We’re having our living room painted next week. As part of the preparation, Diane decided that it would be a good idea to clear out some of the bookcases in there, so that the painters can move them without spilling the books all over the floor.
The first two bookcases were easy — everything went into boxes. But then she got to the bookcase containing old textbooks, and decided that maybe we didn’t actually need to pack and unpack books we hadn’t looked at in 25 years. It was easy to get rid of Mills’ Structured Programming and Kohavi’s Switching and Finite Automata Theory, and we decided we only needed one copy of Kernigan & Richie’s The C Programming Language instead of the four we had, but I couldn’t bring myself to discard Resnick and Halladay’s Physics because of the Pierce quote about Maxwell’s equations, and Diane decided to keep the Cress/Dirksen/Graham Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV because of the picture of the punched cards on the cover.
Unfortunately, our recycling company won’t take hardback books, so I have to throw out these treasures. *sigh*
Diane Reese has just pointed out that I might be able to sell these books on eBay rather than just dumping them out — it’s worth a try. Let’s see, now…”rare collectable treasures from the early days of computer science”…yeah, that’ll work!
Well, somebody is trying to sell the Watfiv book, but so far, without any success. Perhaps I shouldn’t make this part of my retirement planning after all.
More chocolate ranting
I owe Nestle an apology; the Frigor Noir is 46% cocoa, not 44% as I stated yesterday. I still think it’s artifically bitter.
Oh, I got a new computer…
But Tom Digby is right about its value in the cosmic scheme of things. Despite that, I am certainly impressed with how quickly a 1GHz machine can boot up Windows 2000, and depressed about how often I had to do so today. But maybe it’ll get better after I finish setting it up and put it to productive use.