sweet tooth

I suppose this posting is for historical amusement only. I got an email from a local retailer (Micro Center, if you must know) offering various capacity USB drives (private label).

Over the years I've often noted that capacity-oriented items (memory, disc, etc.) have a calculable Best Value, a/k/a the product's Sweet Spot. Today, that appears to be the 8 GB thumb drives:

Capacity	Retail Price	Cost Per GB
1 GB (silver)	$6.99	$6.99
2 GB (blue)	$9.99	$4.99
4 GB (black)	$15.99	$3.99
8 GB (green)	$24.99	$3.12 ("sweet spot")
16 GB (red)	$59.99	$3.75

Unlike hard discs, few people seem to care that USB drives vary in access speed. I do like the fact that Micro Center is color-coding their drives (1 GB=silver, etc) making it easier to choose an appropriate one.

Deep Thought: It would've been nicer if they'd used an industry standard color scale (e.g. ROY G. BIV) when assigning a color to a given capacity, but .. nobody asked me.

e-cycling

Well, I got rid of 1.5 boots (BritSpeak for "trunk") worth of e-waste today. The City of Dallas was sponsoring a Quarterly Recycling Event at a nearby park, so .. I took advantage and got rid of all sorts of circuit boards and cables and .. stuff .. that I will never use again.

Turns out the City had contracted with BCD Electro ("Electronics Recycling – Surplus Electronics – Computer Recycling") to handle all the electronics waste, and -- despite the rain -- they were doing a reasonable amount of "business" when I was there.

I still have 2 CRT monitors that have been sitting in my garage; I'm reluctant to part with them because -- even though they probably have zero value -- they cost hundreds of dollars and still work (they just take up lots of space and use lots of amps).

Now, I simply have to avoid the same mistake - buying stuff that'll ever be obsolete. Where do I start?

KVAM on the fritz .. wait, no .. it's okay now

Every once in awhile, the mouse attached to my KVM switch locks up. The cure is to unplug the mouse from the switch, count to 4 and reinsert it. This doesn't happen with the keyboard, audio* or video - only the mouse. Today is one of those days.

* (Deep Thoughts:) should mine be properly called a KVAM because it switches audio, too, in addition to Keyboard Video Mouse? Why is there a radio station (Weatherford, Oklahoma) with the callsign KAVM, yet none with the callsign KVAM?