Are you a collector?

[Flack]

Some people are inherently collectors, and I am definitely a member of this group. I like collecting things. I like looking for the things I need to finish my collections. I like displaying my collections. I like buying things I used to own as a child.

Some people are not collectors. Some people find no enjoyment whatsoever in collecting "things".

So, which group are you in? And if you're a collector, what do you collect?

[CO]

My parents are borderline horders and it scarred me pretty bad. They were "garage salers" and never seemed to get the idea that it doesn't matter if someting only costs ten cents if you already have three of the same thing at home.

I seem to have zero desire to collect physical objects that don't serve a daily useful purpose. In fact, now that I have a smartphone that can keep me entertained and informed all of the time I find myself completely uninterested in purchasing objects to keep in my home.

I used to collect pirated software but now all I really collect are emails. You could say that I'm an email horder, i almost never delete or throw away emails. I still have a 1.6 gig pst file from a job I left 7 years ago (if needed I could produce a weekly report that I sent to my boss on october 11 of 2002). This is especially useful with the great search in gmail and even Outlook's search is pretty damn good to find anything I might ever need. Regarding physical possessions, my rule of thumb is that if you don't use something for three months then you don't need it and it must go, but for some reason I don't apply that to emails.

[Flack]

I, on the other hand, have things that I haven't used in 20 years, just in case I ever need them again. :)

[Roody_Yogurt]

These days, I think I get more satisfaction out of throwing things away than collecting, but even throwing away is a slow process. I'm still working at the heap of junk I accumulated in my 20s. I'm pretty happy with sections of it, like the various IF memorabilia I have (although I did give all of my Infocom boxes to Stephen Granade just because I only saw them falling into further disrepair in my care) and promotional materials from small time bands I've been into.

There are also the things that I don't keep track of very well and then re-buy over and over, like RCA cables and things like that.

Now that I'm an uncle, I miss some of the things I've thrown away, like the Jedi Knight videogame, as my nephew is on a Star Wars kick. Still, that can be remedied easily enough on Steam one of these days.

[Flack]

My parents are exact opposites when it comes to stuff. My dad is not very interested in "things" at all, My mother is very interested in "things". In this aspect, I take after my mother.

I have always associated memories and feelings with physical items. I don't have the greatest of memories, so when I look at an item that I got from somebody or from a certain place, I instantly remember the occasion.

I have difficulty in parting with items that I believe have value. Unfortunately, "value" can mean a lot of things. An item might have value for me in the future if I need it. It might have value on eBay or craigslist, if I were to sell it. It might have value to a friend of mine, if they need it. Because of this I end up hanging on to a lot of things (many of them easily replaceable) that I should probably part with.

One of my greatest weaknesses are toys that I used to own as a kid. I still own most of the Star Wars vehicles and action figures that I owned as a kid, and now have a collection of Star Wars toys that is too big for me to display all at once. When I see a post like THIS of something I used to own as a kid, I usually run right to eBay and buy them. (Yes, I have a complete collection of all 8 of those little rubber monsters in all 5 colors.) I have done this many times.

I guess what's crazy is that a lot of my collections, I don't even enjoy. I have somewhere around 100 boxed computer games that sit on a shelf. I don't play them or anything. I have 3, maybe 400 loose Atari 2600 games. I haven't had an Atari hooked up in a decade. I have over a thousand DVDs, but I'm too lazy to dig through the stack to find one to watch; everything I watch is stored on my media server (or Netflix).

When my family and I moved six months ago, my physical belongings was more than my wife's and kids' combined. I have made great strides in parting with things over the past six months, but let's just say there's room for improvement.

[AArdvark]

Like the Johnny Cash of stuff, I walk the line of collecting. I have a few small things that I collect* and try really really hard to avoid garage sales. I usually browse Craigslist as a sort of garage sale nicotine patch. I never buy anything but it's nice to windows shop.

I know if left unchecked I would start squirreling away stuff because I might need it someday. This is the classic hoarders reasoning that fills one's house with junk. The Collier brothers come to mind.


THE
ALWAYS ROOM FOR
AARDVARK

*Chipmunk albums and stuffed aardvarks are my downfall.

[Tdarcos]

So, which group are you in?

I like to collect things.

And if you're a collector, what do you collect?

