2008-01-12 Puters

A couple of Pentium 4 PC seemingly complete. First one is HP and has a pretty randomized HD, good job previous owner on wiping. People are learning, upon booting the CDrom makes funny noises and we get a "hot dust" smell. It may need attention.

Second one is a small form factor Dell, 2.4 Ghz, 256M RAM, 40G HD. Bob, you want this? Here is a list of salient data from the HD:

• The household comprises a couple and their two offspring. The lady and the gentleman of the house have accounts on the machine. Given their ages and the fact that their offspring are twins it seems IVF is likely to have occurred here.
• Both the adults are accomplished in terms of fancy high finance management careers. Their resumes are full of bullshit yet nevertheless accomplished contentful bullshit, if you accept the premise that the finance industry has content.
• An interesting 3-column Excel file that caught our roving eye, note we hid columns 2 and 3 for your (their?) benefit:

  My Documents% xl2txt Passwords.xls | cut -f 1 -d"|" 
  SHEET:Sheet1
  Numbers / Passwords
  Smith Barney
  Vanguard
  Chaseonline
  American Express
  Fidelity.com
  Fidelity ATP
  Yahoo Fin
  IBD
  AIM
  Modem
  WSJ
  Pension/  Hewitt
  Verizon Wireless
  Verizon Wireless/DSL
  Verizon.com
  Wireless sync
  HP Tech Support
  Compusa Support M

• The lady (or is it the gentleman?) of the house likes strong women. By strong we mean the traditional definition, "able to lift up a car", and this pic is one of the more bearable, less muscled and less posed examples of their taste, as well as being quite literal.
  
• Some iTunes, stuff grouped by artist and listed here, could be worse. We have these on shuffle as we type, how self-referential of us.

       10 Annie Lennox
       13 Beat Positive
       12 BeBe & CeCe Winans
        9 Black Box
       11 Bonnie Raitt
       13 Collective Soul
      113 Compilations
       10 Crosby, Stills & Nash
       11 Dave Matthews Band
       12 Deee-Lite
        7 Eric Clapton
       45 James Taylor
       11 Natalie Merchant
       17 Red Hot Chili Peppers
       13 Shawn Mullins
       10 Stephen Stills
       15 Steve Winwood
       12 Susan Tedeschi
        8 The Allman Brothers Band
       13 The Pretenders
       12 U2
       13 Young MC
  

• Lots of financial data, tax data, resumes, blockparty invitations, corporate proprietary data etc etc.
• Pretty much no porn. Some naked "strong women", but we will choose not to expose you to them.

2008-01-12 Lamp

A bedside lamp with a remotely steampunk air to it. It had no bulb in it but one was procured and inserted and it worked. This is now fulfilling its purpose next to a new bed.

2008-01-12 Drop Plastic

A substantial roll of folded drop plastic for curtaining off areas under construction, and other such tasks. Convenient really, this will be used for the next set of replacement windows we put in. The roll is only 14 inches wide or so but the plastic folds out into a larger sheet.

2008-01-12 Brass

A small piece of brass that is the perfect size to make a new striker plate for a door that happens to be in need of one. No pic, you know what a small piece of brass looks like. Same door that got the mahogany earlier.

2008-01-09 Mahogany

A couple of pieces of mahogany showed up just as we were working on our front entranceway. The step/saddle/threshhold was junk so we tossed it and some form of custom made thing seemed in order. Voila, the materials (or most of them) showed up. From pickup time to install was less then three hours, a good turnaround.

2008-01-05 Tivo S2

A Tivo Series 2. This is untested and uninvestigated, watch this space. We have had several requests for these so if it works this should find a home pretty quickly.

Update: Tivo seems to work but does not have lifetime subscription on it (booo!) and we do not have the remote. All boring, sorry, no screenshots yet. It will be used by the Z dudes in some capacity we suspect.

2008-01-05 Laptop junk

A selection of laptop accessories including two base stations and some power supplies and such. A nice USB wheelmouse also. Shown, the two docking stations, which may end up on ebay as people seem to like these things there.

2008-01-05 Kenwood 5CD/DVD

A Kenwood 5CD and DVD changer, supports MP3 etc. This is more potential fodder for the record store dudes, initial testing seems good. There were alas no CDs in the tray, we love found music! Grainy pic shot during dodgy testing with Jesus Jones, Doubt. Not an especially good CD to test a CD player but the first we had to hand. Damn, going back to this whole physical media thing is tricky!

2008-01-05 Jeep Stroller

A double Jeep Wrangler stroller. These are not as nice as the Maclaren equivalents but other people seem to like them. This has a cupholder and little bag thingy and is in perfect condition so it will be hitting Craigslist soon.

2008-01-05 GPS

A Garmin Streetpilot III or some such, seemingly new in the box with all the accesories. Previous owner had some token effort at use but it looks very shiny etc. More investigation required on this one, we would love to salvage the tracks data from it to see where the previous owners drove but the preliminary powerup suggests it has never been used in anger.

2008-01-05 Cast Iron Radiator

A cast iron steam radiator, in OK shape. Two nicer ones were present but they were BOD (broken upon discard). It is so sad to see some really nice thing in perfect shape be tossed away only to break upon impact with the hard surface it falls on. Craigslist for one this unless any readers want to trade a few beers for it.

Update: Sold within 24 hours. Fine stuff.

2008-01-05 Bike Rack

An Xport bike rack suitable for a 2 inch receiver. Seems in perfect shape and will be sold as such on craigslist.

2008-01-03 Stroller Cornucopia

First a double jogger with super large wheels and in very nice shape. A puff of air all round and a quick clean and this is ready to go. The hood is missing, sad.

Next a single Maclaren, all very nice and functional. Needed a clean as the seat area was full of crumbs and hair (used for a dog maybe?).

What seems like an early Peg Perego Pliko. If you have used a Pliko you will know that these are pretty nice contraptions for general purpose offspring carriage. The fundamental design seem to be the same as later models so this may find a home somewhere.

2007-12-22 iBook

An iBook 14inch. Seems in sort of OK shape, may boot but had screen problem. Either way it awaits HD inspection and overall evaulation. Looks for parts of this on eBay next month I suspect.

2007-12-19 iBook Batteries.

Two batteries for a 12inch iBook aluminium, seemingly in good shape and one of which having a full charge in it. These will be tested and sent to handy iBook users who happen to require them.

2007-12-19 P4

A Dell Pentium 4 PC with speed around 1.5Ghz, missing memory and some plastic. will probably be used for parts or in the making of a chimera. No pics for now, you know what a Dell computing machine looks like.

2007-12-15 Trek Bike

A not so high quality Trek mountain bike. It is serviceable enough to be sold anyway, it will be going to craigslist. No apparent reason for discard, the tyres even had air in them. It gave us great entertainment riding around in the snow in the middle of the night already, great value for money.

Update: Sold as a commute bike to a happy guy who found it on the list of craig. We were almost sad to see it go as it had provided some amusement riding around in the snow in the meantime.

2007-12-15 Teak outdoor furniture.

Some teak outdoor furniture. A bench, two chairs and one armed chair all matching in a modern-ish style. The bench has some discard damage (i.e. something that seems have have occurred as it was thrown away) but that is easily fixable, we think. Otherwise they are all solid and just need a clean and maybe some teak oil. We could use these but we have a bunch of this type of stuff already so these may become available after some consideration.