jan 25 - 9pm ish
We got to go to the dentist today--the whole family--for our semi annual teeth cleaning and inspection. Wife and I passed, but the kids are all screwed up. one needs to see an oral surgeon, another needs to see an orthodontist, and the other needs a baby tooth pulled....ok, all 3 need to see an orthodontist. The one with the gap is in greatest need, though.
I didn't mention earlier, that the check from the guy in LV for whom I built and deliverd an engine, bounced. He did finally send a cashier's check to cover it. I wasn't too worried, because my friend up there could probably get him to pay up one way or another, if things got bad.
Gary (younger son who got that new old truck) and I have been tinkering with the engine that's going in it, getting all the parts figured out and cleaned up. We got more parts today at the parts store, most of which had to be ordered and will get here tomorrow. We've spent over $300 on it in two days. And I still have to order a couple hundred more bucks stuff from another place. I guess that's what happens when you want to do the job right...I could have reused most of the parts, but they'd be iffy.
A note about old computers....most of them are worthless, only a few fetch $$$. Mostly stuff that was built in the 70s and not mass marketed is what's being collected, and they're generally worth somewhere around what the cost new, or less, and that's not with inflated dollars. Say a computer system like an Altair 8800 cost $500 in 1976, and it had $1000 to $2000 worth of upgrades added at the time (upgrades would be things like a keyboard, a monitor, a cassette tape drive, etc, and each one would have an associated card to be plugged into the main unit). The whole thing would be worth $1000 or so today, so with an inflation factor of 3 to 5 over the past 30 years, it's still worth only a fraction of it's original cost.
And things like Commodores, TRaSh 80s, and PC clones are worth maybe $10-$50 depending on how complete and nice they are. There's a reason people give them to thrift stores...it's hard to throw away something that still does what it did when it was new, but is utterly worthless today because technology overtook it.
But it is neat to fiddle with something like an original IBM PC from 1982 that has 1/1000 or less of the power of a modern computer, and cost 10 to 20 times as much (adjusting for inflation)....knowing that it was state-of-the-art at the time, and the guys who are billionaires today were struggling back then to make the thing do the basics. I have a 1982 MS DOS manual that was written by Microsoft and looks like it was printed on a cheap Daisywheel printer, something like you would do at home. They've come a long ways, baby!
ahhh..it's getting to be beddy-bye time for all the little munchkins, so quiet once again overtakes the house.
We'll probably go out to dinner tomorrow, a guy that wife worked on a project with a time ago is visiting, so they want to get together, and I suppose I should go along and chaperone. Or at least play pool with the kids!
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