This Holiday Season, Don't Recycle....Reglue.

As we begin to enter the different stages of our annual fund raiser, at this point, we don't want your money. Not now at least.

The past 19 months have been brutal for us, equipment-wise. Between 2 floods-of-the-century less than a year apart, and an unprecedented demand for computers, our inventory has dipped lower than it has ever been. For the first time in our history, we are out of machines while 17 Taylor Texas kids are still in need of computers. Diane and I dug into our savings and donated Reglue 2K in order to get on track, but the more kids we helped, the more requests came in. We are both living on extremely limited incomes. We cannot do that again.

And it wasn't anywhere near the holiday season when this happened. But it is now and all we have is a handful of woefully under-powered computers left in our make-ready shelves. Unfortunately, about half of those just are not up to the demands of today's high school students. And while many will suggest that we simply use a lighter distro, that's not going to help. Sure I can make a computer work, but in cases like this, even a light distro cannot make it useful. You can go as "light" as you want but when you find the need to use LibreOffice or The Gimp, all of those miserly intentions crash around your feet.

So here's the deal. We're asking for those computers that are sitting in your closets and under your company's tech support benches. Ideally, we are asking for machines that are six years old, maybe seven. It's not only computers we need. The last flood completely filled a plastic bin with 2 dozen laptops that were ready to go. Your hard drives, speakers, mice and keyboards can be put to work immediately...

If not sooner.

And while it seems that we were taking right hooks to the side of the head, both left and right; we recently received a donation of 49 extremely useable flat screen monitors, of the 17, 19 and 21 inch variety. We're good on monitors, for now anyway. And that donation came from one of you. Holy frickin' cow. I'm afraid to ask what the shipping costs were. They came in via the back of a Yellow Freight truck on pallets, so it was probably less than the everyday carriers, but not by much.

Should you have any of the things we need, we will try to scrape up the money to help you with shipping. We'll do our best to offset those costs the best we can. If you are in Travis or Williamson county, I can arrange to come to you. I'll buy us lunch while we're at it.

We want to get this campaign underway before we start the main fund raiser. This way, we'll know a bit more about how we are going to address the 17 student's needs from a hardware point of view.

The greater Linux community has been the driving force behind our efforts. From our beginning, you people are directly responsible for over 1600 computers being placed into the homes of kids that needed our help the most, and we never forget the people who help us.

Ever.

You can contact me personally ken at reglue dott orggg or go to reglue.org and click the "contact us" button. That will go to my or Pete's inbox. As I try to do as often as I can, I want to personally thank you for helping us do what we do. We could have never done it without you.

All Righty Then...