The Best Thing I Got for Christmas

You seen all the crap I keep in my pockets and book bag: Blackberry, iTouch, PSP, iBook, etc... Each one has a charger and about 6 feet of electrical cord. In some cases I have two charges, one at home and the other for Work/Travel. The only good thing that has happen in the past two years: They are all rechargeable and most business are staring to use the Mini USB styled port. That last one is starting to change back into chaos. I guess the "powers that be" found out that the mini USB made thing to convenient. Poeple started using their computer to charge their phone and one crap. I do it all the time. The computer already on all day, night as well use it for something other than playing Freecell and WoW.

I'm pretty broken up about how many trees I have to kill in the form of coal to charge all my toys. I've been trying to use rechargeable batteries whenever I can, but even those are not the best for the environment. (By the way... all the sex toys run on rechargeable batteries and the line forms to the left ladies. Well except the 220 volt monster I own.)

As I was saying, I been looking for a solar recharger for quite awhile. The Solio Classic charger is one of the best I've seen. You can read the features yourself, but the key is it charges a set of internal batteries so you can use it anytime. When it's sunny you can charge your stuff or the Solio. At night you can plug your stuff in and it will charge your cell phone from the internal batteries. It's darn near perfect. The price is a little high for the basic package (about $80) plus you need special tips for each object you want to charge. I really wish the mini-USB port would just be the standard. Fortunately that's one of the tips I received as well, along with another tip for my iTouch/iPod.

I just charged my Blackberry today and it took about 2-3 hours. That's about normal for hooking it to the computer as well.


Now if I could convince the High Priestess to let me cover the house with solar panels maybe I could off set the electricity use in the lab and the Mancave.

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.