Still cleaning… I got through a couple of more sort drawers and found just masses of stuff that I shouldn’t be keeping such as an old broken linksys wireless cable router (I had dreams of tearing it apart and trying to fix it sometime…), old Borland Framework posters I never hung up, more IDE cables (I think I could have wired up a datacenter worth of IDE drives if a datacenter used IDE drives (and if you have a datacenter that does, I don’t want to hear about it thankyouverymuch)). Found more SATA cables, a bunch of hardware install CDs for Dell and yes, even Packard Bell computers. 10 backpacks from various conferences or other techie get togethers prior to decided to just toss that stuff when I first get it[1]. All of that stuff hit the junk.
I also started sorting through books. I have always had trouble tossing out books but when they are computer books from 1997 you have to start to wonder if they will ever become a collectors item and if not you should toss them. Actually anymore if something is older than 2-3 years you have to wonder if it will be a collectors item or possibly toss it. I did a great book cleaning several years ago and it hurt to toss books out on everything from DOS batch files on MSDOS 4.0 (and new features of 5.0) to the original versions of IIS and SQL Server 6.5. This time going through I started tossing ADO 2.0 and ASP 2.0 and everything Visual Basic (except the .NET stuff – I will either read it or throw it away in the next 3-4 years probably). SQL Server 7.0 stuff, Oracle on NT stuff, every book on Borland Compilers prior to the ones I am using right now (Borland Developer Studio and Borland Builder 6) so that means all of them but one which I still haven’t read. After I sorted out all of the books I started to toss them and thought… wow, this could be someone throwing out my book in a few years… Then I looked at all of the books and how much time and energy and sweat and blood went into them. I looked at them in a completely transformed way…
Originally I was worried about seeing my book in a bargain bin, now I seem to be past that and thinking about someone just tossing it out. That sucks. You sort of think about writing a book and how it will always exist out there, but for technical books, that just isn’t so… You keep old technical books like you keep the newer cars… You don’t, the moment they are no longer current and useful you toss them out. There are some technical books that transcend the normal technical book rules though. Some examples are books from Charles Petzold, Jeffrey Richter, Knuth[2], and other books on operating system design or data structures and algorithms, etc.
Contrast that with non-tech books that you almost always keep nearly forever or at least I do, I have Asimov and Heinlein books now that were given to me over 20 years ago and I know that I will have those along with the Douglas Adams, Dan Brown,Mary Stewart and Ann Rice and other non-technical books 20 years from now even if books are no longer made and it is anachronistic to have and read paper books.
After 30 seconds of serious sadness I tossed the books out and went on. Korn blasting on media center doesn’t allow for you to stay sad for long. 🙂
    joe
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[1] I have an exception here. I kept the Ogio Back Pack from DEC 2006.
[2] If you don’t know Knuth, there is nothing I can do to help you with that.
So I’m on a gig right now that involves SQL7 and ASP2 (I think) as well as VB5 or VB6. Going to be interesting…