Attitude Adjustment

I made over $1,000.00 selling the Cisco switches I bought at an auction. I used a good chunk of it at Trek Expo last weekend and I ordered some upgrades for my computer. (The upgrades are MIA - FedEx appears to have lost them and, due to the holiday, they won't start a trace until Wednesday.) It being the first part of the month, I decided to take a trip to First Saturday in Dallas. The first saturday sale is held on the first saturday of every month (rain, shine, holiday, doesn't matter) near the West End in Dallas. It's nerdvana, basically. Vendors set up booths full of computer parts, electronics, and broken crap they're hoping to sell to someone. You can find everything from complete, fairly new servers to obscure connector cables and widgets that will make you say, "I've been looking for one of those!" Some of the vendors obviously have a business and this is just something extra they do. They have well-lit booths, new parts in boxes, charge you tax, issue receipts, and offer warranties. Most of them, however, are people that apparently go to surplus auctions, buy stuff in lots, or have wholesale connections. Caveat Emptor. It had been held in a large parking lot that was difficult to find but has moved back to its original location "under the bridge." It's literally under I-35. You pretty much get off the highway and take the exit ramp into the parking lot across the street.

Kevin and I went last September. I planned on doing something similar this trip - leave town right after work, drive to Dallas, shop for a few hours, then head home. I was excited to get going and I had thought about hitting a drive-through but we had several boxes of leftovers in the fridge so I invited Kevin over for dinner before we left. He's been going through some of the same BS and having similar health issues I had a couple of years ago. He was very down when he arrived.

We ate our leftovers, he drank my last beer (I let him have it), and he pissed and moaned for a bit. I tried to cheer him up but it just didn't look like it was going to happen. I told him I wanted no bad karma in my car but his mood didn't change much. I was afraid I was going to get dragged down as we drove in the car for the next 5 hours and wasn't looking forward to it. I needn't have worried. We didn't even make it a mile before we had the tunes cranked, we were making fart jokes (and farts) to each other, and we were on our way. We both left our baggage at the house.

Given my recent financial gains, I took $200.00 with me. I had my eye out for a couple of items but wasn't going down with a real need. I, of course, found plenty to spend money on.

One of the things I was looking for was a new computer case. I could probably use one of the cases I already have but 1) the newer power supplies would be a better fit with the new mobo and 2) I wasn't sure what I was going to do with the system I'm using now. For $35.70 I bought a tool-less case (no screws!) and a 400W power supply. I do a lot with DVD burning but I only have a single-layer 4x burner. The guy selling the case had some Sony 16x dual-layer burners so I picked one of those up for $43.30.

Just like last time, I found some boxes of surplus hard drives. I nabbed an 80gig, a 120gig and a 12cm system fan for $15. I have no idea if the drives work or not.

I kept my eye out for some bargains for the office. I found several but didn't want to sacrifice my personal cashflow (most of the vendors only take cash). I found a linux-based rack server (Cobalt RaQ4) for $50, several Dell laptop docking stations for $20 each and a dual Xeon server for $450. Alas, none of that made it home with me.

Kevin and I saw some 4U rack servers sitting in a stack. They were obviously older but they said $15 each or 2 for $25. The price piqued our interest. We examined them then asked the vendor if we could pop the top. We did and discovered that they were dual Pentium II systems with a CD-ROM, Floppy, hard drive of undetermined capacity and no RAM. The advantage, however, is that a standard motherboard could be dropped into them. We offered the lady $20 for 2 and she took it. In retrospect, I should have grabbed a third for the office. I powered mine up Saturday afternoon and it came on but I still haven't tested it because my extra RAM was at the office. I'll be testing it later today and over the holiday.

As we walked around some more, we came across a vendor with new hard drives. I was interested to notice that a 200GB drive was only $60 (that's $0.30 per gigabyte) and considered getting one until I saw the sign that said a 250GB drive was $65 (that's $0.26 per gig). Given my new hardware will support Serial ATA, I bought my first SATA drive for $65.

Yes, there were some good bargains but half the reason for going was the journey there and back. Both Kevin and I got a refreshed attitude and will be going into the holiday with a smile.

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p.s. I've started sorting through the pictures from last weekend. It's probably going to take me another 3-4 weeks before I get them posted on the web site. There will be stories to go along with them.