This Friday, I was at my brother’s compound helping oversee the installation of a secret project, now revealed: The Information Cube.

That’s my little brother and the driver, discussing the best way to offload this monster onto the property. At 40 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet, this is a storage container which has seen some world travel, and which, for at least a year or so, will be the official repository for the contents of PAPER.TEXTFILES.COM.

A 20′ storage container is much more manageable, but the difference between 20′ and 40′ was $10 a month, and that’s a little hard to pass up.

Once we dropped it down, things looked even more imposing:

For the record, a storage container makes a sound like BBBBBBBBBBBUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN when you drop it off the back of a truck. As you also might notice, it’s kind of just sitting out there in the middle of the lot, which isn’t the ideal place, so that’s when it came down to little bro to use one of his vehicles to fix things:

Yes, that’s right. A bulldozer. We have a bulldozer. And a backhoe. And a wide variety of other earth moving equipment. What I’m saying is, don’t fuck with us or you get a free moat one night.

Storage containers are neat. It’s one thing to see them stacked at docks when you drive by or to walk by one when you’re on your way somewhere else, but it’s another deal altogether when it’s yours. This one is mine, or, I should say, is mine thanks to all the generous donations of the sabbatical and some other money I had saved up. This is all part of making my computer history work real. This is the start of an empire, a huge, cubic, green empire. (More thank yous to my supporters, shortly.)

The side of a storage container gives you all sorts of crazy information:

For the folks at home who don’t own or operate a storage container, the “Tare Weight” is “Weight when there’s nothing in there”, in this case 8.470 pounds. As you can also see, it has 2,360 cubic feet of capacity, which is also nice and solid, an excellent amount to do work in. Here’s what it looks like inside, without stuff:

And here’s what it looked like after we loaded in the first 100 crates (!) of material or so:

There’s a bunch of computer equipment, additional material and such that needs to go in here, and then I’ll be resorting and better quantizing these crates, including which crate location various items are residing – in other words, running it like a real library. I will open it up for appointments as needed, although if people simply need a specific item listed in the collection for a reason, I’m up to discussing that as well. I think it’s the right thing to do, and this whole process is going to make it easier for me to do my work.

This is a big, crazy thing, and it had to be done, and I appreciate how it might surprise people I’d move so fast so broadly after the Sabbatical hit success, but that’s what it’s about, right? Showing what I’m up to? Well, there you go.

I just rented a massive metal box of computer history!

Categorised as: computer history | jason his own self | textfiles.com

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