2009 DMRAA Chili Feed/Auction

Tuesday night was the annual Des Moines Radio Amateurs’ Association Chili Feed and Auction. It drew a pretty good crowd — a lot of faces I haven’t seen at the general meetings in the past year or so. A lot of attendees also brought their XYL’s and children. We had three crock pots of chili out, ranging from normal spiciness to more-than-normal spiciness. After about an hour of eating, the auction started. A lot of boatanchors, a lot of CB’s and a lot of miscellany, but there were some gems to be found in there.

I wasn’t anticipating to bid on any auctions since I don’t usually carry any cash, but I had about $15 in my pocket for the night after I paid my admission fee. A few computers were up for bids, two homebrew Windows XP Pro machines and an HP Pavilion running Windows 98. Bidding started at $20 (I think) for one, the price dropped to $1 which was the lowest possible bid. Still no one bid. So they added one more computer. And still no one bid. Finally they added the third computer and someone bid $1. I bid next for $2.50 and ended up winning the computer pile. The computers really aren’t bad — the two homebrew towers are reasonably fast for their age. One was password protected but with the help of a boot disk that was remedied quickly. The HP Pavilion — a 6 GB hard drive with 256 MB of RAM — took 40 minutes to boot up for the first time last night. With a bit of patience, I removed a ton of software and files and freed up 75% of the hard drive. After that and defragmenting, it moves along as quickly as the other two computers.

Funny thing is, these computers might be excellent candidates to be used in a project I was about to scrap due to computer costs. Never know what might fall into your lap!

I also won Motorola speakers for a dollar for both. $3.50 overall for the night for three computers and two Moto speakers for my first auction ever ain’t bad at all!

We’re already a week away from the club’s Christmas party on Tuesday. If you’re in central Iowa, I hope you can make it to what is usually one of the best events of the year. Click here to go to the DMRAA website for more information on the Christmas party.