The big sloppy pile that threatened to take over one half of the living room is gone, and that feels both good and very strange. That was mostly the easy stuff; mail to be answered or filed, receipts to file, bills to pay. The deck of problem cards is, as yet, unaddressed.
I said it was a long overdue review.
In other, exciting news, yesterday I went to Office Depot and bought moving boxes. In a stroke of luck, they were marked “buy one [package of 6] get two free,” and thus we have a bunch of still-folded boxes in the hallway. And I’m paying the registration fee on Delicious Library tonight, after testing its barcode-reading via webcam function. Which works beautifully (screenshot). It is, simply stated, iTunes for physical media, complete with sort and search, plus some moderate lending and tracking functions.
These two things have something to do with each other. See, my fianc√©e and I are going to move at some point, but we don’t know exactly when. The last time we moved, something like 50-75% of the pain was boxing and sorting books and CD’s. And worse, later, you end up not knowing what the hell is in those boxes, so when you really need that one reference book or art book for a pattern to scan, you end up pulling all the boxes out of wherever they are and digging through them all.
And if you’re anything like me, that means that you pore through a bunch of books you haven’t seen in ages, and then it’s getting dark and what were you doing in the first place, anyway? Oh, right. That book. Well, it isn’t in this box, maybe in that other one over there…? And so on.
Thus, an experiment. I’m breaking out all these boxes, and I’m going to label them in a very general, but legible way. Then, as I put books, CD’s, etc. in them, I’m importing them into Delicious Library. Which, later, in theory, will let me search my books on the computer, and will inform me which box the books are in. It also syncs my library to the iPod, something that I think is of dubious utility.
I can see potential pitfalls to this, and ways it could become a pain in the ass. If books don’t get put back where they belong, for example. But when we move, I do plan to invest in some real bookshelves (or build my own), and so when we unpack, the books can get re-labeled and sorted as they’re put away.
It’s already a big job, and I see no real harm in giving a little extra effort a shot. I’ll let you know how it works.
Of course, this software would be so much cooler if I could add other peoples’ libraries to my search capacity. So, for example, if I search for “Stephenson” and see that I don’t have a copy of Zodiac, but Loki does, well, I could… um, hop a trans-pacific flight to Australia to borrow it. :) Well, maybe not, but you see my point, given friends that don’t live on the opposite ends of the world.
I really need to work on that.