Secret Santa/White Elephant 2007

I really like doing Secret Santa stuff with my friends, but I like to do it in my own way. I like giving gifts that are useful, cheap and get the extra stuff out of my house.

Last year I gave away coffee mugs. One thing a teacher has more than enough of are coffee mugs. Every conference, meeting, seminar, and gathering there is a coffee mug that goes with it. All my mugs were festively package in those popcorn tins the Boy Scouts sell every year around fall. I have over half a dozen of the those tins and more than enough coffee mugs, so SHAZAM! Instant Xmas gifts.

This year I went a different route. We can only spend under $5. No Problem. University Surplus was giving away these puppies for a buck a piece! The hard drives were another dollar each. All these cuties needed was a little cleaning and installing the hard drive. They all work and it amused me to give each one a theme and load different software on each of them. (I said they needed to be useful, remember.)

What do I find amazing? I paid $2500 for my Mac SE with 2 disk drives, 1 megabyte of memory and some software. The most expensive Mac here is an Mac SE/30 that went for $6500, back in the day. That's with all the bells and whistles. Some of the hard drives I added were bigger than the original stock computer so the value would be higher.

So what are the Themes? (I know you are dying to ask.)

Old School - Mac SE (800K Drive) - Packed with MacWrite, Mac Paint, and Public Domain games.

I See Stars - Mac SE (Superdrive) - Packed with Astronomy software: Sky Travel, Voyager 1.2 and some cool PD astronomy software and PD games.

Imagination - Mac SE/30 - Packed with MS Word, MS Excel, Superpaint and PD games.

Weird Science - Mac SE (Superdrive)- packed with all my old Physics, Astronomy, Physicals Science software from grad school and PD games.

Come-Pile-On-Me - Mac SE (Superdrive) - Packed with my old Fortran77, Turbo pascal, and Think C compilers. Plus PD games.

All the software comes from my old stuff I don't use anymore, because modern Macintosh don't even have floppy drives! So everything is just given away now.