Last night I went through my four-drawer file cabinet in the basement. Exciting, right? Well, if you’re anything like me, you keep the most bizarre epherma for the most inane reasons imaginable. And that tendency seems to get worse if it has anything to do with art or technology. You can learn a lot about me by what I threw away this morning:

• Two spare Mac disk drives
• A copy of Adobe Illustrator 5.5 on floppy disk
• The original 700 MB disk from my 7100
• Roughly 200 blank and filled 3.5MB floppy disks
• ATM reciepts from 1995, 1996, and 1997 (separated by year in envelopes)
• 15 issues of MacWorld from 1999-2001
• An LP of Donny Osmond’s Disco Train
• An LP of XTC’s Skylarking
• 50+ assorted B/W prints from college (embarassing, mostly)
• Five linoleum cuts dating back to college
• Three years of collected illustration clippings (other folks’, as reference)
• Four 500MB external SCSI hard drives (going to Goodwill)
• One SCSI scanner (also going to Goodwill)
• 20+ RAM chips, totaling about 10MB, dating back to my Mac IIcx
• Assorted illustration, design, and web client files from 1997-2000
• 20+ Print sample books from three years ago
• A copy of WordPerfect for the Mac, version 2.0, from 1994 (four floppies)
• Two boxes filled with business cards from jobs I had in 1996 and 1999

Naturally, because I am a geek, I backed up all the floppies that had good stuff on them to CD before I pitched them. I found copies of the promos I built in 1996 to get illustration work, funny sound samples from my sister, old writing from a class I took at Hopkins in 1997, and about a billion different extentions, updaters, and utilities.