We're Back!

For those not following the news, the Blogger strike local 77598 has ended!  This was a long and heinous process, but I think both sides came to an amicable agreement.

We, the Bloggers, were demanding higher compensation for our work.  The Man felt otherwise.  The agreement was reached that our pay would remain the same, but we would be held to less frequent output.  A new Dental Plan was also brokered.

So yes, for the time being, let us return to Random Photos.  As always, these photos are taken by me, unless otherwise specified, and our copyrighted 2010.

This photo needs no description, but I will venture one anyway.

This was taken at the Cathedral of Junk, in Austin, Texas.  While this was 1 of many, many CD's hanging (for some of you younger viewers, a CD was the mundane thing we had to deal with before iPods and the concept of an MP3 player), this was the CD that I felt truly defined a Cathedral of Junk.  Let's jump in.

What we have is technically a CD-ROM, but really, now we are just being capricious and arbitrary.  This CD is apparently from the 200 edition of Windows Server.  So basically, this cheap piece of plastic actually costs hundreds of dollars, and will still break daily.

The Dictionary.com (no link unless I am paid extra, see page 46 of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement) app on my iPhone tells me that junk is defined as old or discarded material, anything regarded as worthless, or just no longer of use.  Let's look at each aspect of this.

There is no doubt this is a piece of discarded material.  How else would it end up dangling from a string in a Cathedral of sorts?  So we have met that definition.

Worthless?  Of course, 10 years after a technology product debuts it is generally outdated.  I would guess this is the real reason they stopped giving their products names with years in them.  Of course then they did it again, so really it's anyone's guess.

That brings us to no longer of use.  Well, yeah.  One could argue that it being a PC product, it was never of that much use anyway.

So here we have this piece of junk, that is really junk for a variety of reasons.  And naturally, it is sitting in the Cathedral of Junk.

As a side note, the Cathedral is under pressure from the City of Austin, which apparently doesn't appreciate it's own culture.  A laundry list of Code Violations were handed out, and the owner isn't sure what he is going to do.  So when in Austin, stop by, view it, and donate so he can fight.


*Taken with iPhone, 3/27