I have way too much stuff and I finally hit my limit.

I took a long, hard look at all of the gadgets, cables, and miscellaneous electronic crap that I’ve been building up in the closet “just in case I ever need it” and decided to just dump everything. It was the great “Purge of 2007″ for me, and I feel as if a weight has been lifted.

With one fail swoop, I threw away all those IDE cables, floppy drives, dvd drives, hard drives, port adapters, gender changers and case parts that have been been resident in the ‘electronics’ closet for the last few years. Yes, I actually threw away the 17 computer case fans I had just sitting in a box.

Old PDA’s? Gone. That 6gb 3.5″ HD? Gone. Old webcams? Gone. My “old” blackberry Pearl? Sent it to Costco for recycling (and got $80 for it!). I still need to donate an old scanner and inkjet printer, but they’re on the way out as well.

The entire closet is now compressed into 2 small containers sitting on a shelf - I figure a few SATA cables and loose screws may come in handy some day.

Purge, purge, purge! And that was only the start. 2008 is about simplicity for me:

• I’m finally going to finish ripping out the home office. While I made a good start last year, we still have to paint it and turn it into a study. I’m done with a computer room in the house.
• My backup plan is almost complete. Our laptops now rsync to the NAS, so they’re constantly being backed up. The last part I need to do is put in place an automated mechanism to store the data offsite (on S3, Moxy or Dreamhost).
• I’m no longer an IT department. We’re down to my laptop, my wife’s laptop and the machine for the kids in the playroom. My ’server’ environment is now simply a Mac Mini and a 1.5TB NAS for storage. I’m wondering if I even need the NAS these days or if I should just hang a huge drive off the Mac Mini.
• Clean desk environment. At home, the only thing on my desk is an iPhone dock and a small 2.5″ drive that I use for a full ‘clone’ of my laptop that I do every week. At work, I have a few essentials, but I’m working on getting it to be as sparse as possible.
• Media is accessible ‘everywhere’ at home. Unlike some who are just figuring it out, hooking a computer up to the TV for HD output is so 2004. Even though I get the ‘geek’ factor to it, I’d rather not have a computer attached to the TV (nor does it pass any type of WAF factor. To quote my wife, “I’m NOT booting the TV”) - embedded devices are the future (see exploding pc). The new Tivo has been working wonderfully in the living room, which also has an AppleTV for streaming movies. The theater is still running on xBox 360. I can’t remember when I last watched a movie or listened to music that wasn’t streamed from the media ’server’. I still need to find a place to box away all those DVDs and CDs though…

Electronics was only the beginning - We’ve been cleaning out the garage of all our old baby stuff, donating most of it as we’re not planning on having any more. All of this cleaning house has felt a bit weird, but it’s been incredibly freeing.

Some of what inspired me for this was Paul Graham’s post on “Stuff”. Simplicity and less ‘junk’ in my life are my goals for 2008. What are yours?