What is it?

I have no idea.

Shirt

Its a shirt:

And it's a good shirt, too, except for that pesky hole in the elbow.

Electric griddle

These things are cool, but this one is half broken and they take up a lot of space:

Giant novelty pencil

It's from Lagoon! Tic Tacs included for size reference.

Book Week: Day 7

This is a great book:

 But, we have several copies of it.

Book Week: Day 6

Here's a little gem:

It's a book of the proceedings from a conference in 1991 that I have never been to, and have no interest it. Compulsive book collecting strikes again!

Book Week: Day 5

Fast forward to 2005. Still drinking the graphing calculator Kool-Aid that was given to me by every single one of my Junior High and High School math teachers, I decided that I needed an updated calculator to get me through college, and foolishly bought an HP 49g+:

This was a terrible calculator. So bad, in fact, that when this calculator died mere weeks after I bought it, it had already been pulled from shelves and replaced with the 50g model. Oh well, free upgrade, and the 50g isn't too bad of a calculator.

Book Week: Day 4

If I remember anything from Junior High, it's programming games for the TI-83 graphing calculator. In those days, this book was indispensable:

Nowadays, I've pretty solidly reversed my stance on giving graphing calculators to children who are still early in their mathematical development. These things are bad for you. Parents: talk to your kids about graphing calculators, before some ignorant school district does first.

Book Week: Day 3

I picked this book up at a used book sale for a buck:

Mostly, I liked that the guy on the cover looked like the most prototypical basement-dwelling, D&D playing computer geek I had ever seen. Plus I wanted to learn C#. As it turns out, the "beginning" classifier on the cover made this book lose most of its usefulness to me. The book assumes no previous programming experience, which makes it too arduous of a task for anyone with some experience to work through.

Book Week: Day 2

Here's a reference book that I've had on my shelf for years, but never seriously used:

Anytime that I needed any information that might be in this book, the internet always turned out to be a more convenient resource.

Book Week: Day 1

I decided that everyday this week I will give away a book. To start it off, I'm getting rid of a book that I'm sure a lot of us have hanging around somewhere, simply because we haven't gotten around to tossing it out:

An old phone book! I found this little guy squatting on some prime bookshelf real estate. This is an easy one to get rid of, just a quick toss toward the recycle bin.

Kitchen redundancy

We got two blenders as gifts when we got married. Since each blender seemed to have a distinct feature set (and apparently we had an abundance of kitchen space) we decided to keep both of them. Here is one:

As anyone probably could have guessed, one of the blenders has gone virtually untouched all this time. It is time to eliminate that blender redundancy.

A good idea, but...

I guess I am getting rid of a lot of kitchen items that I have had since my bachelorhood. Here is a microwave rice cooker:

It actually works pretty good, as long as you only make a very small amount of rice at a time in it. Because of this limitation, it just hasn't gotten used like it did before I was married.

From the depths of my kitchen cabinet

A long time ago I saw this sandwich toaster at the D.I. and decided to buy it:

It's like a George Foreman grill, except that it's purposely shaped into an awkward design that makes it utterly useless for making anything except grilled sandwiches. Come to think of it, it might actually do a decent job at making homemade Hot Pockets, too. Oh well, it's already gone.

Sorry, I tried my best.

This classic board game was a wedding gift:

It is a beautiful edition of the game, with a neat wooden box made to look like a thick reference manual when viewed from the side. I was excited to get the gift, until we actually took it out and played a game. Turns out, Sorry! is a terrible game. I have no idea how it managed to become the American board game icon that it is, because it is totally boring. It's like an Art Deco-style cousin to Candyland, Shoots and Ladders, and Trouble, but without the fun of the pop-o-matic bubble. It's the board game version of a carousel, it doesn't take too long before you get tired of just going around in a circle. I'm sure that someone out there will love it, though.

Souvenir

Twice upon a time I worked at a circuit board fabrication shop. While I was there, I came across a small piece of broken circuit board that was headed for the scrap pile:

It caught my eye because it was torn in such a way that it clearly exposed the inner layers of the board. At this time I was still fascinated by circuit board fabrication, so I held on to it as a souvenir.