Solace in utility

I should explain what I've been doing for the past few weeks. You know a tad about my new job as a salescritter on an inbound phone bank at AT&Love. I'm still in training, so I don't dislike it yet. My training group of eleven people found out that we are going to be the founding members of a new team. We'll sit near each other and ride each other's energy. This company is so big yet so friendly that I'm willing to give it a full try. I want to see how much of the salesman is left in me after years in front of computers.
( Click here to find out what's left. )

Dude, you're throwing away a Dell

The older I get, the less I am afraid of trash. If you still feel that putting something in the garbage means that thing ceases to exist, you have no idea how much free stuff you're missing.

I was taking out the normal trash -- pizza boxes, chicken bones, medical waste (okay, dental floss) -- when I found two amazing scores:

1. An unused French press, complete with instructions still in the decanter;
2. A midtower computer from about 1998.

This rocked my geeky world. I shook out the bigger dust bunnies and the coffee grounds and hauled it to my apartment.
( If you're not into geek hardware runs, don't click here. )

More journalism about old geek hardware

If you're a metro Boston geek and you haven't been to You-Do-It Electronics, you should check it out. You will leave feeling less geeky than usual but more in touch with the geek events of your childhood.

I was looking for silicone heat sink paste. You put a decent-sized drop on top of a CPU, then put a manifold on top of that. It fills the microscopic cracks between the metal surfaces to assist heat transfer and dissipation. I bought two 6-gram tubes for 99 cents each and wound up having plenty of the first tube left over.

On the way to finding this paste I walked through aisles of...
( Of what? What? You're killin' me, here! )