The Ashdar Partners Blog

It's been a long time since I've done anything interesting with the blog, and it seems a little stale. With some prompting from Blogger's "Buzz" blog , I'm hooking this blog up to a Google+ account. This is a bit of a brave new world for me, since I've confined myself to LinkedIn, Twitter and a few other sites.  At the least, I hope that this will help comments on the blog be more dynamic and that a few more people might find these posts. Perhaps we can get a few more conversations going as well.

I recently found an IBM Model M keyboard at my local Goodwill store. There is rarely any computer hardware in there worth having, so this was quite a surprise. As far as I can tell, this Model M has never been used even though it was made in 1993. It came in what appears to be the original box, with a styrofoam insert. The coiled, un-stretched cable still has plastic wrap on it. There is no visible wear on the keys. There are no finger grease stains. It is a virgin, IBM-branded, Lexmark-manufactured beige beauty. Even the box doesn't look 20 years old. The model M was built before USB was a thing, so it has a PS/2 port. My main rig has a "legacy free" motherboard, so it doesn't have PS/2 ports. It only has USB ports. The keyboard I have been using lately is from long-gone Micron computer. I bought a computer from Micron in the 1990s and the only remaining evidence of that is that keyboard. (Micron was a popular computer vendor at that time, though there isn't muc...