Multiples of things

Is this just me, or are many/most people like this?

I seem unable to be happy with just one of something. If I like it, I get more (and I don't just mean that when the bottle of wine is finished, I buy another one - I buy wine 6 bottles at a time, and beer in crates of 20 (or 24, for some of the Belgian ones). I regard this as simply efficient shopping, though, just as I buy teabags in boxes of 240 at once).

On the other hand…

• When I was young(er) I had a Lego collection. I think it was a pretty normal-sized collection for a child interested in Lego, and I still have it. Since I've been 35+ years old, though, I've continued buying Lego (nowadays mostly on eBay) and I now have something like a cubic metre of it.
  • One cubic metre might not sound like much, but bear in mind that that weighs somewhere between a half and one ton, and it takes up a *lot* more space than one cubic metre when you've sorted it into compartmented storage boxes. The collection also includes a higher-than-average number of Mindstorms RCX, NXT and EV3 bricks and sensors.

• For several years I've had a video camera mounted at my front door, connected to a computer running zoneminder. This has on a couple of occasions come in useful for providing images to the police of people who weren't supposed to be there.
  • I recently won an eBay action for eight (better quality) cameras, and shall soon be fitting these around my house and garden (ie: for both indoor and outdoor monitoring). Just one or two didn't really seem like enough.

• When Hewlett-Packard brought out the N36L Proliant Microserver in 2010, I thought this was a pretty good computer for a pretty good price (especially given that HP operated a strange "cashback" scheme where you bought the machine for full price from an authorised dealer, sent the receipt to HP, and got a refund back of something like 50% of the cost). I bought four of them, which was the maximum number of refunds HP would pay out to a single customer.
  • I now have an additional N40L and two N54Ls, making a total of 7 microservers. The original four N36Ls (which are over 10 years old at the time of writing this) are still working nicely. All 7 machines have the full standard capacity of four hard disks in them, giving me a total storage capacity (before Raid etc) of 92Tbytes. Much of this is simply used for multiple backups, in multiple locations, of around 20Tbytes of data.

• Many years ago I bought a house, and I've lived in it quite happily since then.
  • Since 2008 I've had an apartment as well, in another country, and (except for Covid-19 getting in the way) regularly travel between the two and live in both part-time. I can't even manage with a single house in a single country.

• For related reasons I also own two cars, in different countries.

• Shortly after getting interested in Lego, I also became slightly fascinated with telephones. I managed to collect four or five of them at an early age because my father worked on civil engineering construction sites, and when a job was finished and the temporary offices were being taken away, nobody was interested in bothering with little bits of equipment like phones. They went in the skip or someone took them home. I wired them up between different parts of the house and some garden sheds.
  • In recent years I've worked on many Voice over IP projects, involving several different makes and model of VoIP phones (mostly connected to the Asterisk PBX systems which I build for customers. I like to be able to test things out with different type of phones, to see how well they work etc., and I now have something in the region of 100 different VoIP telephones at home (nearly all PoE, and nearly all SIP). I also bought an HP 24-port PoE switch which now sits in my loft (but that doesn't mean it isn't being used).

• Most people have a "home computer network" these days, due to the number of devices we all own which connect to the Internet, and the simplicity of having an always-on connection to it.
  • My "home network" includes two 24-port gigabit switches, three 8-port gigabit switches, a 16-port PoE switch, and a couple of spares in the cupboard. That's just the network in the apartment; the one at the house is similar but with more RJ45 sockets.

There are some things I probably have fewer of than most people, though:

• Shoes
• Clothes
• Electronic toys (not counting VoIP phones)
• Social media accounts
• Shopping loyalty cards
• Photographs

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