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Journal johndiii's Journal: Twenty Years Worth of Junk 22

Journal by johndiii
What is the longest you have lived in one place? My life has been six years in one house, seventeen in another (part of that away at college), three years in an apartment in Milwaukee, a year in an apartment in Dallas, then nineteen and a half years in a house in Dallas. Five months in my current apartment.

The problem is that I tend to like to save things. "Hmmm, that might be useful at some point in the future..." Well, no. Not really. All of those old issues of Scientific American? There is exactly one that I want - the one that has an article coauthored by a friend from college. The rest? Out they go. A Byte magazine from 1983? NOT useful. How about the ATi Mach64 graphics card from the computer that I bought in 1994? A Pentium 100 - seemed very fast at the time. :-) Decently fast PCI graphics. Anyone want this? Yours for the cost of shipping... How about a box of old QIC-80 formatted backup tapes? Once the divorce is final, I will have a drive to read them (if it still works). Not a bad backup device for the time, but it would take over 4000 of these tapes to back up the hard drives in my current computer.

Software dating back to the mid-80s. Copy II PC, anyone? Old Infocom games? MS Flight Simulator for the Texas Instruments Professional Computer?

Books, of course, are another question entirely. :-) I do not lightly allow books to leave my possession. But what good is a book in a box? And there are some that I know that I will never go back to. And no one else should waste their time on. So I've identified forty or fifty books (out of a couple thousand, so far) that I will be taking to the used bookstore. And I will be seeing what Ikea can do for me in the way of bookshelves.

The problem is the basic attitude that I can just put something in a box and put it in storage and forget about it. Kids toys, baby furniture, papers, magazines, books... Forgetting about it, of course, is the issue. I did not know what I had, for the most part, nor how to find the things that I knew that I had.

I have gotten rid of an enormous amount of stuff, and my apartment is much the better for it. I still have a ways to go, but the end is coming into view.

These days, I am a convert to the "throw it away" school of thought. I still have a weakness for food magazines (all of those recipes, and the lovely pictures...), but I am working on that. Old computer junk will be taking a long walk off a short plank. No more little useless odds and ends.

So. Anyone want an old CH Flightstick Pro and a box of Star Wars toys (everything but the destroyer droid)? I'll throw in the golf utility belt if you want it.
This discussion was created by johndiii (229824) for no Foes, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Twenty Years Worth of Junk More

Twenty Years Worth of Junk

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  • Really? For what architecture? HP/UX tapes, or PC?
    • PC, 5.25" floppies for the most part. I think that I have all of them zipped on my hard drive, though - I bought the "Lost Treasures" collections a few years back. I loved those games. They have z-machine emulators for most computers (including Palm) these days, so the data files can be played anywhere that they can be transferred.
  • When I was storing crap that I knew I needed tog o through (eventually) I tried putting stuff in that I knew I would eventually have to recover. These would entail things like employment records, statements, and even the occasional tax filing. Did it work? Nope. Now, I either have a place for it or it is out the door. I also find myself not buying enarly as much useless shit because I know that I don't have anywhere to put it, and that I'll be bored with it in 4-6 weeks anyway;-) That gut instinct to
  • *sigh* offer them to blinder.

    yeah, i'm getting rid of clutter, too. If you don't have access to it, you don't have it.

    Donate what you can.

    And my hard part is letting go of the cool, with-it, savvy me that i keep hoping i'll turn into and need all this stuff for.

    I keep forgetting that that she can Mcguyver just about anything- she doesn't NEED these stupid boxes of old wires and the butterknife with the tip snapped off!

    What we need is a stuff swap, where we all bring our junk, each receive a small empty box,
    • After two weekends of having a LARGE dumpster in front of my house ( which, somehow I filled to the top, yet still can't fit two cars into my two-car garage ) I fully understand the whole "throw it away" idea. I trashed a 10 year old (broken) Sun SPARC system, and I feel very upset about it now that the dumpster was removed.

      That said, there are some things that I can't make myself part from. One of these is my collection of four+ year old clothes that are now three sizes smaller than me. I have a new Go

      • tape one to the fridge. That should give you some inertia. Or even better, try one of the outfits on every single morning.

        I'm one to talk, i'm starting to not fit into my work clothes, which means it's time to do something about it. My solution is to simply not buy clothes any larger. I want clothes that fit, i have to lose the weight. And i don't get to buy new clothes until the old ones fit again.

        It's mean, but it's the only way to get myself in gear.
        • I'm one to talk, i'm starting to not fit into my work clothes, which means it's time to do something about it.

          I have a huge collection of T-shirts, and the older ones have shrunk, while I'll expanded a bit. Thus they no longer fit, and I have no real hope of wearing them again. Yet I've bneen lothe to get rid of them, as each comes with its own set of memories. They're nearly all tour shirts. I used to buy at least one T-shirt from every gig I went to, and I go to a lot of gigs[1]. But they've been one of

          • another option- and one which we are exploring, due to someone's 'history of the straightedge movement' tshirt collection, is that they may all be folded on boards and set up on the wall as a sort of art collection...

