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

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...