The Final Frontier

I haven't done much in the way of blogging before, but a Facebook post reminded me that 12/12/12 is the last date that any of us is likely to see in our lifetimes- the next trio of numbers, of course, being 01/01/01 (January 1, 2101... simple math eliminates the vast majority of humanity).

So, rather than a slew of 140-character succinct and tantalizing tweets, or a more lengthy Facebook status post or two, I've decided to do a bit of blogging to talk a bit about my database. BTW, who talks about a database anyway?

I've decided to give my database a name befitting it's goal: FORTY-TWO. Those familiar with Douglas Adams' tales will probably get the concept, but for those who don't: in Adam's universe, FORTY-TWO is the answer to "LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING". My database is, at its most basic level, an accounting of everything significant and/or quantifiable that we own, and in many cases, how often said things are used. It has its beginnings in the prehistory of music, when vinyl giants dominated the world, and 45's enslaved small minds. In those days my data was all on paper, a complete collection of every LP I owned, as well as a record of every time each of them had been played. Later, I invited others into my musical world, doing a few music popularity polls. These days, when someone asks me what my favorite album/artist/genre are, I want to be able to pull up a database, check the speeds and feeds, and respond accurately.

So, FORTY-TWO answers all of my music questions. It also answers similar video questions- and, more importantly, it answers the (seemingly) ages-old-question: "What haven't we watched in a while"? I'm a firm believer in AV diversity (*listening to tobyMac right now), and my tastes are pretty predictable... loud (according to snookums), 80's hair band music. I also train with weights, and more often than not, I've got some music (relatively) blasting- even our kids, the youngest of which is seventeen- ask me to turn it down.

I'd bet Orff didn't go through this while composing "Carmina Burana".

Back to the database. As of this moment, it is an Access 2003 database comprised of eleven tables and nine queries. There are currently 54,366 unique pieces of data. My "main" table has 711 records - these are an incomplete record of our AV collection... and AV includes not just music CDs and videos of all descriptions, but games and books.