My next hair brained business plan. Or: an unlikely gold mine

Okay, now for a real life post: no this is not a dream. I suppose I should apologize for that last one, but hoho baby, I am not sorry. That worked even better then I thought. And honestly! It was a real dream, haha... suuckaahs!

So... what have I been up to?

Life for me has been louder- the highs are higher and lows lower, so that the contrast is much sharper and abrupt sometimes. This is life more, well, lifelike. If I had to choose between extremes and a dull semi eventless life, I do think I would choose the extremes. Not that I enjoy my mistakes...bah, but enough of theory. Lets get into it, shall we?

Here's an outline:
I went to soulfest and it was great
BTW my birthday is coming up
Heres my wishlist, fam.
I like various music
I'm sort of on a diet
My little bro is cool and I have gold-fever.

(some items removed for brevity's sake)
(Update- and since I know some of you have short attention spans, I'll put the topic in bold so you can skip right to the one you care about. There, ya happy?)

I went to soulfest and it was great
It was an amazing event, but by now I've told some of these stories so many times that it seems stale to re-hash them so maybe I'll take this a different route and focus on the volunteering.

This year, I volunteered part time at the festival in order to get a discount ticket. I got there under the assumption that I was going to work in IT (information technology- computers, networking, etc.) because, well...thats what I was told I would be working in. Instead, the scene I arrived at was something like this:

Everyone was friendly, but everyone was busy. They were understaffed by about 200 hundred volunteers and no one knew what I.T. was. Finally a light bulb came on in the leader of volunteer's face and she said "Oh! I know where you go!" or something to that affect and much merriment was partaken of by all.

Until I got there, and the leader was utterly confused.

"Uhh, no the networks... the network was set up like, 2 weeks ago... were good- but thanks! Thank you for singing up, we uhh- if anything goes wrong, we know where you are!"

Hah, I got it. Someone made a booboo. I'm okay with that- they didn't need me there, but they DID need someone at the yurt.

"What is the yurt!?"

Well, since you asked...

The yurt was a special dome that was set up inside of the backstage/secured area. But when I say secured, I use the term lightly. Even with the shortages, there were about 350 volunteers or so and almost all of them could get backstage.

Anyway, the yurt was basically mission command- the temporary office of all divisions. The leaders all had their seats in their: Two people who basically ran soulfest this year, EMT, gunstock staff, people who coordinated transportation for all the artists, drivers, security, etc.

My job was sort of half secretary, half bouncer. I checked in and out radios, charged batteries and guarded the gates with my life from unauthorized personal. It wasn't bad- I enjoyed it actually. There was one other girl on shift with me, Priscilla (I recall this because I think it was the coolest name I heard at the festival) and the lady in charge...whom, lord forgive me, I cannot recall the name of. It went pretty good and even had it's emergencies to keep everything fun- there were not enough radios to go around, and we had to allocate them and try and make all the departments happy. On top of that, some were malfunctioning. On top of that, we had the weather to deal with- someone was tracking it on radar and was letting us know how many minutes off it looked as the staff tried to call when to shut down certain things and when to keep going.

One of the most exciting things to happen at me during the festival occurred right in the middle of all this: an environmentalists guy jumped the chain and tried to confront the girl who was heading up the festival on them not having recylable bins out everywhere yet. I was still new and he just came in like he owned the place and got past me. Luckily, the lady was a tough chick and firmly, but as kind as possible under those circumstances, escorted him out the door.

Yeah...Uhh, sorry- oops.

Well, you know I said I wasn't going to talk about soulfest much, but hah! yes I did! Hopefully it was a story you hadn't heard yet.

BTW my birthday is coming up
So... My birthday is coming up. That's cool, I guess. But I'll be honest. I don't want to be 20 right now. In a year or two, I'd be fine with it. But not right now. It scares me. I never planned on being in school right now... I forget what wonder job I was going to have, but I recall that I had planned I was going to graduate at 16 and basically get out and start adventuring from a converted van. Such is not my life as of yet.

My little bro is cool...
Let me just brag on my little brother here for a second. This kid I think must be like what my dad was at 7. He's more technically intuitive than I will ever be and shall easily surpass my skill in things tech, quite possibly before he turns 16. Some kids bug their older brothers about getting a toy or giving them the bigger piece of something. Littleman bugs me to help build a computer.

He came up the other day with everything he figured he needed to start off with: a case, a keyboard, tape, and a remote control tank. He taped the case onto the tank so he could drive it around. Alas, it was to heavy but it is the thought that counts. I mean, that's an awesome idea, isn't it? It's like the ultimate computer couch potato. You don't even have to go to the PC, the PC can come to you!

Anyway, he had asked me questions a few weeks back about how computers worked and this kid sat through me explaining everything I could on a very technical level of how the hardware works to do things, and I daresay, I think he retained over half of it. He keeps coming up to me and saying

"I have the, uhh, RAMs, the muvverboard, the disk drive and the- whats-it-called? Professor?"

"processor?"

"Yeah, wight."

