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May 18, 2005
Busy Work
So I keep getting asked what I'm doing now that I have nothing to do between now and moving. Usually I just say 'tryin' to pack,' 'just chillin',' or 'nada,' or something equally as non-descript. While this is mostly true, I have been doing stuff that if I actually told them, people would think I was being a complete slackard and wasting more time than 'just chillin.'
So what am I actually doing? Well, the catch-all term is 'sorting.' I have a lot of things/crap/junk to sort. I used to be a very organized person... in HS all my CDs were arranged by genre and then each genre was put in alphabetical order. My clothes were neatly folded in my dresser. I even tried to organize my closet by ROYGBIV. So, I figured since I'm gonna be a government employee, where things have rules, regulations, and specific ways of being done, I figured I'd try getting my life organized and, well, anal, in order to prepare for work. This is all a very daunting task for someone whose attention span is barely enough to watch one episode of Robot Chicken on my tivo... I usually end up going from one of the various sorting activities to another.
First of all, I need to pack all my crap. While I could easily 'pack' everything in boxes, and probably do it fairly quickly, doing so would just result in my crap being transported from here to DC. I don't want that to happen. I mean, I have four years of accumulated junk from this house alone. The last thing I want is to start unpacking at my new apartment and have countless boxes of utter junk. So, I've been sorting everything. I went under my bed, through my closet, through my cabinets, through the attic stuff. I sorted everything into three piles: 1) garage sale junk 2) movable junk and 3) junk junk. Yesterday while cleaning out a box from my closet, I found: receipts from five years ago for electronics I bought at BestBuy, receipts from random things I bought in Rome ('99), and computer components/manuals/cds from my Gateway computer--that I bought in 1998! Needless to say I don't want those things coming with me, so I ended up trashing most of the box. I STILL have a ton of sorting to do before I can ultimately pack.
The things that have been occupying most of my time has been sorting various things on my computer. The first thing I did was clean up my directory structures a bit and put like files together. I put all the software on a dvd to save space... programs like acrobat, photoshop, windowsXP, etc. The next thing I did was I went through 'My Documents' and took out all the documents and articles and such that I no longer needed. I put all the papers, projects, and presentations into folders based on class and year. Then I went through the other user accounts, julie's, melanie's, etc., and deleted all their stuff after making sure none of it was terribly important. I also found 5 gigs of Tom's hiking photos... so I backed those up on DVD + CD.
Wow, this is incredibly boring... moving on.
I've also been sorting pics and renaming them with irfanview. Eventually I'll get around to uploading more pics and sorting the ones that are currently in my gallery.
The past two days I've been doing something really really tedious and boring. Wanna hear about it? Of course you do!!! I downloaded a program called The Godfather, which is an all-in-one mp3 utility. It's integrated to search the free cd database and to tag mp3s. It sorts, renames and catalogs. It's great. I have music dating back almost eight years. And anyone who knows me knows I'm fairly lazy... so that means I have over 23 gigabytes of mp3s... which translates into roughly 4500 songs. The vast majority of which do not have id3 tags nor do they have correct filenames(and by correct, I mean the way I want them to be named). So I've spent about 10 hours over the past two days cataloguing, tagging, d/ling album photos, and renaming my mp3s. I'm about halfway done.
I can't wait to get all this crap done. I'll feel much better once it's all done... Until then my room is in a quasi-clean, quasi-ordered, quasi-packed state... which is really frustrating. But the whole sorting process is rather cathartic... I'm beginning to enjoy it.
Posted by josh at May 18, 2005 03:35 PM