Preserving and Pack-Ratting & Storing e-Things

I'm SLOWLY working through the details of migrating over from one internet service provider to another, and from an old clunky pawnshop laptop to brand new shiny black desktop.

I hate to throw things away. Right now, in my man cave there is a box of 5 1/4" diskettes with DOS 2.1 programs on them. I have textbooks from courses I dropped. There are cables hanging from my wall that go to ports that aren't MADE any more.

And the computers themselves? Well, before the LAST pawnshop laptop expired, it was the top of the stack of three of them. That's right; when one died, I buried it under the next one. Desktops? Yeah, I have three of them lined up against the wall in my man cave. There is one up in the attic, and one next to the furnace in the basement.

I think I finally threw away the Color Computer I had stashed out in the shed for years and decades. Still have the slimline tape recorder that stored the programs on cassette tapes, though. It works, if I ever find a cassette tape I want to listen to.

Printers? Well, yeah, they are here as well. At least three in this room, which includes one that was working just FINE until I upgraded to Windows 10, plus the one that works, and I don't know WHAT that other one is. I did take one out in the woods and shoot it, but anyone would have done that. It was a Lexmark.

My gun cabinet is topped, NOT with cleaning supplies, reloading reference manuals, etc, but keyboards and mice. And I have multiple boxes with more of the same.

WHY?

Well, in the case of the 5 1/4" diskettes, I DO actually have a defensible reason: those are from the days when I first owned a personal computer. I keep that for nostalgia. The rest of it?

I don't have a good answer. I suppose in the case of the desktops, I always started by thinking that I could harvest parts for a new build. That would have worked, too, had it not been for the fact that memory modules changed pretty rapidly back in the day. And the graphics board that was state of the art was soon surpassed with what was built into the motherboard of the next system. Same for sound cards. Modems? Same thing.

Monitors are a different story. I've only got two of those, and they are both twenty-something inch flat panels. I'd still be using the first one I got, except my first-born son gave me a better one a couple of years ago. The first one still works, though. We plugged it into the TV base in the living room where there isn't a TV, just to make sure the connection worked.

But apart from the monitor, I don't think my life would be any the worse if I were to dump all of it. And if my gift-from-God, happily-ever-after trophy wife Vanessa, the elegant, foxy, praying black grandmother of Woodstock, GA reads this, she may sweetly encourage me to do so. Maybe not; after all, SHE still has textbooks from Spelman. I can always fall back on that, I suppose.

But today, NONE of that is my problem. Instead, it's data that I would LIKE to keep, but will have to work to do so.

I've been writing book reviews on Amazon since July 6, 2014, with Cedar Sanderson's "Plant Life" and I (sort of) turned pro in 2015. Which is to say, in 2015, I realized that writing reviews was what I did. And, as of today (I just checked) I have written 365 reviews.

Now, when a review goes live, Amazon sends you an email. In the past, that email included how many reviews you had written, your Amazon ranking, and other stuff. Later, they dropped that info. I didn't save the first few emails; it wasn't until my sixth review on October 28, 2014,   of Amanda S. Greene's "Nocturnal Origins", which was a TOTAL spoof, by the way, that I started saving my email receipt from Amazon in a newly Created folder in my Inbox (300+ of them).

According to my record of review #6, and at that time, my reviewer rank was: 14,360,604. Today, I am ranked 6,502, and I have hovered in the six thousands for quite some time. After I post each review on my Facebook page, I make a comment in the next line, of my Amazon rating.

It was a bit of fun to watch my numbers climb, and I think that's what prompted me initially to save the reviews. Afterward? Just continued out of inertia. I rarely went back and looked. On occasion, I would look at the records Amazon kept of my activity, but that was mostly on the occasions when I THOUGHT I had reviewed something, but had no record of it.

And now? Now I'm wondering whether it's worthwhile to try to save a record of the reviews. I might, perhaps, create a notecard of my progress up the rating system, just for remembrance, and tuck it into my box of floppies, but I can't think of a single FUNCTIONAL reason for keeping them. Especially since the ONLY way I know of getting them over to my new email system is by forwarding them all, then moving them into a new designated folder. If there is a way of saving emails in any other form, I don't know what it is. I can print them, of course, but I don't want the paper. And the NEW Amazon email doesn't contain the entire review, EITHER! Just the first couple of paragraphs. Maybe that's all the mundane reviewers NEED, but I write more words than that.

Well, unless someone provides me with a suggestion on how to do it easily, or a reason I should do the work to do it the hard way, I'm inclined to just let these things go away. And then, maybe I'll throw away some of these cables and what not.