Lots of different things. Mostly software. Source codes of open-source applications. I like to collect music and music videos, I started doing it a lot more since I broke the hard drive I had thousands of MP3s stored on that I stupidly didn't have a backup. (Actually, i had a backup, I forgot or didn't notice the backup disks got lost in the eviction.)

I lost interest in it, but I picked up an open-source web-based finance and resource management tool, like usable for managing conference rooms, plus it had an accounts payable and accounts receivable package. I believe it was called WebErp. The one thing it was missing was a payroll module. I then found a fairly good web-based payroll system. I wanted to figure a way to integrate the login systems to use one database and merge them together. It's the sort of thing that would be useful and probably easily sold. I just didn't have the time to work on it but I probably could have if I wanted to.

Probably, similar to your esoteric hobby of collecting video game machines, mine is the collection of program compilers.

Compilers. Programs that translate other programs. Especially compiler source codes, more likely Pascal over other languages. You learn a great deal about what a language can do when you see how someone uses it for various functions and how they can stress the language. Also I've been a big collector of error message files. Learning ways people write error messages for compilers and other applications gives better understanding of how to better describe failure conditions and to propagate that understanding to the end user.

One thing I really hate are error messages that don't tell you anything. When I post a message on Yahoo Answers, where I'm answering a question of someone, and it fails, it won't tell me why it failed, it just usually gives the (almost always erroneous) error that Yahoo Answers is temporarily unavailable.

In many cases I can get the answer submission to work if I shorten the answer, if I open a new browser window and resubmit it, or things like that. In some cases it can't take my answer because the question has been removed (either because the questioner cancelled it or because the question violated Yahoo's Terms of Service). And sometimes it's really because they're doing maintenance.

But if the goddam error message system could tell me that, then I'm not going to keep trying to post the message because the question is no longer there. But no, all failures are "Yahoo Answers is temporarily unavailable." It also doesn't mention unless you hit the back button, your reply will be lost forever.

[Flack]

Probably, similar to your esoteric hobby of collecting video game machines, mine is the collection of program compilers.

Maybe. How much have you spent on collecting program compilers, and how do you display them?

[Tdarcos]

Probably, similar to your esoteric hobby of collecting video game machines, mine is the collection of program compilers.

Maybe. How much have you spent on collecting program compilers,

Probably twenty years.

and how do you display them?

Same way you display any source code, it's in a file folder where you can look at it. That's mostly how you do it.

The AAEC Pascal Compiler for the IBM 370 mainframe computer is about 10,000 lines of code. It basically does no frills Standard Pascal. The compiler itself is about 5500 lines, written in Pascal. The rest is the assembly language run-time library. Now, 10,000 lines of code is a program listing the size of a book, about 200 pages. And that compiler doesn't do as well for providing good application support as Turbo Pascal. (It was fine for the type of programs people wrote when it was created back around 1980.)

I played around with Free Pascal for a while but it didn't seem to do the job that well. So I moved back to Basic, and there are a number of nice Basic compilers, but many of them, like a really interesting one called Gambas, only work under Linux.

I used to use Free Basic, a basic compiler written in Basic for writing quickie console applications (something you cannot do with Visual Basic) until I discovered the Free Pascal compiler now can do the same thing and supports both a console mode and a windowed mode.

The current compiler I'm going through looking at is the Free Pascal Compiler. I'm certainly not going to print out this compiler. It supports full Object Pascal, contains about 60 units, and is over 200,000 lines of Pascal code. Compiles itself in about 16 seconds. A 200,000 line application would require about 4,000 pages to print.

If you've read my comments on Caltrops you can probably understand why I'm writing a cross-reference tool. Figuring out where a particular variable is defined or used in an application of more than 60 modules (plus include files) and 200,000 lines of source code is going to be a huge problem.

[Flack]

I guess I could have saved a lot of time and money by just printing out pictures of things and storing them in folders.

[FANSY]

Go go hot chicks!

[Tdarcos]

I guess I could have saved a lot of time and money by just printing out pictures of things and storing them in folders.

If the only place you can use them on is the computer, then yes. If it has corporeal existence then clearly you have it as an item. Which would be of use to you, 30 photographs of pizza cutters or one pizza cutter? (Yes, you have 1 photograph of your pizza cutters and 30 of them, but the qualification still implies.)

