A brief look into the depths on Andy's head

[andrewducker]

I'm a very organised person.

*waits for people who have actually met him to pick themselves up off the floor*

When I was younger (about 13), I reorganised all of my parents books into alphabetical order on several occasions (this being a several hour task).  I've spent numerous hours arranging and rearranging files and folders on my computer.

My problem happens when I try to deal with real life, and the fact that it doesn't fit, even slightly, into nice, neat orderly boxes.  I stand there, with a random item from my room in my hand, as my brain grinds away trying to form a coherent system wherein everything has a right place and tell me where this particular thing would go if this were the case.  After a while I realise that no matter what happens I'm not going to get everything in a 'right' place, at which point I lose interest, and go and do something more appealing instead (like read one of the comics which has no doubt turned up during my initial burst of enthusiasm).

Even when it's something nice and simple like sorting books or comics there are problems.  I mean, should Arkham Asylum be filed under Grant Morrison, Dave McKean or Batman?

The wonder of modern tagging systems is that the answer can be "All Three" - the organisation of the book is metadata, describing various places it can be found, all of which point back to the original book, which only actually exists once.

All of which is on my mind because I spent the last 3 hours sorting out my LJ gallery so that all of them having at least half-decent attempts at tags.  This means that you can now find this picture in the "Ed" gallery, the "Padmini" gallery and the "PreBirthday 2005" gallery (for some reason I don't have any photos of the actual 2005 birthday bowling, which is a shame).

I don't think I've spent 4 hours solidly tidying anything in years, but it felt extremely satisfying to get these pics sorted out.  Probably would have been moreso if the interface wasn't such a pain in the arse.

Edit: you can see all of my tags here.

Comments

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Oh kewl there's that one of me on Arthur's Seat :-)

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I was considering the fact that long division is basically a pointless skill, an educational appendix. They do still teach it in some schools to some kids, but it's on the way out like handwashing and abacuses.

Anyway, the equivalent for the next generation -- Marianne's kids -- is going to be alphabetical order. Watch. We'll be old and horrified.

[andrewducker]

Bah. Next they'll be getting computers to breath for them!

I remember someone being very scathing of me when I said that actually knowing vast amounts of stuff was overrated - and that the ability to quickly track down information and absorb it usefully was going to replace it. They called me a philistine...

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

You have to learn a lot of stuff up at some point, to establish the category blocks in your brain you then slot information into as you later cme across it. You also have to learn a fair bit, to know how to search for more. You can then forget the stuff you learnt by heart because you have the tools for acquiring knowledge and synthesising it in place.
This is very clear when teaching law students - if they never learn anything by heart but always rely on external materials to hand, they come out as very poor adapters and future learners IME.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

:-) I've always gone for 'knowing exactly where to find the information' = 'having the information'. Even since the days when that meant books and ringbinders. Ok, in the middle of the Atlantic witn no satcomms this is perahps not quite true - but that's an increasingly unlikely situation - and if that changes we can learn/relearn...

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

As someone whose brain frequently thrashes over exactly the optimal way to arrange 2-5 tasks with maximal parallelism EVEN when this thinking takes longer than doing any 1 (or 3) of the tasks in sequence, I can totally empathise!

I/we are not alone...

I worked in a job ince where we were trying to come up with the ultimate 'filing system' whereby the *name* and *location* of any item of information exactly defined by where and what it was. Of course the guy in charge was crazy - it was evident that he thought there was 'one true answer' to this problem i.e. one perfect filename that would encapsulate exactly what the file was about. Certainly you couldn't do it with a hierarchical filing system (as we were trying to). I got to base256 encoding prefix characters on the filename (didn't work cos not all ASCII chars are printable/legal) just to try to show that it was really not even technically feasible - there was no hope of changing his mind on the philosophical side.

You get some entertainliy mentally aberrant people in this business.

I don't know whether I am such an optimising freak because I am a programmer or that I am a programmer because I am such an optimising freak (to the point of paralysis sometimes - if it wasn't for my physical hobbies, where you can't DO that I'd be plain nuts). Bit of both and a giant, 20-odd year long feedback loop...

[andrewducker]

There's a description in The Confusion of a library wherein all subjects are assigned a prime number. When the subjects are combined, the numbers are multiplied. As the product of primes is only divisible by those numbers you could instantly find the poetry of Aristotle by multiplying "Aristotle" by "Poetry". Of course, it'd be stacked next to something completely different...

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

oh god, crazy ex-boss would LOVE that....

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Random thought on flickage - God, the latter-day Hugh reminds me of my friend Sophie's husband Rick!! (but with very slightly crazier hair).

Untidyness

[adrenalineanima.livejournal.com]

It'd be a lot easier if mess could be stored virtually. Otherwise when you tag an item with the various places it could be found, you just get pissed off when you look for it in all of those places, and instead it turns up some weeks later down the side of the bed. Or maybe, all tags point back to "down the side of the bed" where everything really exists...

I wish I could schedule ScanRoom and DeMess to run automatically every week.

Re: Untidyness

[andrewducker]

Occasionally I'm tempted by the idea of cleaners.

At least that way I'd have to tidy up before they came round...

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

There is another like me? *Shudder*. For me it was - is - knifes. We have a magnetic knife rack on the wall in the kitchen; everything must be in the correct size order. Naturally, my bedroom from ages past to present is a total tip. Such is life.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

The thing to do, I think, is to learn how to come up with, and settle for, incomplete (and/or inconsistent) systems. For instance, come up with Right Places for everything you can, but have a Stuff With No Right Place area (or two) as well. Come to peace with things not always fitting into your system, but aim make as many things fit as possible, so you know where to find them and people are less likely to tread on them. Invent systems for doing your share of the housework which - while imperfect - approach optimality asymptotically.

That's my advice, anyway.