New item to discuss: A while back, I half-jokingly, half-seriously talked about auctioning off my old college machine, Pandora (the inspiration for
this comic). The whole idea was primarily to clear the rather large space in the office that her full-tower case occupies while making a tiny bit of quick cash on the side. I don't use this machine for anything anymore mostly because of its age (I'll give the vital stats in a bit), so it's a waste of valuable space in an already cluttered room.
Well, I never went through with the auction, mostly because I've been uncertain of how to ship the darn thing to whoever won the auction. My guess is that the shipping alone would be more than what the machine would go for in the auction, and that's just the CPU; last I heard, there was no interest in the accompanying monitor and/or dot-matrix printer. So I've held off on this, dragged my feet, and otherwise largely forgot about the whole thing... until last night.
kmd and I had some old friends over to visit this week (we were their mid-way layover in their move from Tampa, FL, to Syracuse, NY), and the topic of the auction of Pandora came up. Someone suggested that I bring Pandora to Dragon*Con and hold the auction there. Since we're driving to Atlanta anyway, we won't have to pay for shipping, and I'll assume no one will bid on the thing if they don't have a way to transport it back home anyway. This unfortunately limits the number of potential bidders, because I know not everyone who may be interested in bidding will be able to reach the con. But it certainly clears up a lot of problems that held me back from holding the auction.
So what do you guys think? Is anyone (aside from Unit, whose answer I already know what it is
) potentially interested? I assure you, there's very little practical use for this machine now aside from perhaps making it a hardware network gateway (and even then you'll need to add in a couple ISA NICs first (that's right, this is pre-PCI)). The only real value in this machine is the fact that (a) it was owned by me and (b) the very first GPF comics were probably generated on this machine.
The details of the auction will eventually have to be worked out, but I figure it will be some sort of silent auction, with the winner being determined perhaps at the prerequisite Webcomics panel. Those details can be hashed out later, once it's decided if there actually will
be an auction.
The vital stats: AMD 486 100MHz generic PC, 32MB RAM, approximately 3GB HD (across two disks), 4x CD-ROM, generic VESA video card with a whopping 1MB of video RAM. The main HD is a little flakey and requires that the system warm up first before it will actually run (it will report a "hard drive not found" error at first, but after a few minutes it can be rebooted and will boot normally). The parallel port doesn't stay in place and will fall inside the case, so the only way to hook a printer up to it is to open the case and push the DB-25 from the inside while pushing the cable on from the outside (but it
does work). Currently, it has Red Hat 7.1 installed, but I'll wipe the drives and install Fedora Core 1 before giving it away. I can also sign the case if so desired, and earlier talks had me putting all the GPF comics from the beginning up to the auction date on the HD as a bonus (not the high-res originals, but at least the High-Def versions).
As usual, my default location will be the table in Artists' Alley. I might try and slip out and see a few stars (epecially 