[conspire] Free stuff at toworrow's CABAL meeting

[Rick Moen]

Free stuff!  At tomorrow's CABAL meeting, you're invited to scoop up
any and all of this gear:

o  About a dozen serial and PS/2 mice
o  4-5 ATX power supply units.  (Yes, you may take a power cable
   from my box, for each PSU you adopt.  I forgot to take some out.)
o  One Iomega Zip drive, external.
o  One black t-shirt from local tech. startup Splunk, motto "Take the ShIT
   out of IT".
o  About four PS/2 keyboards
o  Set of CentOS 4.x CDs  (the best RHEL rebuild distro)
o  Four copies of _Running Linux_ from O'Reilly & Assoc.

Anything not adopted will get dumpstered, so grab while you can.  
All gear is tested & functional.

I'm not going to be there (or will arrive home very late), because I'm
attending a wedding in L.A.  Ross and Bruce will be in charge.  Cheryl 
expects to be home; Deirdre's at a Ruby on Rails conference in Chicago.
There's a cut-up beef roast in the refrigerator, available to all.

The K6 mentioned earlier (Enzo the Second) is gone:  Mark Weisler's
going to be doing network work with it.

Ethernet cables are in the usual place in the garage closet.
The table, hubs, AC power, etc. are already set up for the meeting.
If you need to borrow my CDs, they're in the kitchen.  

Ross, Bruce:  those are _five_ of my six CD cases.  Please look after
'em.  I accidentally took the sixth with me.  Also, maybe you won't mind
moving the "free stuff" collection to atop the washer.  Cheryl needed
washer access, so the "stuff" is temporarily on the long table in the
garage.


A word about "free stuff":  It's what the open source community deals in
(free knowledge, free assistance, free-as-in-freedom code), but people
are funny about it.  They hold back; they want to delay:  If you're
giving it away for free, there must be a catch.

I basically don't give away _junk_ gear (I'd warn you, anyway).  All
computer parts in my closet are winnowings after many years of
_discarding_ junk.  Most is specifically tested and known-good; if it
didn't pull its weight, I wouldn't have been spending rent money on it.

At the same time, computer gear doesn't age well:  Occasionally, you
have to reassess it, and decide the world has moved on.  All of the
above gear is trailing-edge (albeit good).  Using Linux instead of
legacy proprietary OSes adds a few years to equipment life, though it
can't do miracles.