Wayne,

Please don't regard this as a flame (although it may sound like one).

TRUISMS AND GENERAL COMMENTS ON SCROUNGING:

• If it looks too good to be true, it is probably much less good than it looks.

• Unless someone's taken a hammer to it or something, you can't tell if a device is functional by visual inspection.

• Be prepared for frustration. I try to keep a six-pack handy for such circumstances. Music helps.

• DUST, HEAT, and STATIC ELECTRICITY are the biggest enemies of electronic devices.

• Parts with configuration jumpers and without manuals are probably worthless. When scrounging, try to find manuals for the things you get even if you don't know the first damn thing about what they are trying to say. Whoever you con into helping you may be able to decipher them. They may flat out refuse to help if you don't have them. Remember, they have lives too.

• I've worked with people who throw manuals in the trash. There's a special place for them in the afterlife. I hear it's very HOT there.

• Scrounging cheap computer stuff is a never ending task. Don't stop when you've got the first parts to make a complete system.

• You may find that some of the things you acquire for free are broken. This is good! You can then take them apart and learn something with a clear conscience. You may even see some simple mechanical defect that you can fix! The platters of old hard disks make nifty Christmas ornaments.

ON KEYBOARDS:

• I have about the same regard for $25 keyboards as you have for $9 mice. I like keyboards that have a click you can feel rather than the mushy ones. That way I KNOW when I've miskeyed something before I even look at the screen.

ON KEYBOARD ENVIRONMENTS:

• Keep the "expletive deleted" staples and paper clips away from your computer. They are alive and will leap into the worst possible place. Invariably, this will happen just before the most important deadline of your carreer, and no substitute keyboard will be available for any amount of money in time for you to meet that deadline. Coffee and soda are also particularly notorious for the same reasons.

ON MOUSE CLEANING:

• I would only recommend using alchohol on the rollers that the mouse ball turns. I just wash the mouse ball itself with tap water. Rubbing alchohol will eventually make the soft sticky rubber mouse ball hard and slippery. Back in the days of typewriters, (remember those?) people that used rubbing alchohol to clean ink off the rubber platen roller found out about this. I also remember similar cautions from the Diskwasher folks about alchohol leaching out the lubricant/softener/plastisizer of vinyl records. My personal experience has been that lumps of gunk on the little rollers, or animal fur wrapped around their axles is more of a problem than contamination of the ball.

MOUSE ENVIRONMENTS:

• Here's a note to those people that are in the habit of using hand lotion several times a day. It's GREASE. The residue is left on everything touched afterwards. It combines with the dust on your desk to make DIRTY GREASE. Guess what happens when you roll a mouse around on a surface covered with FILTHY GREASE. As proof, just walk around a typical work place, and note which desks have a bottle of hand lotion there. Does the keyboard look grungy? Case closed. To really drive the point home, use a mirror for a mouse pad for a day. If you see LOTS of GREASY fingerprints, think about changing your habits or accepting the fate of always having mouse problems and a slimy looking keyboard.

More stuff coming as I think of it,

  - Brian