I'm sad Festivus is over. It is my favorite event of the year. Random highlights: - Eight of us arrived Friday night to beat the snow and celebrate Festivus Eve! That was a fun change from past Festivii. - Everyone got their slide rules. Mouse and others watched Youtube videos to learn how to use these. - Alex J. brought HP-9000s and donated a working one to VCFed. He also purchased and will soon give us the correct color monitor for our IBM PS/2 486 (Win 3.1 demo machine). - Jon C. brought ADM terminals and floppy disks (which everyone loved; bought a box for myself). He also brought a very clean and fully working Kaypro II. Nobody wanted it, their loss, VCFed's gain! We made a trade -- the Kaypro for an Intel board. This particular Kaypro is in much better shape than any of our other Kaypro units. - I gave the old MARCH banner to Jeff S. who designed the logo waaaaaaaay back in 2004. - "New Lou": it's always great to meet new members! - There were several surprise visitors: Connor; Tony's friend Ken (who's done a lot of manual labor for us in the past two years); Mouse's colleague (whose name I forget); and Jon G.'s friend Davi. I may have forgotten another person or two. - Festivus Claus is real! He gave Tony the long RCA cable that we needed to connect the Lego desk to the big monitor above our workbench. Tony played the part of a reindeer and delivered it to us. - A non-member brought us a very nice homebrewed version of a Netronics Elf II. I included Herb and Bernie when the benefactor arrived because they both know a lot about 1802. - The final highlight, as posted in earlier emails tonight, was Jeff's idea to donate extra items to a local community food bank. It's one thing to be good citizens in the vintage computing community and the InfoAge community, quite another to be good citizens to the real world! I'd like for us to do more things along these lines. Suggestions welcome. Regarding 2018, I talked on Saturday night about some of the Federation-wise ideas/plans for next year and also sent a long email to this list on Nov. 29. Thank you to everyone who donated so far! Some of the near-term plans include museum updates (displays, technology, maybe lighting); VCF PNW (Feb. 10-11, Seattle!); inventory software shopping; and more restorations. ** Please keep the 2018 donations flowing!! ** There are about 180 people on this list. If everyone gave just $5, that would pay for some museum improvements such as another display case that Corey and I are considering to show things like our blue box, 6501 kit, and so on. If everyone reached deep and gave $50, that would be more than our entire VCFed fiscal year budget from 2016! The link to make a donation is http://vcfed.org/wp/contribute/. As for 2017, "That's all, folks!" -Evan PS. I told a little white lie: that may * not * be all for 2017! There's a cool artifact donation being delivered soon. :) I will announce it when it's actually in our hands. Nebulous hint telling you virtually nothing: this artifact has a special connection to Silicon Valley.