Saturday -3/07/26
today I drrove to he museum and led the 12pm tour. I noticed that the 2pm tour was shown as “canceled” so I guess none of my fellow docents signed up. Surprises me, but there you go. I edited myself on the fly, speeding through parts of my usual patter, to be sure to get my party of a dozen or so back to the lobby in time for them to join the live 1401 demo at 1pm.
For an hour before, and about 3 hours after, I worked with Bert on a technical project here. Mary Beth, queen of the gift shop, had accumulated a large cart stacked on three shelves with various kinds of electronic devices. When people die, the family is responsible for clearing their possessions out of that apartment. Quite often, after they cherry-pick the very best or most meaningful items, the family will just say to the gift shop people, you take it, thanks byeeee.
Sorry, the gift shop has been renamed, it is the Treasure Trove. Run entirely by residents, it carries stuff like distilled water for CPAP machines, computer paper, See’s Candy, but also stocks lots of used clothing and dishware and canes and such, acquired by the above process. In addition Mary Beth and her fellow volunteers process a lot of stuff that isn’t really saleable, which they pass on to Goodwill or the Ecumenical Hunger Project.
Anyway, they ad this cart stacked with dozens and dozens of things and they wanted somebody technical to evaluate them, are they useful? Saleable? Worth donating? Or just e-waste? Facilities has a special room in the basement where they collect old TVs and other e-waste until they get a contractor in to clear it.
Some of the things I looked at today were clock radios, iPad keyboards, several of those digital picture frame devices, power banks for traveling, a digital audio recorder, a digital camera… It took me and Bert together at least 3 hours to sort it all out. Over 60% went to the e-waste room. The rest we put tentative prices on, typically half of what an identical object was getting on eBay. Lot of work but satisfying.
One item I kept for myself, a tiny little mini-vacuum cleaner for dusting off computer keyboards. And another is the most elegant little digital camera, a Canon PowerShot Elph, dating to about 2004. Almost mint condition, with a cute red leather case, spare batteries, a charger. It seems to be working but didn’t have an SD card in it. I got an SD card out of my drawer but it couldn’t format it. Because? Because this card was an 8GB one, and when I checked the manual, the largest card the camera knew about was 512MB. So I’ve gone on eBay and ordered a couple of 128MB SD cards and hopefully it will be able to deal with those.
I mean, why bother? Since the phone in my pocket takes far better pictures. I don’t know, it’s just a lovely little object and I want to verify it still works.
Codgerville 