The weekend, as amended

[mdlbear]

Oddly enough, today was mostly spend driving around, with a little shopping thrown in. Went to Costco with the flower_cat, had a delicious lunch at the little Mexican place in Santana Row (some of the waiters' uniforms still call it Cazuela's, but their menus and signs say "Consuela" -- I'm guessing it was a common misspelling), went next door to Peets to buy coffee and tea, picked up the Y.D. at Sylvan.

After that, I hit the surplus joints: looked at disk drives (about $.50/Gb for SCA SCSI drives) at Surplus Computers, bought a PC carrying strap and a couple of rackmount wire organizers at Weird Stuff, poked around Halted. It was my father who introduced me to surplus joints. Halted's been in the same building for decades -- it still has that faint smell of the wax they used to use to insulate paper capacitors and power-transformer windings back in the days of tubes. Takes me right back to Radio Row in New York.

Finally went to Mel Cotton's, a local camping (etc) store, and picked up a couple of the tarps that they had on sale, for chaoswolf's gaming sunshade project. Came home, helped with dinner, and am now slowly collapsing into a small heap of fractal fuzz.

Comments

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Dangit, I wish there was a surplus place - or even a boneyard worth a darn - over my way. The only one I've been able to find is owned by a guy who would make the stereotypical used car salesman frown at his business practices.

[mdlbear]

There are a few out here, but it's still nothing like Radio Row used to be: several blocks of booths and little shops along Canal and Cortlandt streets in NYC. Haven't been back there in several decades; about half of it disappeared when the WTC was built.

Only place that's remotely comparable is the Akihabara district in Tokyo.