Month: May 2004

My Own Library

The spring cleaning frenzy continues. I think my bedroom is now the least cluttered it’s been in at least five or six years. No more boxes on the floor, clothes on the boxes, piles of papers and junk on the desk, etc.

An essential part of this process has been throwing stuff out. A large part of the reason it gets so cluttered in the first place is that I run out of room to put things, so they get dumped on the floor or desk ‘temporarily’, to be sorted later on. And things get dumped on top of them. And then they get hidden by a blanket tossed off to the side. And so on… After throwing a lot of old junk out, I finally have some more room in which to put everything.

There’s one thing that I’ve been reluctant to throw out so far though, and that’s the books. My collection might not be that large compared to some people’s, but it’s still a fair amount of space. There’s a fairly wide variety, too: textbooks, technical manuals, paperbacks, comics, game manuals, reference guides, tutorials… I don’t really want to let *any* of them go. Throwing out a book almost seems sacrilegious somehow, as though I’m devaluing the very information contained therein.

Do I really need all of those books? Well, maybe… The textbooks for courses long since passed? I’ve already thrown out my own notes for those classes, but the books are somehow different. On occasion I actually have gone running back to them to check on some bit of information I vaguely remembered, so they are still occasionally useful. How about the paperbacks and comics? I do sometimes like to reread my favourites. Game manuals? Not really, but they take up the least space. Some of the computer books are fairly recent and still relevant, and I refer to them often. Others though, aren’t quite so up-to-date. Do I really need “The MC68000 Reference Guide” anymore? Almost certainly not.

In the end though, I’m really just too lazy to sort through them for the few I might actually get rid of and dispose of them properly, so for now I’ll just keep building my own little library here. I just need to get more bookshelves so I’m not forced to keep stuffing them in closets, in drawers, on top of desks, etc…

iTunes and ID3

Today’s lesson:

ID3 tags are annoying. All the different versions of them, that is.

I’ve been using my own script for ripping CD tracks and converting them to MP3, with all of the appropriate ID3 tags and such. That required manually entering all the album and track data though, which was a pain. I considered extending the script to get the appropriate information from the CDDB databases automatically, but that’s a lot of work and I never got around to it.

Now that I have the iBook though, it turns out that iTunes is a pretty good CD ripper. I can slap a CD in, select all the tracks, wander away and come back ten minutes later to a complete set of properly-sorted 192kbps MP3s. However, not all was well. If I took the tracks and then tried to play them in xmms or on the PocketPC, the ID3 information would not show up. It looks like Apple is using their own extended version of the ID3 tags to embed extra information like the album jacket cover pictures, and other programs haven’t caught up yet.

Fortunately, the fix is simple. If I use the “Convert ID3 tags” option and set it back to version 1.1, the tags are now properly recognized by everything else. I don’t think I’m using any of the extended tags that would get lost in the conversion anyway.

Okay, Maybe I Don’t Want It All

It feels weird not wearing a ring after so long. I never realized how often I’d subconsciously fiddle with it with my thumb, and I catch myself doing it and finding nothing there. After sticking my hand in a garbage bag, there’s often a slight panic as I sense the ring missing after pulling the hand out, before I remind myself that I didn’t put it on in the first place. Ah, the forces of habit…

Yesterday’s lesson:

Don’t select whole categories of packages in Debian. It’s just a Really Bad Idea.

I wiped Slackware off of my Athlon system so that I could free up some disk space for XP. I rarey ever use Linux on it anymore now that I have two other systems running it, so there’s no sense in letting it hog 100 of the 140 gigs, especially when I have to frequently clean up files to keep from running out of space in the XP partition.

I do still occasionally use Linux on it though, so I left a 40 gig partition and put Debian on it. Slackware’s great on the server, but I wanted to experiment more with other distros with better desktop support. The basic install went smoothly enough, and it was up and running in no time.

Of course, I can’t leave things well enough alone… I pulled up ‘aptitude’ and started browsing the package listings, seeing if there was anything interesting. Since it was getting late and I was impatient and wanted to let the installs run overnight, I decided I’d just select the whole ‘admin’ and ‘base’ categories and sort out the useful bits in the morning.

Oh, that was a mistake… In the morning I discovered that the downloads and installs had aborted partway through due to errors. And that there were now some 50+ package conflicts. And that there were six gazillion settings irrelevant to me that wanted to be configured. And that even after working out the conflicts, there were still installation errors. And after working out those errors, the system plodded along slowly under the weight of some 400-odd processes, when idle. And programs were still generating numerous error reports and mailing them to me. Oops.

So, rather than try to trim things back to what I actually needed, I just reinstalled from scratch again. Now I’ll be a bit more careful about what packages I select…

Most Alumni Have The Opposite Problem…

I don’t think I’m going to be able to wear my iron ring much longer. Three or four times now in the last week it’s just slid right off while I was in the middle of doing something, and it’s only a matter of time before it falls into the garbage/toilet/drain/etc.

It’s questionable whether I even really have the right to continue wearing it, as I haven’t gone for the proper P.Eng. title yet. Software work doesn’t require it, and I’d be hard-pressed to justify my recent work as ‘engineering’ anyway. Still, I did take the Oath, and it still serves as a reminder of that regardless of what little pieces of paper I have…

Yesterday’s (belated) lesson:
Continue reading “Most Alumni Have The Opposite Problem…”

Today’s Challenge

I have a slight problem. Whenever I get mail, or flyers, or magazines, or most anything else on paper, it tends to get tossed off onto the kitchen table, or top of the fridge, or some other out-of-the-way place.

So, after eight years of accumulating stuff this way, I finally went around and collected all of the bits and pieces lying around the apartment and I’m left with:

Now I have to sort them into three piles: stuff I can throw away, stuff I have to shred first and can then throw away (old bank statements, credit card bills, etc.), and then the stuff I really want to keep (tax records).

Sigh, sometimes I feel like I skipped the qualification exam for being an adult…