I've been spending a lot of time lately doing some winter cleaning. We're trying to free up some space in the basement for a play area for Brendan. It's amazing how much stuff you can collect. We've thrown away a LOT of stuff - I'm pretty sure the garbage guys hate us by now. Jenn mentioned that one of them didn't look too pleased when he tried to lift one of the bags we put out. We've been donating anything with think might still be useful, and we have people who drive through our subdivision on garbage days looking for interesting finds. More power to them, I say; I'd rather someone finds some use for this stuff instead of throwing it out. Besides, who's got the patience for a garage sale? And who really wants to deal with people trying to get half price for an item marked $1 that originally cost $50.

Since I've been involved with computers for quite some time (and not all of it as a developer), I've managed to collect quite a collection of old computers. Old Pentiums, 486's, a few 386's, motherboards, cases, power supplies, an unbelievable amount of cables, network cards, video cards, etc. I'm planning on posting that stuff on our local freecycle site to see if anyone might be interested in it before tossing it. One of my regrets with a lot of this is that I didn't give it away sooner, while it still may have been of more use to someone. I guess that may have been why I kept it.

A big part of this collection is a ton of books and magazines. I've whittled the magazines down to something manageable, but I still have way too many books. I'm sure I'll add more to the list as soon as I can convince myself that I really don't need them anymore, and once I have time to go through the ones still hiding in the basement (and hopefully before some of them aren't useful anymore). Here's a list of what's on the chopping block (you might be surprised; there are some good books here):

• Apple II Plus/IIe Troubleshooting & Repair Guide, Robert C. Brenner. Sams. ISBN: 0-672-22353-8
• DNS and BIND 3rd Edition, Paul Albitz & Cricket Liu. O'Reilly. ISBN: 1-56592-512-2
• XML Extensible Markup Language (w/CD), Elliotte Rusty Harold. IDG Books. ISBN: 0-7645-3199-9
• The Unified Modeling Language User Guide, Booch, Rumbaugh, Jacobson. Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0-201-57168-4
• The Visual FoxPro 3 Codebook (CD is missing), Yair Aan Griver. Sybex. ISBN: 0-7821-1648-5
• Object Orientation in Visual Foxpro, Savannah Brentnall. Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0-201-47943-5
• Object Models: Strategies, Patterns, & Applications (Second Edition), Coad, North, Mayfield. Yourdon Press. ISBN: 0-13-840117-9
• Visual Basic 6 Business Objects, Rockford Lhotka. Wrox. ISBN: 1-861001-07-X
• ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed, Stephen Walther. Sams. ISBN: 0-672-32823-2
• Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 6.0, Granor, Roche. Hentzenwerke Publishing. ISBN: 0-96550-936-2
• The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, Alan Cooper. Sams. ISBN: 0-672-31649-8
• About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, Alan Cooper. IDG Books. ISBN: 1-56884-322-4
• The Improvement Guide, Langley, Nolan, Nolan, Normal, Provost. Jossey-Bass. ISBN: 0-7879-0257-8
• HTML: The Complete Reference (Second Edition), Thomas A. Powell. Osborne. ISBN: 0-07-211977-2
• Effective Techniques for Application Development w/VFP 6.0, Booth, Sawyer. Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 0-96550-937-0
• What's New in Visual FoxPro 8.0, Granor, Hennig. Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 1-930919-40-9
• CrysDev: A Developer's Guide to Integrating Crystal Reports, Craig Berntson. Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 1-930919-38-7
• Advanced Object Oriented Programming w/VFP 6, Egger.  Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 0-96550-938-9
• Client/Server Applications w/VFP & SQL Server, Urwiler, DeWitt, Ley, Koorhan. Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 1-930919-01-8
• C# Unleashed, Joseph Mayo. Sams. ISBN: 0-672-321-22-X
• Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, Robert D. Austin. Dorset House. ISBN: 0-932633-36-6
• Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit (No CD), 8 books total
   

If anyone might be interested in this stuff (books or computer techno-rubble), drop me a line (I can take a pic. of the computer stuff). All of it free as long as you pick up the shipping cost. I hope I don't regret giving away some of this, these books have served me well <g>

Links:

http://www.freecycle.org