This has been a pretty wild year. I was a victim of Boeing's mismanagement and greed, in the form of their ongoing layoffs, as of January 2003. My wife and I have been surviving on my unemployment bennies, her day job, a little bit from Blue Feather, and some income from the sale of my father's old house in Berkeley ever since.
These conditions all put an interesting spin on Scrounge 2K3, mainly by limiting the amount that I could spend. In fact, there was some doubt that I'd be able to do my annual Bay Area run this year at all. I went ahead, though, because it's a lot more than just a chance to chase down cool electronic goodies; It's seeing family and friends that I grew up with as well! Given how nasty and long Washington state winters can be, I knew I'd be Really Bad Company if I didn't go, and my wife (God bless her!) didn't want to deal with that possibility any more than I did.
So, with that in mind... I just finished posting the updates to the California swaps page. Of particular interest is the fact that Kaiser Tech has taken the (very unofficial) Traveling Technoid Award for Best Bay Area Surplus Store for the second year in a row. Seriously, gang, Dan Burtis is a heck of a good guy, and he's got some great deals in that warehouse of his. Check it out if you get the chance.
More good news comes in the form of a new entry in the listings: Triangle Machinery and Tool, a surplus dealer specializing in the kinds of parts, tools, and supplies that drive robotics builders nuts. This is a place that participants in the TV series "Junkyard Wars" would, I think, be drooling about in short order.
Each trip always turns up at least one fly in the ointment, as it were, and 2K3 was no exception. Once again, HSC Electronics, aka Halted Specialties, has proven that they don't really want to sell some of the (admittedly nice!) test gear they have in the store; They just like to display it with outlandish prices that would make Tucker Electronics look tame by comparison. We're talking no contact with Reality at all, folks.
In short, HSC is still rated as a 'Scrounger Rip-Off' on my page, and they will remain in that state until they start seeing reason where their test gear pricing is concerned.
Some more bits of bad news: First, Sharon Industries seems to have vanished. This is unfortunate, as they had tremendous potential. I have absolutely no information on when they went under, or what happened to their inventory. Just an empty building with no forwarding address.
Finally, there's the Saga of ACCRC, aka Aftermath Technologies. It seems that someone washed them in hot water, and boy, did they ever shrink as a result! They moved out of the old Oakland Creamery building back in July 2003, relocating themselves into a cramped warehouse about one-third the size of the Creamery. Said warehouse is on the Berkeley waterfront, not far from the Marina, and looks like it's going to be their home for a long time to come.
Essentially, although they're doing some very worthy things for some equally worthy causes, they're no longer the scrounger's resource that they were. Even the used computer place out front (Tom's Computer Warehouse, or some such silliness) was so lousy that I didn't even bother including them in the listings.
One saving grace that ACCRC has for the serious scrounger: They have an ever-changing 'Free Stuff' pile near the front of the warehouse. This, if nothing else, is worth keeping an eye on.
Upcoming events! I will have a table at the North Kitsap ARC swap meet on Oct. 11th, once again offering on-site programming for (programmable) Motorola radios, and selling off electronics that tend to breed in my garage. I hope to see some of the Technoid's readers there, and I hope you'll swing by and at least tell me you saw this (admittedly shameless) plug.
That's all for now. Keep the peace(es).
The Puyallup swap meet was something of a bust this year, and certainly a pale shadow of the 2002 event! Not only was there a lower seller population, there was also a much lower count of Interesting Stuff. I did come away with a few small parts, and some older Dovetron RTTY terminal units, but I also came away in a state of annoyance.
Why, you ask? Simple. I went to a lot of trouble to advertise Blue Feather's programming and conversion services for Motorola radios, and there was certainly no lack of such at the swap. However, despite some of the sellers of such trying to send people my way, and despite my print ad in the swap flyer and the big LED sign I had set up, I didn't get ONE single programming job.
It wasn't a total loss, though. The print ad netted me some business later on, and I'm getting bites through the RF Services section of the Blue Feather web site. I guess I really can't complain too much, but, dang it... I was hoping for at least ONE chance to strut my stuff during the swap itself. ;-)
I'm going to take a hard look at different ham swap meets in the Puget Sound region this year to see which ones may be good prospects to set up at. Ebay can't have claimed all the good Motorola-oriented sellers!
Speaking of swap meets and surplus, an interesting bit of poetic justice came to my attention during my 2002 scrounge trip to the Bay Area. I decided to take a run by Haltek's old site to see if anything had been done with the buildings. The background on this, in case you didn't know or don't recall, is that Haltek Electronics, one of the best surplus outlets in the Bay Area, was unfairly forced out of business through the actions of a very greedy and unscrupulous jackass of a landlord. See the swap and surplus store listings for California for more details.
Anyway, I drove by about the middle of the week, during normal business hours, and got a very pleasant (in terms of a sense of justice having been done) surprise: Not only was Haltek's old building STILL empty (as far as I know, the land-ass responsible for Haltek's demise never did find a new tenant), but the adjacent building, formerly held by Test Labs, Inc., and owned by the same land-ass, was also empty! It seems that Test Labs moved to Sacramento some time ago, leaving the aforementioned land-ass with not one but TWO very expensive (in terms of property taxes and utilities) buildings. Justice has indeed been served!
HSC (Halted Specialties) hasn't changed a bit, BTW. As of August 2002, they're still trying to push gross overpricing on what little test gear they have. I will say that the quantity of it, as well as the quality, has dropped significantly since 2001.
Based on that, I cannot rule out the possibility that the bad rating on my page, coupled with other techies who may have visited the store and come away disgusted, is having an ongoing effect. All I can say is keep up the pressure! If you see something you want at HSC, and the price is too high, AND they won't flex on it, take your business elsewhere and make DARN sure they know why you're walking out.
Justice Dept. Caves in, politicians to blame...
And that just about sums it up, doesn't it? The laughable "settlement" that was reached with M$ was clearly a product of bought-and-paid-for lawyers and politicians. Don't even get me started on George "The Shrub" Bush's involvement. That maniacal war-monger not only told DoJ to back off, even after M$ had been found guilty and convicted of monopoly power abuse by no less than NINE federal judges, but he's also playing yes-man to John "Hitler" Ashcroft's personal agenda of constitution-trampling.
I could practically write a book on how I feel about the ongoing war. Instead, I think I will sum things up in a few easy Unix command lines.
# rm -rf /bin/laden
# rm -rf /etc/TheShrub
# rm -rf /etc/ashcroft
Linus Torvalds must be one happy camper by now. His pet OS has become one of the hottest things since sliced bread. However, it's all too easy to let hype overrun common sense, especially when spurred on by mass media news reports.
What I'm saying is that Linux is only one choice, and it does not have its roots in "true" Unix. There are other open-source OS's that have been around a lot longer than Linux, that did grow out of the Unix source tree, and that, in many cases, appear to be a more stable and secure choice for a server than any Linux release.
As an example, I find that FreeBSD , NetBSD , and OpenBSD support my applications and needs far better than any Linux release. I've had consistent troubles with SCSI tape support under Linux, troubles that magically vanish when I try the same thing on one of the other *nix OS's, and I much prefer OpenBSD's "Secure by Default" configuration for Internet-connected servers to Linux's model of "Tweak for maximum security."
If you find Linux to be a Good Thing for your apps, great! More power to you. But don't ignore the possibility that one of the *BSD packages may be a better choice for what you're doing.
'Til next time...
Last updated 22-Sep-03 by Bruce Lane