A Week of Crud - And Some Thoughts on Organization

For the last week the crud has stalked us and made us feel bad.  But at last it seems we are free of the malingering, festering illness that has plagued us.  Yes - we fell prey to whatever the name of the crud that is circulating through society at this time.  Zack brought it home from school last Tuesday and it made itself comfy and at home with us.  Zack bore the brunt of it as he ran temperatures as high as 103.6 on several occasions.  But we are healthy now and so we are much happier!  Unfortunately, I do believe we managed to infect at least one other person with this illness.

Since we were sick I really didn't have the desire to sit down in front of the computer and write the blog.  Despite not having the desire to write - my mind has been churning over many different subjects that I want to write about.  As a result I have a backlog of probably 10 different topics that I want to write about.  Most of them have been triggered by items that I have read  or have been covered in the news in the last few days/week.  It seems that there are some many different things going on in the world right now that it leaves you grasping to make heads or tails of everything.  But I will save those topics for another day.

This evening while I sit in front of my computer, I was dumbfounded by the amount of data that I generate every year.  I have so many photos, videos, songs and documents that I really don't even know where to begin to organize it.  Today I was pondering this problem when I think I at least made some headway about how to attack it.  (I am sharing this as I figured others might benefit from my thought process.)

If you are like me, you probably have a gigantic hard drive on your home computer that pretty much holds your entire life upon it.  For me I have 2 Terabytes worth of data between my home computer, my home network drive and my work computer.  There is so much data that I really can't make sense of it.  I need to find some way to organize it all and make it useable.

I decided today that to make it usable I need some way to organize it.  I don't feel that there is one solution that will work for all my data.  I am going to need to use a specific solution to organize each type of data.  So to sort this whole thing out my first decision is what tool I will use to organize each type of data.  I came to the following conclusions:

Music/MP3 Files: Stored and organized in iTunes
Pictures and Graphics: Stored in directories by Month/Year and organized in Adobe Photoshop Elements
Videos and MPGs: Stored in Directories by Month/Year and organized in Adobe Photoshop Premerie Elements
Documents/Articles/PDF: Storied and organized in Nuance Paperport

The really cool thing about all of this is that I will have the capability to search through every kind of document/file and find want I want.  For example, if I want to find all pictures of Bailey in the mountains - all I need to do is go into Adobe Photoshop Elements and search all my photos with that criteria - Bailey, Mountains.  As long as I have them tagged correctly then all of those photos will pop up when I do the search.  How cool is that???  So time to get to work implementing all of this!

Today was picture day for Finnegan.  I sat at the kitchen table today looking at him and I realized that he is growing up quickly.  So I pulled out the camera and shot a bunch of photos of him so I can capture him as a puppy.  Here are a few.

 

 I hope everyone has had a good week and is looking forward to the weekend!

Thanks and peace to all! ~J.

FYSRD!