The Drawer of Redundant Technology by Nathan Barry
At last the festivities are over, the decorations have been put away, the cards and tree have been recycled, and I can finally play with one of my presents to myself – a home cinema kit. That’s not what this post is about, but it does need a little bit of a backstory…
A few years back, before my days of being a dad, I spent all of my free time rebuilding our house. I planned out the wiring and buried all the speaker cables for a surround sound setup in the walls, with nice banana plug sockets on the ends. About halfway through the build, we somehow managed to get pregnant – no idea where we found the time or energy for that. The impending arrival of ‘Oops,’ as she was then known, changed many of the plans for the house and a home cinema kit was no longer a priority.
Fast forward back to now and Dulcie is old enough to appreciate a good movie (even if they do all feature Princesses and Faeries) and needs to hear them in glorious 5.1 Surround Sound right? So I find the right system on eBay – it has to be silver and slimline to match the decor, with small speakers as the room isn’t very big – and it all arrives just before Christmas. So first chance I get when the living room is de-christmased, I start to set it all up. Now where did I put those gold-plated banana plugs…?
Oh yes, I remember, they are tucked away in that special storage area that all GeekDad’s surely have for such things – I call mine The Drawer of Redundant Technology. Yours may be a cupboard, or a box tucked away in a wardrobe, or perhaps a shelf out in the garage – maybe even the whole garage!
Wherever and whatever yours is, it is the place where that outdated camera lives. It is the last resting place of superseded iPods. It is a nest of tangled (or possibly neatly coiled) cables and wires of all types. Power adaptors for long lost mobile phones, a vast array of digital media storage devices, knotted and broken Headphones or Earbuds, spare parts for things that you don’t even own anymore – they can all be found within.
The Contents of The Drawer of Redundant Technology by Nathan Barry
Here’s just a few of the choice items that my drawer contains:
- A mouse for a Mac Plus – the Mac Plus itself in now a Macquarium. I always thought how cool it would be to convert the mouse to hold the air pump for the tank, but I know I’ll never get round to it.
- A six-CD changer magazine for my car – hasn’t been used for about 8 years, since I got my first iPod
- That very same iPod – a 2nd gen 20GB model, complete with a 12v power adapter and an iTrip
- A 5″ floppy disk
- A Canon Powershot camera with a busted LCD screen and lens cover
- Pieces of that lens cover
- 3 Apple power adapters – 2 x Firewire and 1 USB
- 2 kettle power leads and 3 figure 8s
- A 32Mb compact flash card – in my 6MP Nikon D70s, that only about 10-15 photos. It can’t have been enough for the camera it came with either, because there’s also a whopping 128Mb one there too
- An old HP RPN scientific calculator from my school days – I remember spending ages first learning Reverse Polish Notation, then programming the formula to solve quadratic equations into it
- A Darth Vader rubber stamp
- And, of course, those gold-plated banana plugs
I could go on, but I won’t. Suffice to say that it’s time for me to stop hoarding useless crap, and that goes for more than the Drawer of Redundant Technology too. My shed is full of leftover DIY materials, electric drills that packed up, rolls of carpet underlay that are slowly rotting away, offcuts of timber that are far too small to do anything useful with even if I did have the time. My wardrobe is full of T-shirts and trainers that I just don’t wear anymore and my bookshelves filled with tomes that have been read and need not be read again.
Enough is enough I say, and this is my New Year’s Resolution – to the recycling center with you all!
Have you got a fabulous stash of redundant technology? If so, we’d love to see it. Upload a photo to the GeekDad Flickr Pool and tag it ‘redundanttech’ and we’ll post them up later for all to see.
