Lets say that for some rea­son you needed a SATA cable or two. Or six. You think to your­self, “I guess I should head down to the store,” or you mozy your online self over to Monoprice or Amazon or whatever.

Yeah. Don’t do that. I’m pretty sure I have twenty extras lay­ing around. They’re angled and I needed straight, or I already bought some and hooked them up before open­ing up the mount­ing cage to find that it came with five, or they’re just attracted to me… I don’t know. Somehow I ended up with more SATA cables than any one per­son could use in a life­time. And how did I end up with six or seven extra case fans in var­i­ous sizes?

While I’m at it, I’m pretty sure I have dozens of HDMI, DVI, and DisplayPort cables. And USB (3.0 and 2.0) cables in the hun­dreds. And at least a cou­ple extra Thunderbolt cables. Don’t even get me started on 4‑pin Molex power cables.

Moral of the story: If you need any of this stuff, message/email/call/text. Most of it’s free to any­one who’ll give it a good home. (OK… I can’t give away the Thunderbolt cables for free. But the rest.) Think the cable/adapter/dongle you need is insanely obscure? I prob­a­bly have six of them. Try me.

Found the above pic in Maurice Sendak’s strange count­ing book One Was Johnny.

What’s weird is that he looks an awful lot like Freddie (at right), the mas­cot for MailChimp.

This incar­na­tion of Freddie has been around since 2008, but it seems he was born August 17, 2001. So the mon­key in Sendak’s book has got to be a dif­fer­ent mail-deliv­er­ing pri­mate. In case you’re unfa­mil­iar, MailChimp does awe­some email mar­ket­ing (and email newslet­ters, and that kind of thing). It’s one of my favorite soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice com­pa­nies. If you’re using ConstantContact, there are about a gazil­lion rea­sons to switch. (If that sounds scary, I can help.)

Anyway, I’ve decided that Sendak’s mail mon­key must be Freddie’s dad, since it would make sense that he’d go into the fam­ily business.

Look at those two. They just gotta be related.

After spend­ing way too much time sit­ting in traf­fic over the past cou­ple months, today I beta-tested () a new way to con­quer the 36-mile (ish) com­mute between my home in San Mateo and my place of work in San Jose. To pass the time, I doc­u­mented the jour­ney on my iPhone (whose bat­tery is now depleted to 24% — my 5S can’t get here soon enough).