2008-04-12 Cast Iron

A cast iron thingy that allows one to bake things in the shapes of various animals. Wow! It has seemingly never been used. This will be donated to somebody who might have a use for it.

.

2008-03-29 Switch Plates

A bunch of brass switch covers, mostly of them OK and one ornately ugly. These are for a neighbour who may have need for such.

2008-03-29 Pipe Wrench

This is a cheapo junky pipe wrench but will be handy to keep in a car or some such place where it might provie of crucial usefullness one day.

2008-03-29 Mac Tower

A Mac G4 tower missing HD but full of memory. THis will be invesitgated for its usefuless but we suspect it is getting a bit old to be anything but fanboy fodder.

2008-03-29 Bag

A random travelling bag that has a couple of rips but is otherwise in very usable shape. This will be stored for the next visiting European to use to take all their swag home with. Now the US really does have monopoly money we expect more surgical shopping strikes to pass through and require extra bags for homeward transportation.

2008-03-26 Tie down

A tie down that presumably literally fell off the back of a lorry. It will come in handy for our trailor. Note this is genuine "stuff" because even though the owner lost it they threw it away by not coming back for it.

2008-03-26 Schwinn

We got a modern Schwinn racing style bike a while ago and recently found the parts to fix it up. The handlebars were rusty and drop style, not popular and not nice. We put on some straight bars and old schwinn sparkly grips and gave the thing a clean up and voila. This may already have a home waiting for it.

2008-03-25 Cookware

A Griswold No9 skillet in excellent condition. This one is nicer than ours in certain details so we will use this and pass our existing Griswold No9 on. Shown here after cleaning and a light cure at 450F.

An anonymous cast iron skillet marked only "8" on the handle and "8-" underneath". It has a nicely shaped handle, very nice interior and a heat ring so this will displace our prior skillet of this size, a Wagner. Again the Wagner will find a home with a worthy kitchen, after all we have been breaking it in for a few years now.....

A Griswold baster dutch oven with wire handle. The lid has the handle broken off, such a shame. This is a possible donation as we are not sure we need this. Pic shows it in gloriously unrestored state, though note that the previous two looked like this a short while before their pictures were taken. Most of the appearance problems stem from a weird dusty coating. The lid on this is a beautiful casting.

2008-03-25 Bike Stuff

Some bike stuff, we need to replenish stock to that we can sell to the hipsters for the spring bike awakening. No pics yet.

2008-03-22 Kelty Jogging Stroller

A Kelty Jogging Stroller in fine condition. This is an interesting artifact in that is a full jogging stroller, with better standard features than most but it folds like a Maclaren stroller. It is way superior on features to almost every other jogger out there. Surplus to our requirements but it will make a blazing appearance on craigslist.

2008-03-22 DVD Player

Small form-factor DVD player that also plays endless other alphabet soup formats. Complete with manual and remote. This is of course pretty useless to us but is a standing request from somebody in need of one. (Yours Russ, just get it out of our house!).

2008-03-22 Book Selection

A pile of books, nothing too thrilling but some OK stuff there. Mythology book for anthro-prof friend, Linux book for the next noob that asks me about Linux, wine book for some vinophilic friends, some of them to read and some for reference.

2008-03-22 Baby Seat

A fancy shiny Peg Perego baby seat for use in those newfangled automobiles. This is a good seat in excellent condition and it arrives just in time, sort of. It was not even very dirty but it got a good wash anyway. It came with the base but that is not shown in the pic:

2008-03-08 Radiator

Small cast iron radiator, usable for water or steam. Available until it sells on the list of craig.

2008-03-08 Jogger

A nice shiny green jogging stroller, all complete and ready to go. It is a bit of a strange shape in the area that is in immediate contact with the offspring's butt, but there you go. It does seem to work though and no apparent reason for discard. Craigslist for this.

2008-03-08 40 inch TV

A Gateway 40 inch TV/monitor. It has some issues, often there is fuzzy ghosting all over it especially at startup, but this pic shows it perfectly clear. We will probe its precise deficiencies and see if it can be used.

2008-03-06 Hard Drives

A colleague found some RAID arrays being tossed, and inside were 60 or so seemingly good 120G Western Digital hard drives. Now we would not want to use these in a RAID type application now, much easier just to go buy 7 1TB drives. But for random machines that need a new HD or an extra 120G or sneaker drives, they seem just fine. We will test them as we use them, you may also if you need one.

No investigation of drive content here for several obvious reasons. Sorry.

2008-03-01 Rocking Horse

A wooden FAO Schwarz rocking horse in OK shape. It seems to function quite well as an offspring amuser so it will be deployed in the offspring amusement device zone.

2008-03-01 Drop Cloth

A roll of plastic drop cloth. Super handy!

2008-03-01 Dell P4 machines

Three Dell Pentium 4 PC machines all seemingly complete and in good order, they were all dumped off by the same guy. Jumping ahead, they all seem to come from the office of a "fund of funds manager".

First one is a hyperthreading 2.8Ghz 512M RAM with an 80G HD. No reason for discard, boots to XP fine. The following summarizes their computer usage:

• Music, 699 mp3s, seemingly sourced from Limewire, well represented artists shown here

       28 disturbed 
       14 blue october 
       12 nickelback 
       11 vertical horizon 
       10 pink 
       10 maroon 5 
       10 concrete blonde 
        9 vast 
        9 queen 
        9 pm dawn 
        9 my chemical romance 
        9 house of pain 
        9 him 
        9 fall out boy 
        8 toad the wet sprocket 
        8 korn 
        8 blake lewis 
  

• Lots of (gothic?) wedding pics and baby pics. Lovely. You are invited to guess, based on the music selection, whether the former owners have tattoos or not. Go on, guess.
• IE caches completely empty, cleaned we would say. Given the facts that the cache dirs were present and these machines are all from a common admin domain and the others have full caches I would say that this user surfed loads of NSFW stuff and knew enough to clean up. We may try an undelete on this at some stage.
• Documents present include resumes, house purchase docs, pleading letters to lawyers, that sort of thing.

The next one is also a Dell hyperthreading machine, 2.6Ghz, 512M RAM, 80G HD. It seems to function well with no apparent reason for discard. Only 15G or so of the disk used. Salient points include:

• Browser cache present and correct, no porn visible upon quick check.
• Lots of google maps usage, many closeup zooms of houses on satellite view.
• Recycler was full of pics, business documents and all sorts of good stuff. Good job they threw these out before tossing the machine. Dop!
• One user has lots of Dell stuff in their cache, presumably browsing for the replacement machine.
• 5 mp3s, bah!

Next machine is a Dell Pentium 4 1.6Ghz 384M RAM with a 20G HD. No apparent reason for discard, seems to work fine. Though obviously if you are going to toss the above machines this one is going to go also.

• Cache has lots of Britney and Rudy pics and no porn.
• The dir "Copy of g drive" has all sorts of stuff in it that may have been forgotten there, lots of stuff presumably related to managing funds of funds. Mixed docs, ppt, and xls. How do these people do any work with these constraints?

The 2.8 benchmarked 12300 secs vs an existing machine's 15600 secs, and hence will be pressed into service.