Consolidation of Stuff

For the last week or so, I've been in the process of consolidating stuff. Which is the not so glamorous task of taking all the various parts and cast-offs and making use of them. This part of being a Propellerhead is not only less than fun, but often down-right laborious. Unfortunately it's something that has to be done and can be financially rewarding as well.

The crux of the matter is that, if you dabble in technology and upgrade on a regular basis, there's aways going to be leftovers. Much like the edible variety that clutters up your refrigerator, it's generally not anyone's first choice for dinner, but it's there, it's free and you'll feel much better about yourself if you go ahead and eat it instead of throwing it out. And as a result of my upgrading this last spring and most of the summer, there's quite a collection of various items that needed to be gotten rid of.

They run the gamut from various camera gear to computer parts, and even a DVD/Home Networking deadend that I got involved with a couple of years ago. Actually it all started when we decided to buy a new car to replace our 10 year old Honda Civic, so that had to be sold off first. That got the ball rolling and I've been at it ever since. Luckily the car sold relatively quickly and we were off and running. This is were eBay and/or Craig's List make their appearance. A few years ago, when we decided to move home from Chicago, I decided that it was time to get rid of some of my stuff that was on the edge of or fallen over the edge of obsolescence. There was the collection of 200+ Laserdiscs and about the same number of Betas as well as the decks to play them. DVD was really being to take hold, but there were still a number of die-hards that hung onto the perceived technical superiority of the uncompressed laserdisc video. So I took the more interesting of my collection and put them on eBay, then found a local place that gave me $5 a-pop for the rest (about 150) which as a great price. Pretty much everything else got sold on eBay as well. I just turn it into a virtual garage sale, which I took advantage of again when we moved to Dallas from Lubbock.

At any rate, I finally got off my hunkas and sold my flashes that had been rendered obsolete, by upgrade, the last of the D70 accessories and some tripod parts that I'd picked up for free since it was broken. This is something that I learned years ago (and it never fails to amaze my wife who just shakes her head); is that I will typically sell items on eBay for more than I originally paid for it. This is mostly due to the fact that I believe strongly (supported by experience) that anything on eBay will eventually reappear and if a buyer is persistent and patient enough, can be had for lower than the typical selling price. You just have to be disciplined enough to let the item go when it gets over what you know to be the price for a "good or great deal". I even sold off my technological dead end, a D-Link "networked" DVD Player that allows you to connect it to one or more computers across a home network. Sounds really cool....pain in the neck to use though. So I took about a $20 bath on it after a couple of years and sold it the other day.

Then it was on to the other accummulated stuff. Amoung the piles of laptop parts were 2 ThinkPads that needed to be put to use. One was an old machine that my brother had used as a electronic media computer in his A/V system which he sent me when he upgraded, and the other was my sister-in-law's old laptop that died and I replaced (with my wife's old machine) last year. The A/V machine required me to do some reconfiguring my cabinet so it would have a slide-out shelf to sit on. The other one though has sucked up most of my attention span over the last 2 days since it was one of those things where it was exhibiting an "intermittent" problem....meaning, sometimes it boots, but most of the time it doesn't. After seeking my brother's thought on it last night, I took his recommendation to pull the CPU and reapply the paste between it and the cooling fan. Made sense to me since that machine is almost 10 years old and has gone through 2 hard drives. However, it was a no go. Now, back to the drawing board for a first computer for daughter. Who is now quite insistent about having a computer now that she's seen me working on it and keeps asking when I'll be finished!

So, there's that to do and then to move on to computer #3 when I get done! There's a really interesting project waiting for me, in the form of my other brother-in-law's old PowerBook G4 Titanium with a broken screen hinge, bad optical drive and generally ugly cosmetics.

All these projects are the unfortunately ugly underside of the technology treadmill. For me the hunt and kill (finding great deals on eBay and CL) is much more fun, but then there has to be the occasional bouts of housekeeping where I clean out, and try to fix up old stuff to be "retasked".