I've a confession to make: I could not make a living at writing. Even if I had contracts and paying customers, I have two heretofore undiagnosed maladies that impact my writing life. The first is PBCS, or Prolonged Brain Cramp Syndrome. It's similar to writer's block, except that while blocks are generally small things, PBCS is more like an aircraft revetment (per wikipedia, "In military aviation, a revetment is a parking area for one or more aircraft that is protected by blast walls."). The other condition is burstitus (not to be confused with bursitis, which is a medical condition); this is the opposite of PBCS, and is sometimes referred to by its more technical name, neurodiarrhea. As these conditions are present only in a small niche of any population, the American Psychological Association (APA) has yet to recognize them as valid psychological conditions, and given their recent proclamations about ASD (autism spectrum disorders) in general and Asperger's Syndrome in particular, its unlikely that either of the writers' maladies will ever grace the pages of the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). That's okay, I suppose- maybe it will be considered in DSM XIV (but even that is up in the air, as the latest edition is DSM 5). Then again, I don't have anything nice to say about either the APA or the DSM, so they won't even get search engine labels.
As I think I've mentioned, the database is picking up steam again.and I've gotten back into the habit of doing daily data entry as well as some development. Which brings me to the inspiration for the preceding paragraph.
A few days ago, Jennifer observed (not an exact quote, but the general spirit), "Why are you wasting your time on inputting the time of individual songs?" My initial, unvoiced answer was, "Because its included on the liner or CD notes or media player information". At first, I did not have any answer. After much thought, I came up with a somewhat lame but nonetheless valid explanation: times are useful for creating mixes. As I said, lame but valid.
I had to dig so deep for that, though, that I was reminded of the briefly famous American humorist Jack Handey, and his Deep Thoughts. In the midst of the randomness of Handey, the invention of the fakey psychological conditions of the first paragraph and Jennifer's slightly snarky question, a valid question- nearly an epiphany- popped into my already crowded cranium: at what point does data stop being and start being trivia?
Hmmm. Excellent question, Dude (imagine that in the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure voice). As the owner and consumer of the database, as well as the designer/DBA, I need to ask this question and make the call. Minutes and seconds (Time) was one of the original tables I created, and I did it specifically for movies and music. The use in music pretty much only makes sense to me- to Jennifer, it is trivial. For movies, though, this information can be very useful to both of us. On Sunday evenings it is common for us to have a "Dinner and a Movie" night.We often agonize over a movie to watch, and if dinner is later in the evening, the choices are usually a TV episode or two. However, on those nights when we do have time, we'll watch a movie. Time comes into play because on more than one occasion we've selected a DVD to watch, only to realize that it is a real long feature. So, in this situation, being able to scan the collection by time is not trivial- it's a useful piece of data. I also have a year table, which was initially intended primarily to be bibliographical data for books, but it is also useful for audio and video recordings. A very recently created table has place names, and right now I envision this as primarily being used as bibliographic data.
I think that's going to be a wrap for today, because its time for Dinner and a Movie!
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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