the corner office

GeoCities is being shut down (because Yahoo! is! circling! the! drain!), but some people are trying to archive it (via):

Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I've archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It's not for me to judge. It's for me to collect

This resonates with me, which is I have so many boxes of crap. Recently I was digging through some old files, and came across some old Telkom phone bills.

'I have a lot of old phone bills,' I said to Ronwen, 'It's silly but I can't quite bring myself to throw them away, what do you think I should do with them?'. 'Why don't you hang on to them for a little longer,' she replied. 'I have all my phone bills going back to the mid-90s,' I said. 'OK,' she said, 'then maybe only keep some of them.'

Which is not so easy for me, because if there's one thing that compels me more than the urge to hang on to old things, it's the urge to preserve collections.