Digital Clutter Saturday, Jan 31 2009

I have 1127 songs in my iTunes Music library.  326 of these songs I have never listened to.  737 songs I have listened to twice at most.  I’m not really a background music person.  But I resist deleting them.  I can’t even imagine a future where I listen to some of this music, yet Time Machine faithfully backs them up, twenty four times a day.

This same scenario plays itself out with my photos, my videos, and my documents.  I have dozens of videos of my son, hundreds of documents, thousands of photos.  And I can’t bear to delete anything, even the bad or worthless ones.

Gmail is another culprit, with ever increasing storage, I never need to delete an email again, not even the short note from The Husband telling me he’s going to be five minutes late picking me up tonight.  I will never need that email again, but I keep it all the same.

Why?  Why do I do this?  I know data storage capacity doubles or something every year, it’s increasing enough that I don’t need to conserve hard drive space, enough that I don’t need to delete anything.  But not needing to delete anything is really a terrible case for keeping everything!  Storage space may be increasing exponentially, but the quality of my data is not.  It’s like looking for pearls in mud, the volume of the mud is increasing hourly, but I’m lucky to add a new pearl to the puddle once a week.  A song I really love, a great photo of my son, an actually insightful blog post.

I’m drowning in data.  Really I’m lucky I can find stuff these days.  In fact, that I can find anything is amazing if I think about it.

I’ve tried every organization technique under the sun.  And none of them have helped, because I simply can’t get over this tendency to packratism.  I need to learn to throw things away.

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Quality Versus Cost Monday, Jan 19 2009

My dad and I keep having the same circular conversation, and it starts out something like this:

Dad:  ”I’ll tell you what, you would be stupid to buy an Apple laptop these days.  You can a laptop just as nice as a MacBook, with better graphics, for less than a Macbook.”

Me:  ”But I don’t want to use Windows or Linux.”

Dad:  ”I know, but the graphics in these laptops are just so much better and for less.”

Me:  ”I’d rather buy the laptop that has a lower chance of being borked in 18 months.”  (My Fujitsu Lifebook only lasted 20, which, given what I paid for it, was a crime.)

Dad:  ”Well, this Vaio is four years old now and it’s still running.  You just can’t play games on these new MacBooks, the graphics aren’t there.”

Dad and Me together, one at the other:  ”Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

Conversation ends.

We have this conversation at least once a month, and it always bugs me because he’s irrevocably correct, there are new OEM laptops that are just as specced as a MacBook (or better specced) for cheaper… but I look at them and still prefer the MacBook. 

It’s not that either of us are wrong.  Dad and I are just coming at the problem from different perspectives.  

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Assessment of Resources Thursday, Jan 15 2009

Okay, learning Cocoa… I have the collective knowledge of:

• one high school C++ computer science class taken over ten years ago
• a book on Cocoa and Objective C written for Panther
• XCode installed on my iMac
• and the internet

Hit it.

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Finger Foods Wednesday, Jan 14 2009

Today we introduced avocado to the young Geek. He took to it surprisingly well, and gnawed happily on it throughout dinner.
He’s been interested in that stuff we put in our mouths for a while now, but yesterday got rather insistent on taking my pizza rolls, so today he got avocado.
As for me, I’m rather sad. Mostly because his previously inoffensive diapers are now just going to get smellier and smellier. *sigh*
(Nothing too substantive today, I’m beat. Plus I’m posting from my touch, and typing takes forever.)

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Autodidacticism Tuesday, Jan 13 2009

The last listed, but most interesting (at least to me, also the most likely to be kept) resolution in my list was to learn something new.  Not because of some exterior stimulus or need, just because.  Just because I can.

Autodidacticism is self-education, self-directed learning.  My dad does this all the time.  Heck, I do it a lot myself, learn something just because I want to know it.  Last year I picked up needles and taught myself to knit, and now I’m a knitting fiend.  I’m always learning new recipes, new lab techniques, new embroidery stitches.  But these are all things that come easily to me.  The difference this year is that I’m determined to learn something that truly challenges me, something I really have to work for, something that I will probably only dint even if I work consistently at learning it the whole year.  Something hard.

(And preferably something inexpensive.  Knitting and woodworking and cooking and all that are loads of fun, but in addition to finding them relatively easy, they also require working capital, and we’re trying to save money.)

If I look at the things that I do, and do well, there is a theme to them.  They are all tactile things, things I do with my hands.  I’m good with my hands.  So something new should exercise my brain.  I’ve narrowed it down learning a new language, either Spanish, or Cocoa.

Yes, I am aware that one’s a programming language, and one’s a ‘real’ language.  But I hate learning languages, any language.  I’m bad at it.  Stupendously bad at it.  I haul out that ‘one language, badly’ joke all the time.  So either should be perfect.

I’m leaning towards Cocoa, but I’ll probably try to learn both.  Does this seem excessive, nay, unrealistic to anyone else?  It does to me.

The problem with learning Spanish is that I feel a responsibility to learn Spanish.  My husband’s paternal grandparents live in Mexico (with brief sojourns into the US for their pension checks *sigh*) and speak essentially no English.  The rest of that side of the family can speak English… but won’t unless absolutely necessary.  And whatever the relationship between The Husband and his relatives, whatever my relationship with them, I feel like I have a responsibility to give my son the ability to make his own relationship with them.  So he needs to learn Spanish.  Which means I need to learn Spanish.  (Obviously The Husband already speaks the language).  But GeekBaby is lucky to have the opportunity to know so many of his great grandparents.

But this feeling of responsibility takes away the fun in learning a language just because I want to learn it.  So I’ll try to learn both this year, one for fun and one for duty.

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