Long Friday
Today started off before breakfast with a knock on the door. Was a guy I grew up with, that I had seen at a grocery store a month or so ago, and had mentioned then that I had a car or two for sale. He had gotten an old truck that needed a motor and decided to check with me and see what kind of engine was in the Crown Vic that I had told him about. We rode over and looked at it, and at some others that were parked by it. Then took a ride down into the field and looked at some down there. He made an offer on one and left his number for me to call the owner of the Crown Vic and see if he would take a bit less for it. He would and I called him back and he said he’d take the other 3 too. So that was 5 sold before breakfast. I ate and went to unlock the gate so the roll back could get in. They got here and we talked about some of the others and I sold them 6 more junkers. Before the day was out they ended up buying a total of 14. They finished up with the last load about 9:30 pm. I’m beat and have a few less vehicles. Still have 10 cars and trucks left counting the 2 we drive. 🙄 They are interested in some of the others but I haven’t decided to get rid of them yet. May end up selling them a bunch of other stuff as they are interested in any kind of scrap metal and I have got piles of old washers and dryers and fridges and other stuff like that. They told me to pile it all up and they would come over and make me an offer so I guess in the next few weeks I’ll do just that.
Think I am gonna read some feeds and then call it a night. Hoping that the storms wait till daylight to get here. Till tomorrow… 😉
Themocracy
Sounds like a long but productive day. Got rid of some junkers and acquired some cash. Sounds like a good deal.
My day was different. Went and was a judge at the Gadsden City Schools TechBlitz. Kindergarden through 12th grade. I saw/judged stuff from 3-12 grade. Saw some pretty neat stuff. Fourth-graders from one school really did some nice stuff, as well as others from elsewhere. One 9th grader made a digital book using Blender, and several other things, and it was really neat. Dude was a stone geek–when we (the judges) asked him a question, we invariably got more information back than we wanted. Just like me. He won his division ($50 for first, $25 for second) and was a VERY close second for Best of Show ($100). Best of show went to one of the afore-mentioned 4th graders who made a Lego MindStorm robot claw (not a big deal, IMHO) and then programmed it to where he could operate it with the Lego controls, F-keys on the computer, or a Wii remote! That was a big deal, we thought, and his documentation would make most manufacturers blush in embaressement at the though of how bad THEIR documentation is in comparison. All-in-all, a very neat experience.
Afterwards, I made a brief stop at home and then went in and worked for a couple of hours. Looks like we will get an Xserve, Apple made a good price for one (and it wouldn’t be that bad a price for a Dell, or HP, and I speaking from knowledge of recent bids, not generally) and the ease of use and extended capability of the software was just a real deal-maker. Gee, I sound like a fanboy, don’t I? Well, maybe so, but it is REAL nice to buy one thing, and then have it do several different things that you need done, out of the box (once you turn on what you want–it comes out of the box with everything turned off–you enable what you want, which is the way it should be, methinks) without having to integrate/coax/beat over the head a bunch of 3rd-party software to get it to half-ass work. Yes, you can get just about ANYTHING that you want to run on Windoze, but you will:
A. pay for it, because it won’t come with Windoze.
B. pay for it in time to get working, because it will ALWAYS require severe tweaking to get it going. Always. Or close enough to always as to be not worth mentioning. Looking forward to playing with the demo machine, and with the production machine when it gets here.
Well, got a drive from a lightning-struck machine formatting whilst I type. Hope it’s OK, I guess I’ll see. At least it is formatting. I think it is OK, which is more than I can say for the motherboard. I think the motherboard bit the big one, and then corrupted the HD on the first few attempts at reboot–to begin with, the machine would try to boot, and then die, and I think it corrupted the files on the drive. Anyway, nothing there I wanted, or the former owners, so I didn’t spend any time trying to save it when I hooked it up (via an external USB adapter) and it said “Unreadable, files corrupt”. After formatting I’ll try loading/reading some stuff and if that works, I’ll pop it in a machine that I want to load Kubuntu onto, and that won’t have any critical files on it for a while. We’ll see.
Have a good day!