Lifestyle

Organizing Eternally

For the past few years, I have been in a pretty hard core “Organizing mode” on a lot of various fronts. It honestly feels like an endless uphill climb because there is just so much and it doesn’t help that I am constantly adapting and updating the methodology. Some of these topics are ones I will likely touch on in more detail in the future, especially the technology related ones, but I wanted to run over a quick list. This is partially for my own sanity.

Physical Organization

Part of this involved The Basement upgrades, which aren’t really complete but they are at a good stopping point. Most of my physical stuff is pretty well organized, for the most part. The basement has a second half that’s a little jankey that we use for storage. It’s lined with totes for various holiday decorations and winder clothes, and one corner is all of my stuff I don’t have room to display or use, sorted into a bunch of shoebox sized totes, along with a bunch of boxes in larger totes. I’ve thinned out a lot of my extra electronics over the years. I’ve started thinning out some of my video games stuff as well, often because I have PC versions or even just newer versions on newer consoles.

Having a toy collection requires a fair amount of organzining. For example, I use these tackle boxes to sort out the accessories.

For import figures, I generally give each figure it’s own cubby, bot things like Marvel Legends, I have entire sections for alternate heads and hands. I’ve got effect parts sorted, missiles sorted, transformer guns sorted, I have one that’s all 4″ scaled parts. I have a different organizer that’s just 1/12th accessory parts I have collected over the years for use in photos.

Photos

I want to do an entire post just for photos. I take an enormous amount of photos. It’s slowed down now that my kids are all adults, and there is less going on, but just a quick check suggests I have at least 250,000 photos or 160 gigabytes of data.

Photos of school and family events, photos of projects, photos of toys, just tons and tons of photos. Half of these photos never get used or posted anywhere but they are meticulously organized.

I am also slowly working on scanning in old photos from my own photos to my parent’s photos to my in law’s photos.

Video

I also have a lot of video files. And not just movies and TV from the high seas. I honestly don’t really have a ton of that to start with, you can pretty much just get everything somewhere on streaming these days so why bother. But family movies. I’ve had several digital video games over the years, and at least one Professional Panasonic camera I used to do Professional video production (IE, I got paid for it). Video takes up a lot more space than photos though, so I’ve been working on converting a lot of that down. Video will probably also get it’s own post.

Files in General

Another topic for discussion I want to cover that I have been sorting is files in general. I’ll admit, it’s a bit of a problem, but digital storage is cheap, and I save a shitload of files. From random memes, interesting landscapes, photos of toys others have taken, news clippings, hot-to articles, and other web stuff, to my own files. I’ve got files I’ve moved forward from floppy disks to zip disks to CD-Rs to modern day that were writings or drawings or even custom levels for super old DOS games.

Backup Strategies

I also do my best to keep a fairly robust backup system for the things I’d rather not lose (mostly family photos and important documents). Some of which I have had to update recently due to software changes by certain companies (Amazon no longer working with Synology).

A lot of the systems are similar, but I want to go over some of my general organizing techniques in the near future because it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot for a while now. It also works pretty well, for the most part, especially now that I am caught up.

My Music Listening Habits for 2020

Yeah, those monthly updates were kind of bleh, so I dumped them. But I still want to do a yearly wrap up. Though overall there isn’t a lot that’s surprising to me about the yearly stats.

The year was dominated by most of the artists I would expect it to be dominated by. Sigrid, Tessa Violet, Aurora, CHVRCHES have 14 of my top 25 albums. This grid doesn’t even include a few additional Sigrid “Albums” of live tracks that don’t properly show up so they get filtered.

Anyway, a bit better breakdown…

I am actually surprised that Sigrid still topped the chart above Aurora. I’ve been listening to a TON of Aurora, and not just “recently” or something, like all year. Plus Sigrid hasn’t had anything new since November 2019, so I felt like I had been listening to her music less. I still had around 100 more scribbles on Sigrid than Aurora. Tessa Violet, I’m less surprised about. I’ll comment a bit more later, but Tessa Violet has kind of dominated my individual song listens, she just… has less songs.