    • mum did a yard sale a couple weeks ago. unfortunately I never got around to looking throuh all my junk over the summer, so I couldn't really let her sell it yet. I'll get around to it. Or she'll throw it all out when I get married. Which ever comes first.

      As for the Star Wars stuff... geez, like I need more toys. I've got boxes of them at home. But, if you have a Kyle Katarn, Mara Jade, or Dark Troopers, let me know. I think these are all from the Expanded Universe collection (or whatever it's ca

      • er... throw it all out when you get married? Because being married absolves you of dealing with your crap how, exactly?

        trust me, if you don't deal with it yourself, you'll just keep carrying the bad habit that got you into this in the first place, when you someplace new...
  • Some of those away at college. Though they've moved away, I still have a considerable amount of stuff that I sent with my parents to be stored. I did go through it pretty thoroughly before they moved, though. I have 10 boxes of stuff- stuff that will most likely never be used again, but that has "sentimental value"- the archnemesis of a simple, decluttered life.

    The stuff that I kept with me after my parents moved is much less cluttery, by virtue of having been moved nearly every year for the past 6 years
  • Once the day comes that my parents pass away, not only will I be broken up over that, but my brother and I'll be faced with the dross of a 40+ year marriage between two inveterate packrats, who in turn are keeping many possessions of their nearly-as-bad packrat offspring.

    Worse, my dad has packrat stuff from his dad that he couldn't bear to throw out. Cigar boxes full of old screws, old license plates from every car my Dad and Grampa ever owned, and that sort of thing. And because of the rather random way

    • A few years ago my grandparents had to dispose of the remnants of ~eighty years of a Great Aunt’s life in one house; it was a very unenjoyable thing for them, and ever since they have been slowly giving aways as much as they possibly can so as to ease the burden on whomever performs the same service for them.

  • I have been in my current house 9 years. My wife has me cleaning the attic and I am finding things I thought I threw away years ago. I found a box of Computer Shopper magazines that were old - back when they were thick like a phone book. Time sheets from 4 employers ago. Junk from when I was in school too.

    The best find was a serial three-button optical mouse that uses a metal mouse pad with grid lines on it. It still works.

    I also found a box of letters dating way back. One or two of them were written to

    • I also found a box of letters dating way back. One or two of them were written to me in the 70's

      Yeah, you have got to keep letters. Well, personal ones. They mean alot on some rainy day.
    • One of the gems that I did find was a box containing letters that my grandmother wrote to me when I was in college in the late 70s. We were very close when I was young, but she died eleven years ago. It was very good to find those again.

      Several of my college notebooks just hit the recycling dumpster last night. :-) Some of the texts, though, are still quite interesting. The phone lists from three employers back are also gone now.

  • Moo (Score:2)

    by Chacham ( 981 ) *
    A Byte magazine from 1983? NOT useful.

    But possibly salable, by some Byte aficionado. Think ebay.

    I do not lightly allow books to leave my possession.

    Absolutely!

    But what good is a book in a box.

    :)

    Oh, thou speaketh the truth. And it does hurteth.
  • one way to reduce that is to keep a database of things in storage. I built a database of my sports cards when I was a kid so I'd know what I had. I could search it by year, team, player name, or position and it would tell me what page of what album in what box it was stored in. You could expand on that idea for your books. The rest you could throw away. Pat is the king of throwing things away. For his last birthday, I asked him what he wanted to do. He wanted to take trash to the landfill. So we made
  • I'm a pack rat. I've been in the same condo for 24 years now. If I was in tune with eBay maybe I could turn a collection of obsolete publications into bucks:
    Burrough B300 Operators Guide circa 1968
    Multics Commands and Functions 1972
    VAX/VMS Manuals 1982
    Linux Journal Vol 1

    My parents bought there house in 1951 in New Orleans. I and my 3 siblings grew up there. Dad died in 93, Ma moved in with my sister two years ago. It's still in the family. It was submerged under 6 feet of water for two weeks following

  • Sigh. I'm a terrible hoarder too (I just went through the loft and shed and chucked out a bunch of junk, but I really really hate doing it).

    But there are some things that I hope never to throw away:

    A Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ - like my first decent computer of the 8 bit days (it's not my original Speccy, but it's the same model as my first: I was given it by a friend who was doing a chucking-out session).

    A Sun Ultra 5. Ideally I'd prefer a real Sun box (i.e. not essentially a SPARC PC with a really awful IDE co
    • Perhaps you can get your hands on an old VAX-11/735 (IIRC). Those were designed to fit under a desk, I think, and were a little larger than a bulky two-drawer filing cabinet. We spec'ed one for a project that I worked on at Texas Instruments in the mid-80s, but I was moved elsewhere before it came in - so I don't have any direct experience of them. Not quite big iron, but fairly chunky.
  • This current abode has been the longest where I have been "acquiring" things. Most recently, we have gotten tons of food from the recently deceased step-father, who was a survivalist. (They dry the *strangest* things.)

    As for the IKEA furniture for books, try the Billy line. They are reasonable in price, look nice and wear very well.

    ^_^

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