My first and only post so far hasn’t shown up yet. Hopefully, this one will.
Anyways, in anticipation of the free day sale, I started researching the Arduino. Unfortunately, the site was conveniently inaccessible during the time of the giveaway, but if it wasn’t for free day, I’d not have not known about, become interested in, and purchased an Arduino from Hacktronics, and a few other good electronic things from some other sites as well, for cheaper. Not free, but cheaper. 
So… um… thanks, I guess. I guess you gave me something, and it was mostly free. So, for the first time in my life, I almost feel like I won something. I just spent 40% of my bread money, so I’m going to be living on a lot more soup and a lot less bread for the next two months, but it’s gonna be worth it when the mail comes!
I’ve been wanting to get back into electronics for the last 15 years, but computer shopping (and trying to learn things reading on the computer instead of books) has made things very complicated for a guy like me. I’m rather poor (but largely by choice. I work at a grocery store half the year and I don’t work the rest of the time), so it’s been really hard to go back to this, and it’s sad to see the tools I’ve kept just collecting dust.
So, this is kind of a big deal. I’m excited! 8)
I want to share my thougths as a hobbys and electronics enthusiast.
I must admit that electronics is just one of the many hobbies I’ve, right now I am working on electronics because I’ve a bigger apartment and some money savings that I’m investing in electronics stuff (toys for adults ).
I’m about to complete my bench with a 60Mhz oscilloscope from Agilent, I also store large amount of toys to keep me busy for 100 years or more (which is kind of disturbing).
I have almost everything that I dream when I was a kid, however the emotion and feelings that I had 15 years ago playing with crappy parts a cheap pencil soldering, and a analog multimeter, have changed.
Once your hooked up on electronics you cant keep your eyes away from the fancy toys, but in reality you don’t need to spend that much money to have fun, my first experiments with transistors, led’s and 555’s where really cheap but very rewarding and fun to do, like never after I should say.
So anyways I ordered stuff from sparkfun after freeday was over because I needed a fix, free or not I needed it badly 
And I’m amazed to say SparkFun is shipping my order as I am writing, thank you guys !
I really don’t see where hacktronics is much cheaper.
Hey Clown, good luck with that Arduino. It is a very fun gadget! I don’t know a lot about electronics, but as best I can tell, it’s the best microcontroller for the money!