Which is more useful to you, a photo of your girlfriend or her actually being there in person? We can obviously know the answer.

---
Jerry Femina tells the story of an advertising copywriter who was chronically late, who wanted a raise so he could have his girlfriend move in with him. She would be able to get up and would wake him up. Jerry asked him why he just didn't get an alarm clock. The copywriter looked at him like he was crazy, and said, "How do you fuck an alarm clock?"

[RetroRomper]

I used to collect typewriters, though it was only because this little thrift store on the corner always seemed to have a "new" vintage model in stock when the ribbon on my old one died; I moved from an Olympia S3 to an Olympia SF, then transitioned to a late model IBM and finally a Selectric (which I went out of my way to buy a ribbon for).

There was also a transition from physical video games, to full ROM sets of a system: import Sega Saturn games were an interest of mine, until I realized that the medium I played them in was only vaguely important. After selling off my collection for various personal reasons, I became content with hoarding the full system discographies of the Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, and Playstation. And considering my interest is mainly in the rare Japanese games for each system (Radiant Silvergun still fetches $200+ for a copy), its become quite a bit cheaper to play these games.

[Flack]

When I was working in Spokane, I (and everyone at my office) had access to the DRMO, or "Dr. Moe's" as we called it. Dr. Moe's was the "Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office" located at the Air Force base just around the corner from our office.

When government agencies have equipment they no longer want or need, they excess it. Excessed equipment goes to a DRMO. The equipment then follows a certain schedule. The first week in the DRMO, the equipment is processed, evaluated and sorted. The second week it's there, it's put on display and any other government agency can claim it, for free. All you have to do is fill out the paperwork and transfer the property to your office. The third week it's there it gets moved to an area where non-profit organizations can come get it for free. The last week of the month, whatever's left gets auctioned off.

I had two or three co-workers (non-computer people) who were constantly going to Dr. Moe's, acquiring equipment, transferring it to our office's inventory, and then dragging it back to the office for me to deal with. And this wasn't one or two items, and it didn't happen once or twice; for the most part, Dr. Moe's dealt in palettes of stuff, and these guys did this on a monthly basis. One time they brought me two dozen IBM 386 machines ... this was at a time when the slowest machine in my office was a Pentium 100 and the fastest was probably a P166. I guess I could have used one of them for a DOS-based mail router, if I didn't already have a DOS-based mail router ...

What reminded me of that was, one time the guys came in with an entire load of old manual typewriters. I literally lost my mind and started screaming. I was like, "I AM THE IT GUY. I AM AGAINST TYPEWRITERS. WE DO NOT NEED TYPEWRITERS!!!"

A month later the guys brought back a shredder that, I shit you not, required two keys to be turned to start it as if it were going to launch missiles out of a silo. I think it was actually a tree mulcher disguised as a paper shredder. It would do about half a book at a time. CHOMP.

[Flack]

There was also a transition from physical video games, to full ROM sets of a system: import Sega Saturn games were an interest of mine, until I realized that the medium I played them in was only vaguely important. After selling off my collection for various personal reasons, I became content with hoarding the full system discographies of the Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, and Playstation. And considering my interest is mainly in the rare Japanese games for each system (Radiant Silvergun still fetches $200+ for a copy), its become quite a bit cheaper to play these games.

I still have CD binders full of CD-Rs out in my garage. I have four 200 booklets for PlayStation games, at least one for Dreamcast games, and several others for PS2, Xbox, and other more obscure systems like the Amiga CD32.

[bruce]

I am a hoarder.

Bruce

[Tdarcos]

A month later the guys brought back a shredder that, I shit you not, required two keys to be turned to start it as if it were going to launch missiles out of a silo. I think it was actually a tree mulcher disguised as a paper shredder. It would do about half a book at a time. CHOMP.

Two keys because it's for a government agency, and that way the operator can't do something stupid like put a hand into the shredder, since both hands have to be outside the machine.

The same thing applies to those cardboard box binders some grocery stores have to crush and bundle used boxes. You have to push two switches simultaneously too far from the business end of the machine, so no part of your body can get caught. You might have some 18-year-old moron (typical teenager thinking about when they're getting off work and can they get laid this weekend who can barely tie his or her shoes) running it.