one-third.
 
This would be a great task for a slightly-geeky high school student wanting some cash... or for anyone in the tech business between jobs right now. It'd be nice if you knew something about Macs in the 1990s to make the writeups easier, but if you don't, Google knows everything.
 
Any interest? Email me.

Cissa and I went to see KOOZA last night under the big tent (Grand Chapiteau) at Atlantic Station.
 
Incredible acrobatics as always, but this is nowhere near my favorite Cirque du Soleil performance. As I Twittered last night, this production needed more gymnastics and fewer fart jokes.
 
That being said, I'm curious about one thing. During the double-highwire act, one of the performers stumbled, fell, caught himself on the wire, climbed back up, and continued. Was it truly an accident? Or was it planned? I'm suspicious because it seemed too well choreographed with the music. But he lost his hat into the audience, and that doesn't seem like part of an act. Maybe an intentional stumble, and an accidental hat loss?
 
I'd be curious to hear from people who saw it on other nights than January 13th. Did one of the highwire artists fall, then catch himself?

I bought my wife a double-sided jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. The same scene is printed on both sides, but rotated ninety degrees. So, from looking at a piece, you can't immediately tell which way is up!
 
To me, it's a recipe for frustration and futility. But Cissa calmly cleaned off a glass-topped table and found a hand mirror...
 
I swear, put this woman in a red wig and she'd be a Heinlein heroine! (And, from me, there is no higher praise...)

Advice to a friend who is planning a trip to Australia, and wants to know which camera to carry...
 
If you're going to Australia just to take photographs, buy a DSLR and all the lenses/accessories your chiropractor will let you carry.
 
If you're taking your family, buy something like my Canon A720is, and focus on the experience, not the photographs.
 
http://www.academicvc.com/2008/07/travel-lessons-learned.html
 
Professionals are always going to get better photographs than you are. Buy postcards wherever you go if all you want is landscapes and wildlife. But no professional is going to get pictures of your wife and your kids. The less time you spend fiddling with the equipment, the more time you have to get pictures of your kids. And those are the pictures you're going to want to look at over and over again.

Oh. Thank you very much. I guess. "Not eligible for PayPal dispute resolution"???
 
Maybe there are reasons to stick with credit cards...

My sister's aging iMac G5 video board blew out. AppleCare has expired, and it's too old to be worth fixing; she's now the happy owner of a brand-new iMac.
 
But her backup strategy consisted of "If something breaks, Stephen will fix it." So now I've pulled the old hard disk out of her G5 with the intention of popping it into a handy external housing and transferring all her files over.
 
Unfortunately, all the 3.5" external housings I have use the 40-pin parallel ATA/IDE connector (two rows of 20 pins each). This drive has a 22-pin connector Serial ATA -- 15 in one bank and 7 in another. It's a Western Digital 800, if that helps any. Photo above for detail.
 
Does anybody in Atlanta have a USB or FireWire adapter or housing that I could borrow long enough to suck all the files off this disk? Thanks!
 
(PS -- Yes, to avoid this problem next time, I've ordered her a big external hard drive to use for Time Machine with the new iMac... :-)

I've always loved Dahlonega. Here's a quick snapshot of the town square illuminated for the holidays.
 
(Taken from the sidewalk in front of the Crimson Moon, where an awesomely pregnant Jennifer Daniels performed a great set of her favorites as well as some new songs from her upcoming album...)

Just received my Clarifi from Griffin Technology. It's an iPhone case that includes a sliding macro lens. Check out the difference with and without the lens in the photos above. Click the image to see the full-size version.  (Random scrap of paper from my desk; no deep philosophical significance.)
 
Well worth thirty bucks from J&R: <http://tr.im/1pqy> . With Evernote's OCR capability, this could make business-card scanners obsolete...