Basement Thoughts

I spent a good chunk of the weekend hiding out in the basment instead of writing. I mean, I’ve been at this for a long time and I am tired and the children are always here. I’ve been dragging this War of the Worlds thing out a bit, I know. What’s left on the roster? Well, I’ve got one and a half more episodes from season 1, and two episodes from season 2, plus one more print book I foolishly picked up, and one more comic series I’d like to look into. Plus, there’s two new TV miniseries. I’ve watched a bit of one of them, and I’m not sure how deeply I care to address it; so far, I can’t really see a solid reason why I should count it as an adaptation of the original, but, I mean, that seems like a petty complaint at this stage.

Given that the UK copyright has run out, there’s also a glut of books appearing in the Kindle marketplace, which… I’m really just not inclined to bother with. I noticed that there’s a follow-up to The Last Days of Thunder Child which seems to be centered around a French ship. I’ll go ahead and suggest that to anyone who’s into Victorian-Era Naval History, but I rather emphatically am not such a person, despite having liked the first book well enough.

The main thrust of this post, though, is the basement thing. My workshop has become sort of unmanageable, due to a complexity of “Other people keep storing shit there” and “I never have time to put things away properly so the stuff I deliberately store there gets buried.” I have a strong hoarder instinct – an innate rejection of the wastefulness of minimalism: it gives me anxiety to think that I might someday need something which I once owned but threw away in the name of “Not hanging on to useless junk.” I’m kicking myself over finally working up the nerve to get rid of my beloved old 486, because it turns out that it was probably the only thing I owned that could’ve salvaged the data off the cache of old 5.25″ floppy disks I found.

So I thought I’d ramble a little about the ridiculous things in my collection in the hopes that someone might comment in the form of “No, seriously, you don’t need that,” or at least, “Oh, hey, I could use one of those send it to me and then you will feel like you weren’t just being wasteful.” For example:

• I have a surprisingly epic number of POTS phone cords. How many of those does a person need? How much should I hold onto? I might have some rj-11 connectors, so maybe should I just throw all the cords away safe in the knowledge I could make new ones if it came down to it?
• How many USB-A to USB-B cables does a man need? What are those even for these days?
• I think printers used to use them, and maybe hard disk enclosures?
• Technically, I also have this question about A-to-micro-B, but I’m pretty sure the answer is “Keep all of them because they will over time disappear into the infinite void of Dylan’s Room no matter how many times I tell him not to.”
• I also have quite a lot of computer power cables. How many of those does a fellow need? Seems like they’re starting to be phased out as well?
• I only have a few Mickey Mouse cables, and will be keeping those.
• I have a bunch of glass cabochons. Anybody want some?
• Remember MemoryStick? I got a crapton of those too. Is there any reasonable justification for keeping those?
• Okay, AC Power adapters. From time to time, I’ll run into something that needs a power adapter and doesn’t have one, and I’ll search through the mountain of them in my workshop and try to find a compatible adapter. Usually this doesn’t work. But sometimes it does. How do I decide which ones to keep and which ones to toss, and is there some better way to sort and store and label them that will lead to it taking me a finite amount of time to find one fit-to-purpose or rule out its usefullness?
• Some years ago, I bought a home monitoring kit with four cameras and a DVR. Turns out the DVR is only accessible via an activex control that won’t run on anything other than IE4 on Windows XP (or, inexplicably, an iPhone). But the cameras are just an ordinary sort of night-vision analogue wired camera. Anything cool I should be doing with those instead of landfill-slash-craigslist?
• I’ve got an ancient first or second-generation Drobo. It’s a USB RAID storage array that works fine but is way too slow for anything other than backups. I think I offered this to someone a few years ago who was interested but couldn’t take it at the time and I don’t recall why. If it’s you, or if you’d like it, let me know.
• Another broken thing I have is a Patriot Javelin NAS. I think its flash memory is shot.
• Old RAM. Is there any reason to keep Old RAM? Most of this RAM is older than my children.
• How ancient does a USB thumbdrive have to be before it’s no longer worth keeping? I don’t use them very often any more, but, like, I could, I guess.
• I got this box full of cables. Serial cables. VGA Cables. I think there’s some coax. Maybe even a Centronics cable? How much of this crap do I need?
• I don’t want to get rid of my old Nintendo accessories but maybe they would be more appreciated by an actual collector? Or is there something cool I can do with a Power Glove? I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.
• Okay. Old hard drives. I got rid of a bunch, but there’s still a bunch left. Am I ever gonna need an IDE Hard drive? How many?