hmatt's blog

At one point I had around 40 of those plastic bins in my room. I had kept everything in storage for a year (at $75 a month) and my roommates called the stacks “Mattropolis”. Aptly named.

Eventually I kept processing all of my stuff. The biggest things were tapes and documents. After much research I finally found a great product for digitizing my VHS tapes from my parent’s house and my grandparent’s house- a Black Magic Video Recorder. This worked GREAT! I was able to process a few hundred tapes (which at an average of 6 hours a tape is a LOT). I hit a few roadblocks on this process. 1) I ran out of hard drive space. I have at least 2 tb of vhs tapes encoded (and tossed afterwards). Plus a backup drive that has the same videos on it. Then there’s several gigs on my computer currently that don’t yet have a backup. 2) a few of my tapes kept skipping- which I’ve since discovered is due to Time Code Errors. They make VHS players that have this fixing built in, but as you can imagine I can’t easily go to a store and buy players like I used to. 3) several tapes are damaged. Either due to being thrown on the ground outside when my grandmother’s house caught fire, or being in a damp basement.

The way to fix all of these issues is mostly due to spending more money on the project. A new VHS player with Time Code correction, new set of 2TB hard drives, and taking the time to sort the remaining tapes to repair. I envision this day where I can call upon all of the old VHS tapes at will, having a searchable index and such.. of course now I still have the meticulous notes on tapes that I took, this was in my younger days when it was quite important to be able to sort through things. I have a few notebooks with pages about what is on each tape, either made by myself or my grandparents. I plan to scan these books and someday combine them with the tapes to create a database (or pay someone to do this).

Scanning documents has been made INCREDIBLY easy due to my Fuji ScanSnap S510M. A high speed scanner that I can feed sheets through and it scans both sides at the same time. I think I bought it for $400 or so at Costco years ago, and it has paid for itself SEVERAL times over. I have a few THOUSAND documents scanned with this. What are all these papers and such you ask? Old school homework, old mail, and for a time I thought it was interesting to see what I was spending my cash on, so old bank statements and such.

Now that I went through boxes and boxes of old stuff and either scanned and shredded or tossed in the trash, I’ve entered this phase where I have a mix of items. Sometimes there are a stack of papers of ‘normal sized’ paper that I can stick in my scanner. Sometimes there are NEWSPAPERS that I’d love to have a PDF of, for reasons unknown.. I guess because there are things that I know I can’t easily get again– mostly information that may be scattered on the pages. Fortunately I have my camera to photograph these pages, but as you can imagine it takes up large amounts of digital space, and SUPER time consuming. Sometimes there are old birthday cards and such that I don’t ‘need’ to have, but they remind me of people who are gone or only were a friend for brief time (and not everyone is on Facebook). Then there are old Boy Scout documents, papers from my experience in Walt Disney World in Florida in the Fall of 2000. Assorted memorabilia and t-shirts that I don’t necessarily want, but I’d like to at least have a picture of.

Thus begins this current time, where I am on the cusp of making major headway… since I started this processing project I’ve whittled down my collection of boxes and today there are only about 16. Of the remaining stuff are smaller collections. There is a box of patches from my Boy Scout days that I plan on scanning on a flatbed scanner and trying to sell, or end up sending out as Geocaching tradables. I’ve gone through my Boy Scout box and Florida box and set aside the things I’d like to keep (like uniforms and such), or my documents of congratulations for becoming an Eagle Scout. The rest of the papers and memorabilia are ready to be scanned or photographed then sold or tossed.

Last night I used an iPhone app called BooksApp to catalog all my printed books. The app is amazing by the way I could easily scan the barcode and it knew what book it was! There were only a handful I had to type in myself. I used the free version, but I’ll definitely be paying the $4 to upgrade so I can export my list. A friend of mine gave me his collection of plays, and now I finally have a list! I was also able to get rid of three boxes and instead put the books on a bookshelf.. can you imagine?

The other remaining projects are my various collections. That’ll be fun (said in a sarcastic tone). I’ll have to decide which collections stay in my life, and which are sold, tossed or given away. I’ll get to decide which are worth cataloging and which items to purge from my life. I know that is dramatic, but the emotional attachments to old toys and items from my past can be draining. My parents never moved when I was younger so I didn’t have to do all this in my youth. Now that I’m in my 30s it can be difficult to sort through these old items from my younger days, a youthful life mentality and reminders of paths I’ve chosen in life.

I used to collect lots of various things and, as I’ve written before, such collections have turned out to be mostly larger baggage. Now that anyone can buy something on the internet, items don’t command such a premium anymore. I know I’m ready to make space for blessings in my life. This “I’ll just sell my things to make money” mentality is nearing it’s end as ideals are shattered on how much things are worth of mine to other people.

I’m ready though. The final goal is to have a digital collection if I ever want to look back, yet minimize the ‘stuff’ that surrounds me. I look forward to the days when I am not sifting so much or spending too much time ‘organizing’ things that aren’t really that important in my life. All the acting books I have won’t ‘make’ me a better actor. That comes from experience (of which percentage of my life I’m doing less and less as the years go on). All the memories, which are nice, are only part of the sum of my life which has yet to be written.

I can remember that each day is important, and the time is now. There are so many wonderful things to do in this world, and I want to get up and do some of these things! If money is a ‘problem’ I can remember that God will provide.

Start.