I’m a terrible hoarder.
I have boxes of cables, some that will only connect obsolete things to other obsolete things. A drawer of widgets – dongles for copyprotected software that can only run on PCs from 12 years ago. Drawing pins and rubber bands too. Rubber bands have become a bit of an obsessive-compulsive fixation. If I see one in the street these days, I will pick it up; and in testament to my maturity, not flick it at Foe.
Useless ideas too. I have a shelf of sketchbooks, approximately 30% full of notes from meetings that bored me enough to fill the other 70% with drawings of giant robot squirrels or stupid ideas.
It doesn’t matter what I hoard, the same mantra goes through my mind each time:
I might need it.
Somebody else might need it.
It’ll be useful one day.
It’s not even a conscious thought any more. It’s an engram. It’s baked-in. It’s just a surface my behaviour runs down like water on a windscreen.
Which is why the web is my salvation, or at least a salve. It’s an infinite shelf I can leave this stuff on, because I might need it, somebody else might need it, it’ll be useful one day. Which I guess leads me to one of the stupid ideas next to the giant robot squirrels, that Ben turned into the LazyWeb, and it’s final justification to me, in an entry at 0xDefcafbad.
“I plan to work on small- to mid-sized projects, presented in a periodic column format with entries around 2500-5000 words each. One of my first challenges is to brainstorm a list of topics; Iâve already got a handful of things I could work on, but I might need to troll the lazyweb to find a few more inspirations.”
It’ll be useful one day, see.
» 0xDecafbad: I was a pre-teen Transactor author wannabe (and still am!)
Petafloptimism 
I tend to hoard too, a habit probably picked up from my parents. At the weekend I spent some time looking through 40 year old newspapers (“Bobby Kennedy Shot!”), 40 year old guidebooks to various parts of America, 35 year old notes from a Fortran course my mum once did, and 20 year old computer magazines (“Why not use your Spectrum to store recipes?”).
All of it fascinating, especially some of the more incidental stuff – the adverts on the backs of newspaper cuttings, the notes scribbled here and there… Give it a few decades and those robot squirrel overlords will be (more) intriguing!