The £250 challenge: I’d like to thank… oh, nobody

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

The results of the £250 challenge are in. I came last. A lot.

This must be what it’s like when the camera pans to you at the Oscars, a second after the presenter has announced that the idiot with the stupid hair has won the award you craved. Unfortunately, I’m not a Hollywood starlet and, more importantly, I’m not the type to sit and smile and pretend it was the taking part that counts.

I wanted to win, dammit. And not because I’m a bad loser. Which I am. And not because the Goodwill PC deserved to win. Which it did. But because I wanted technology to be about more than baubles and flashing lights and faster bits of metal. I wanted to introduce a little soul to proceedings – not mine, of course, which is currently a seething mass of wronged rage – but somebody’s, hopefully somebody nice than me.

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The £250 Challenge: Vote for the free PC

Monday, March 16th, 2009

I’ll hold my hands up – the free PC I acquired as part of the £250 challenge is ugly. It’s so ugly children can’t actually see it and every adult who’s dared peer in its direction has been driven mad. I wouldn’t be surprised if the devil lived inside. It’s big enough. There’d even be room for Cerberus to have a run around.

I could have delivered it to the office in Noah’s Ark while sharing a beer with Elvis Presley and it wouldn’t have caused more of a stir. People were drawn to it.  They crept from behind their desks and gathered around it with bewildered expressions. I’d like to believe it was because I’d discovered a relic, that my technological archaeology had unearthed an ancient fascination. It was built in 1999 after all. The truth is much simpler. It’s monstrous.

We tend to look at our past with rose coloured spectacles, I’ve done it myself. The Compaq Deskpro was the heel which ground those spectacles into the dirt. As a PC it has no redeeming features. Aside from its cheery ugliness, it’s also big enough to beat a whale to death and has the processing power of a twelve-year-old who’s spent the last hour trying to stick a banana in his ear.

Thankfully, my part of the challenge has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the PC I found. While my colleagues were running around trying to get the best machine they could for £250, my task was to prove you could get one for free. You can. End of story… or at lest, that’s what I thought.

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Linux saves the human race

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Mark the day my friends, for today’s the day goodwill ceased being intangible and took its material form. Bask in the glory that is the GoodWill PC!

Anybody who’s been following the travails of the GoodWill PC knows it’s been something of a rocky road. When I was first tasked with scrounging a PC for free I was full of hope, convinced that they were ten-a-penny and I need only flash an amiable smile at a stranger for heaven to open up and shower me with PC bits.

Turns out things weren’t quite that simple and until a few days ago I was convinced I was going to fail this challenge. This depressed me because if I failed the entire concept of human kindness, generosity and compassion failed with me. So you see, I wasn’t just scrounging free stuff, I was trying to prove us worthy of our place in the universe. I was providing a guidepost to the soul. Yes, really.

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Goodwill PC won’t be rubbish after all… unfortunately

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

As the £250 challenge rumbles to its conclusion, the machines my rivals have managed to assemble for this princely sum have started rolling into the office. I must admit to a little PC envy, given that it looks as if I’ll be building my machine out of bad news, false hope and rejection. None of which is going to gift me the six months of victory gloating I so crave.

Just for those who don’t know, I don’t have £250 to spend. I don’t have anything to spend. Not a sausage. Which is lucky because you can’t spend sausages and would look very silly trying. My task is to deliver a PC to Tim for free.

I wrote recently about my travails on sharing site Freecycle, but at the back of my mind I wasn’t panicking because I had a masterplan. I say masterplan. I had a dump. Not even a dump. The promise of a dump. I envisioned myself clambering over mountains of PC bits, snatching sticks of DDR3 RAM from toothless beggars – no idea why – and generally constructing a supercomputer from other people’s foolishly discarded detritus.

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