Desultor

One of the best things about my job is the current lack of budget for any technology. At least five of the desktop machines I administer are scavenged from the Law School’s scrap heap – nasty old HP Vectras which are barely capable of running Windows 2000. It’s wonderful to turn these old machines, which more fussy folk have discarded, into functional workstations.

Two weeks ago I rescued a box of seven or so old hard drives from a dumpster here. They were old 6 GB Quantum Fireball drives – from way back when that was a big drive – and I’ve since pressed four of them into service to get other scrapheap machines running.

This morning I was setting up a second machine in Charley Nesson’s office. Of the two kinds of dumpster drives I had, I only had the worse ones left – and when I turned the machine on in its little echo-chamber under the desk, it was Loud! I looked inside again, and saw that the drive was making the entire chassis resonate. So I looked around – found a napkin on his desk, tore off four thin strips, rolled them into thin cylindrical strips, and remounted the hard drive using them as poor man’s dampers around the screws. The machine is palpably quieter now.

This sort of thing gives me a genuine thrill. I love reusing stuff – resurrecting garbage-can technology for another couple painful, shuddering years of service. Less waste, less cost. When I’m working on this sort of thing, an Argentine phrase, which my email pal there taught me in 1996, often comes into my head – “Lo atamos con alambre.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2003 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.