A Laptop, Some Repeaters, a Sailboat, And a Quarter-Ton Server

Picking up from my last post, I was part of a discussion to determine how far you could push sites such as Freecycle and Craigslist, where people give and get items for free. Would people really treasure my junk? Here's my experience; what's yours?

Let's start with a Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop that I owned for about 6 years. I don't know the exact specs, but it was running GNU/Linux and everything except the battery worked. I posted it on Craigslist - I got 15 "I'll take its" in 10 minutes. The guy picked it up the next day for his ten year old daughter to use. I felt great.

Next one; ten circa-1992 Thinnet repeaters with BNC connectors. For those not on the floor laughing, nowadays these are about as useful as shouting "One!" and "Zero!" into two tin cans with a string between them. Posted on Freecycle and gone in 30 minutes, to a guy right down the street from me. He needed then to run some old system that was still in use.

Sailboat. This is no joke; Freecycle lets people asks for items as well, so one guy asked for a sailboat for his family to cruise around in. After taking considerable flak from the rest of the group for asking for such a 'luxurious' item, he got it! A week later, a guy offered a 14-foot sailboat that needed work, had a trailer with two flat tires, and he just wanted the thing out of his yard.

Finally, a 500 pound server; this one is my favorite. This thing was huge - three feet high, two feet wide, two feet deep - and solid metal. It took three men to move it with a handtruck. There were dozens of hard drives, backup power supplies - the works - but it was old. We had tried for over a year to get rid of it; it sat in the main hallway, sometimes being used as a table. Then I posted it on Freecycle.

Gone. In under a minute, to a guy that wanted to run an Internet site. He picked it up that day.

[one more, just got rid of a broken coffee maker using Craigslist in half an hour! Mark]