I'm just geeking out about it. My friend Jim was over the other day and prophetically declared that "He's going to pwn us all. He'll be a crazy modder- he's going to pwn. You better keep an eye on him." I told him that so far I'm on his good side and I plan to keep him there. So that's what I'm going to do: I'm going to help him build his own computer from spare parts, and I'm seriously thinking about teaching him the command prompt. I think he's ready. He shall be the smallest hacker ever, migets aside. (Are there midget hackers?)

...and I have gold-fever.
And now for the content that the title teased: My hair brained gold exploiting business idea... No, a new one!

Those of you who have been to my lab know that I have ALOT of computer stuff. Most of it pretty much junk. I mean there is spare parts, but you only need so many pentium pro's with 64 mb of ram. If you think I'm bad, you have no idea.

A long time ago (perhaps 6 months- probably closer to 2 years ago) I decided to totally clean out the basement. What better way, said I, then to remove everything from it, resort, then replace? And so, I hauled out one weekend, about half the contents of the basement outside. I placed it on palates and sorted stuff in the basement. Come dusk, my dad warns me:

"You better put those in plastic bags and put a tarp over them, just in case you don't get them done soon and it rains."

Oh shoo, I think to myself, I'm going to be done tomorrow. But I obeyed anyway. Ha, glad I did.

Dad and I just took the tarp off yesterday and started going through. I had 16 computers in there.


Read that: 16 MORE computers then the ones in my basement. Some of them are a bit rusted, as you can see. Some are a lot rusted:

I've never had a rusted screw holding back an expansion card before, so this has been an interesting life first for me. I encountered these on occasion while sifting through the hardware and pulling things of any value (PCI video and network cards, etc.)

After I had vultured over them myself, I called my friend Jim. I had two questions for him.

"So, I have these systems over here and I know you like shiny coiled wire for your crazy projects. Want to see what you can get out of these power supplies?"

...to which he replied "Sure." and came over. My other question was

"So Jim...how up are you on your alchemy?"

To which he actually knew what I was talking about. You see, a while ago while he was in high school chem, he was talking to me about the process for extracting medals out chemically and electro-chemically. (I might have just invented that last word up, but its cool and makes sense so lay off) People do it for gold recovery from plated jewelry. They also do it to recover gold from computers.

Gold is a really good conductor. It doesn't corrode either. And so things that are important are plated with it- CPU's, motherboard pins, connectors for expansion cards, etc. If you can pull it out, its worth alot in the right volume. An old 486 chip has about 0.015 ounces of gold. Not much, say ye, right? Well, do you know what that's worth right now?

$9.36. Gold is floating around $620 an ounce right now. Newer chips have less gold, but they have it. And the beauty is this: Supply.

Computers are rarely recycled. Some companies are just now starting to begin programs to recycle them, but they cost money for the consumer ($30 shipping for HP's, which is the most successful large recycler). You really shouldn't just throw them away- they do contain some chemicals that hurt the environment, but none the less, some landfills are filling up with them. They call it e-waste.

Now you know I'm not the bleeding heart save the world type. I'm the free market lets make some money type. But it seems here that we have a beautiful synergy of the two here- or at least, a very good marketing ploy for all those bleeding heart types to give me money. I won't complain.

And it's not just gold. Silver is used in chips as well and hard drive platters nowadays are coated with a cobalt-platinum alloy. Then there are the non precious metals: casings of drives are often aluminum, and the case is steel (sometimes covered in plastic). Those won't fetch much, but they will fetch something. And so it has begun- my little brother and I spent today taking this:


And turning it into this:

Little man was a huge help with me on today's project... he got right in there with his screwdriver and helped me rip out power supplies, drives, LED's, plastic shells and everything else.

We stripped these computers down further then I have ever before. I basically reduced the cases to about 80 pounds of steel (which I plan on selling) and the useless plastic inserts and such. I removed every motherboard (which is quite a chore on some of the boxes) and tried to "leave not a rack behind." They are clean. After we were done, the pieces were a mess and so we had to resort them. Littleman is amazing at this sort of thing:

Behold his handy work. I came to him with another power supply while he was sorting them and he said "Oh, phew! Good. Now I will not have to make three stacks with one more in the middle then on the sides cause I can just do two piles of six. Thanks!" I told you this kid was good.

So now the next step is to call scrap yards and get the per pound rate on steel. That should be easy. It might be $5 for all of it, but hey, its something. Some of the small stuff like LED, switches, cables and system speakers I might try to sale in a big grab bag type of lot(s) on ebay. "Here! Its a lot of crap- theres nothing good, but theres lots of it so that should make up for it!" I think maybe that's the exact wording I'll use.

Then...and heres the fun part... Jim and I get together and start mixing chemicals and electricity like mad scientists. The idea is that we are "reverse electroplating"- in other words, we "plate" our anode with the medals were extracting. This is way 1 of 2- the other one involves just using chemicals. We will probably experiment with both of them.

I'll keep you guys posted.

(To long, I know. But understand this: I cut out three things or so from this blog to make it shorter. No, seriously).