Boxes

• 18th December 2013 at 10:18

My house has been invaded by boxes. They're everywhere I look - the spare room, the downstairs toilet, my office, the halls - we can barely get around the house. When my gran went to a home and my dad sold our house in Kent about 8 years ago, I spent several weeks going through everything; I started well, but as the weeks dragged on I ended up throwing most stuff into boxes to sort out later. My dad had a bit of storage space, so the boxes sat there until now; I can't keep them there any more, so I'm finally being forced to go through and sort out what to keep and what to get rid of.

Enter ebay. I've got a lot of random crap which I was pretty sure nobody would want, but which I couldn't bear to throw in the bin - minidisc players, a portable analogue tv, an old digital camera, an hp pda - you know, the sort of tech junk that you use for a few years before it gets replaced and goes in a drawer, never to be looked at again. Well, it turns out that there are people who want this stuff, and they live on ebay.

I have sold 11 items now, and made a grand total of £100 - which sounds nice, until you factor in the many hours I have spent writing listings, packing and weighing items, printing postage, and dropping parcels off at drop-off points for the various couriers I chose. Pretty sure once you factor that in, I've actually made a loss - but at least the things have new homes and didn't end up in landfill. I'm just not sure I can bring myself to list the hundreds of other things I need to get rid of.

The other thing I'm going through is a box of VHS tapes. Thanks to family friends with cameras, I have several tapes of me as a child, which I'm in the process of ripping to my computer to delay data rot. It stirs odd feelings of nostalgia and loss - hearing my mum's voice again, seeing my dog running around in the garden, remembering things about my childhood which I'd forgotten. One thing is abundantly clear though - I now understand why I was so mercilessly mocked and bullied at school: I was really, really annoying.

I'm thinking I should forget ebay and set up a kickstarter, where for each goal reached I release a new video on youtube of me as a child, each more embarassing than the last. There's enough cringe-worthy gold here for me to retire by christmas.

In other news, I've done a new version of the TCMI (although nobody else seems to be using it this year, which distresses me greatly), I've been migrating all my sites and services to new servers (I really hate puppet, I'll blog about that at some point), and I decided not to run the new advent calendar this year (it needed a bit more work, and didn't make sense to start in the middle of December). I'm still chugging down through my to do list, gradually approaching "Finish software and put it on sale" - a fairly critical one for an independent software developer, but one which is taking a lot longer to get to than I had hoped. 2014 - that will be when I finally sort things out. Yes, 2014. But until then: back to puppet.

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