CHVRCHES has been kind of slowly building up more and more in rotation, and I expect them to continue to come in pretty high going forward as well. Another sleeper to look out for next year will be Dodie, at number 13. She only has a handful of tracks, and I’ve only recently started listening to her, but I really like her music, and next year, she has her first full album coming out.

On the “falling” list, I’ve hardly been listening to Alice Merton and Kiesza lately. Nothing wrong with either, they just sort of, have fallen off the rotation. And despite both ranking high, Dua Lipa and Carly Rae Jepsen were never really in the rotation. I’m honestly not sure how either is so high.

There are also a few of my more mainstay artists making a showing. The Who, BT, Pink Floyd, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morrisette, Taylor Swift. I’m a little sad that Raffaella only really had one new song recently. She was the opening act for Sigrid when I saw them in 2019 and I really like her music. She has put out one track, Bardot, and a collaboration track called On the Look Out, that may as well just be a Raffaella track.

My single top track for the year, is, without question, the “2020 Anthem” of Bored.

Granted, this track is older than 2020, but it got a music video in 2020, and it kind of just sort of… fits the feel.

Half of my top ten were Tessa Violet tracks, so like I said, she kind of dominated on an individual track list. Everything else is about as expected, though I would have thought more Aurora tracks would have made the cut for that top 20.

Anyway, if you want, you can always just follow me on Last.fm.

Endlessly Learning

One thing I have always done in my life is worked to constantly be learning something. It may not actually be a useful something, but it’s something. Back when I was finishing up my degree in 2003, I was telling people that I wanted to get the RA job in the dorms so I could just live there for the rest of my life taking classes. Granted, the RA position only meant your room was covered, I don’t think it covered any of the course work expense.

Fortunately, we live in a world of connected possibilities, or whatever buzz word you want to use. While I didn’t get to work from home or even end up with extra time at home from the Pandemic, it’s really given me a ton of extra online courses to take, mostly “just because”.

I have taken and completed several single courses over at Real Python. Though I am not entirely sure how useful some of them are, to anything I’ll ever do, but it was good to get some general incite into things like, Facial Detection and Functional Programming.

I took a multi week course called The Science of Well Being, over on Coursera. It was kind of more of a psychology themed course covering concepts behind what makes us happy in our daily lives. I kind of feel like I’ve already been sort of naturally using some of the ideas discussed in my life, but it was interesting.

I’m almost at 2 years of Duolingo learning spanish as well, with a 700+ day streak. Mi Espanol no es perfecto, pero es un poco bien. I guess. I’ve actually been branching out some and have been reading a few children’s books in Spanish. I’ve also been browsing bits of Spanish speaking Twitter and Reddit as well. While I can’t really speak or listen to it well, I am doing alright and comprehending the reading and okish as getting the idea across in writing.

It doesn’t always work out the first try though. Starting at the beginning of this year I started trying to learn how to play Piano. Though the Piano part is the easy part, what I’m really doing is trying to learn how to read sheet music. Unfortunately, I have not sat down at the Piano to practice in nearly 6 months now. Maybe next year on that one.

I get access to Linked in Learning through work as well, I’ve been taking a Full stack Developer course there as well. I kind of got distracted from it doing web development work at work, but it already helped improve my technique in managing PHP file layouts.

I have been doing some tutorials on how to write Markdown, which isn’t super impressive or complicated, but it’s a skill that I feel like may actually be more useful in the future.

I finished off a tutorial on basic COBOL programming. While I don’t think I could write a COBOL program if I had to, it did a pretty good job of giving me an idea of how COBOL is structured and flows.

This is all just scratching the surface of a long list of learning resources I’ve collected up over the past few months. I am hoping to pick up doing some art again next year, I used to be pretty good at drawing in my youth. If I every finish the Spanish tree in Duolingo, I hope to either brush up on the Japanese I had in High School or learn some Norwegian. I’d like to take up 3D modeling at some point as well, I always really enjoyed doing CAD work in College and 3D modeling is essentially just a less precise version of CAD.

In general, I just plan to keep on learning.