kevin_standlee (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kevin_standlee) wrote2021-05-23 09:30 am
kevin_standlee) wrote2021-05-23 09:30 am
Entry tags:
Letting Go of the Past
Lisa has been working her way through clearing up stuff we have stored in the garage, including many boxes of things that I had in my storage locker in Yuba City. This means that stuff that I've had sitting in boxes since my college days has surfaced and I've had to decide what to do with it. I have, for example, decided to trash old planning calendars from the 1980s and 1990s, and most recently, I had a pile of paper that needed diagnosing.
These are printouts of computer programs I wrote when I was at California State University, Chico in the mid-1980s working on my B.Sc. in Computer Science. In those days, you hit submit and eventually an output file would appear at the pickup desk at the appropriate location in one of the university buildings. How long before you got your results depending on the load on the system. I have memories of going to a near-campus 24-hour coffee shop while pulling a late-nighter to drink coffee and eat donuts while waiting for the output from my programs.
(The user icon on this post is from ten years later in Winnipeg, but I don't have any 1980s-vintage photos around that I could use. Perhaps some will resurface as the box-delving continues.)
I reviewed the documents and decided that I really did not need 35-year-old printouts of programs taking up space. I set them aside to await disposal.
This late cold snap gave me an opportunity to get some tiny bit of value out of documents I've been saving for some reason for all this time and hauling around and storing. As I mentioned, we're pretty low on firewood because Big R did not restock the fire logs, so to stretch the supply, I broke down and burned most of the cardboard boxes that Lisa emptied, and most of the computer printouts also went into the fire, where they provided maybe as much as 90 minutes of additional heat.
I have mixed feelings about disposing of this material. It removes ties to past memories, but the physical material uses up space we would like to use for other things (including freeing up storage space for staging material for Westercon 74 next spring), and it isn't useful for anything other than sentiment, so logically, disposing of it in a way that's at least vaguely useful was the right thing to do. The memories are still there, after all, as they are part of my education that earns me a pretty good living today.
These are printouts of computer programs I wrote when I was at California State University, Chico in the mid-1980s working on my B.Sc. in Computer Science. In those days, you hit submit and eventually an output file would appear at the pickup desk at the appropriate location in one of the university buildings. How long before you got your results depending on the load on the system. I have memories of going to a near-campus 24-hour coffee shop while pulling a late-nighter to drink coffee and eat donuts while waiting for the output from my programs.
(The user icon on this post is from ten years later in Winnipeg, but I don't have any 1980s-vintage photos around that I could use. Perhaps some will resurface as the box-delving continues.)
I reviewed the documents and decided that I really did not need 35-year-old printouts of programs taking up space. I set them aside to await disposal.
This late cold snap gave me an opportunity to get some tiny bit of value out of documents I've been saving for some reason for all this time and hauling around and storing. As I mentioned, we're pretty low on firewood because Big R did not restock the fire logs, so to stretch the supply, I broke down and burned most of the cardboard boxes that Lisa emptied, and most of the computer printouts also went into the fire, where they provided maybe as much as 90 minutes of additional heat.
I have mixed feelings about disposing of this material. It removes ties to past memories, but the physical material uses up space we would like to use for other things (including freeing up storage space for staging material for Westercon 74 next spring), and it isn't useful for anything other than sentiment, so logically, disposing of it in a way that's at least vaguely useful was the right thing to do. The memories are still there, after all, as they are part of my education that earns me a pretty good living today.
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