Working the hours and days that I do, I quite often find my mind is set to the wrong day of the week. This is occasionally an issue. For example, this past Thursday I was getting ready for work and I told Jennifer that I'd probably park in front of our neighbor's house when I got done. She reminded me that there was still construction going on. No problem, I said- tomorrow's Saturday. No, she replied- tomorrow's Friday. Yes, these conversations really do happen in our house. It's like an endless loop of the original Terminator movie, the scene where Reese is asking the cop what the date is. Except instead of the cop being startled by the demand for the year, in our house, its the day.
It was the Tuesday evening, and I had the night off. I'd promised myself that if it was a no-work night, I'd spend some quality time with the database- which I'm quite happy to report I did. Some ground rules were needed though, because as I think I've mentioned earlier, while I don't really hate data entry... I'm just not horribly fast. So I came up with a system to make the process move forward and not be horribly tedious: modified carrot and stick. The "stick" is the actual work: I grabbed six CDs, and then checked the Name table, entering the missing ones where necessary. Next, I checked the Media_Title table, once again entering new album titles where necessary. After that came the "carrot"- a round of Civilization V (henceforth, Civ V). Now there's a bit of a catch here: more often than not, Jennifer is quite underimpressed with my self-discipline, especially when unsupervised, and doubly so when computers are involved. On this night, however, I had my "A" game on, and things went quite well. As mentioned, first all of the artists were checked and updated, then the album names, and finally the songs. For the songs, though, the rules change slightly: after every two albums, I get a turn on Civ V. The other caveat is this: as I consider myself a Civ V neophyte, the game I'm playing is a twelve-player hotseat game, with yours truly playing each player (in other words, no AI or NPC players except for city states, so each turn is actually twelve turns). And yes, the data entry is being done on one PC while the game is happening on another machine.
I just did a guesstimate of how much work I have ahead of me. Considering just A/V titles (including games), I think I'm going to have ~2K titles to enter. This does NOT include books, .mp3s and downloads- and the last two I hadn't even thought about until just now.
Oh, well, I like a good project!
*From the IN-CASE-YOU-MISSED-IT Department- some handy links to older blog posts. This will be an occasional feature- any thoughts about my shameless self-promotion are quite welcome!
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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