I've been having a rough month or so, technology-wise. My iBook went wonky on me while I was on a trip to Cleveland, and I just barely managed to make a backup of my essential files using the built-in CD burner before the computer became totally unusable. The computer is now at the shop being repaired.

I bought a large capacity external hard drive (120GB) for archiving purposes, and it was dead on arrival, so I returned it.

My cheapy little Epson inkjet printer has pretty much sucked since day one, and it finally reached the point where it would just shut itself off when halfway through printing a single page, so that went back to the factory for a replacement under warrantee.

So I'm currently managing my e-mail using a web interface until I get back my main machine. Because my main machine is a Mac, and the other machine I have at home is a PC, I can't access my e-mail archives until I get back my main machine, which is making it difficult for me to follow up on threads from last week, blah, blah, blah.

The point is, I seem to be temporarily in this little Bermuda Triangle zone of healthy electronics, which is a weird place for me to be given that I've lived in high tech ever since my grammar school days. Think of it like being an accomplished chef who, for some inexplicable reason, finds himself burning everything he cooks for a week or two. It can shake up your world view.

While all this is happening, Paulette thought it might be a good idea to clean out the garage, and there, lo and behold, we have an old PowerMac 7200 in storage. There's nothing wrong with the unit. It works (or at least, it worked the last time we used it, but I don't dare plug it in right now with my current Reverse-Midas Touch), it just happens to also be old and obsolete.

Rather than have it take up space in our garage, I figured we might be able to sell it. Who knows, maybe we could get a few hundred bucks or something for it.

Looked on eBay, where things always sell for more than their worth, and found dozens of Mac 7200s for sale. Many of them were posted with a requested starting bid of $9.95 and a "Buy It Now" option of something like $20.

Twenty dollars!

Oh, and nobody is bidding on them! Not one had a bid.

So what we appear to have here is a big ol' paperweight. Since it would appear that we're not likely to get much money from it on the open market, Paulette and I have decided that we'll be happy to give it away for free to a good home.

If we can't find a good home for it within the next few weeks, it'll find a home at the local PC Recycling Center.

Anybody out there want a PowerMac 7200? Drop me a line and let me know if you're interested.

--Allan