So, I for­got to pre­vi­ously men­tion in this jour­nal that last week­end some friends and I went to the ACP Swap­meet.  These weren't just any friends, they were fee­dle, Techno­pa­gan, and AJ (Two's Com­pli­ment).  I do not get to see these guys much any­more.  Fee­dle lives in Phoenix, but is start­ing to waf­fle back and forth between here and there, with an eye to move back here.  Techno­pa­gan does live in SoCal, but way up in BFE Cow Town.  AJ does not live too far away, but has a wife and seems to always be busy.  Plus, he actively tries to NOT be connected–no cell phone, no instant mes­sag­ing, email at work only, etc.  Any­way, they are all great guys (well, Techno­pa­gan can be a bit intense at times, but that's just the way Dave is) and we had a ton of fun.  AJ and I were rem­i­nisc­ing on all sorts of things–we had not seen one other in years and we had not attended the ACP Swap since about high school.

The ACP Swap­meet, by the way, is the local once-every-two-months com­puter swap meet.  It started out years ago in the park­ing stalls in front of a hole-in-the-wall com­puter store in a com­plex that looks like a com­bi­na­tion of a busi­ness park and a strip mall.  They even­tu­ally grew larger, swal­low­ing up the park­ing stalls of the busi­nesses on either side.  The last time I had gone, about 10 years ago, it cov­ered all of the neigh­bor­ing businesses' park­ing stalls and wrapped around the side of the build­ing.  This time, it pretty much took up the whole com­plex.  And boy, how it had changed, yet remained exactly the same.

The ACP Swap is not a “pro­fes­sional” swap­meet.  There always are a cou­ple of busi­nesses, but for the most part it is peo­ple sell­ing large amounts of crap.  While a lot of the crap was much more mod­ern than 10 years ago, a lot of it was the exact same crap.  I thought it would be an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment to put elec­tronic loca­tor tags on var­i­ous pieces of equip­ment, then track the migra­tion from the swap­meet to somebody's house, then even­tu­ally back to the swap­meet again.  Miss­ing were the giant bricks of 3.5″ floppy disks and floppy-punches that turn your 720K disk into 1.44M.  New were the gigan­tic spin­dles of generic black CDs bak­ing in the sun.  Miss­ing were large num­bers of AT cases and moth­er­boards (although they were still present, just not in mass).  New were the stacks and stacks of old laptops. 

There were too many peo­ple for such a small area.  As AJ pointed out, it felt like a scene in Blade Runner–like push­ing past peo­ple in a future LA Chi­na­town, press­ing past the stalls sell­ing black mar­ket hard­ware and freshly grown eye­balls in Erlen­meyer flasks, try­ing to get to the noo­dle booth.

It kind of sur­prised me that there was a lot more porn.  Or maybe it did not sur­prise me, come to think of it.  Any­way, the pr0n count went from zero to just about every booth hav­ing a small col­lec­tion of pr0n soft­ware, at the front of the booth, with nobody really mind­ing it–protecting it from the lit­tle sweaty grasp­ing hands of chil­dren, as it were.  There was even a booth com­pletely wrapped in tarp, with a lit­tle flap of a door that pro­claimed adult enter­tain­ment was to be found within.  To top it all off, there was a large num­ber of creechy, bald­ing, forty-something men around, being creechy.  Lady at booth: “Let me know if I can get you any­thing.”  Loud creechy man: “Yeah, babe, how 'bout a kiss!” (turn­ing to his friends, and laugh­ing at the level of creech he attained, out­creech­ing his friends).

---

On an unre­lated note, my phone got dropped and the screen is smashed.  I guess I will find out today what the extra $2/month in phone insur­ance is worth.

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Tagged as: computerswapmeet