I'm Still Here

ENTRY 0020


Yes, I've been a little quiet for a couple of months.  There have been a few reasons.  First and foremost among those was Christmas shopping.  With one little exception, I did all of my Christmas shopping in the real world.  I'm not going to trust finding the right present for any of my family members to the vagaries of Ebay.  I found what I wanted at different stores, and believe it or not, I enjoy going to the mall.  You just have to approach Christmas shopping with the attitude that it's a full-contact sport.

I've also been working on the records for my library.  In addition to the spreadsheet file I mentioned in a previous entry, I have pages of handwritten records that, for one reason or another, I never got around to turning into Quattro Pro files.  Most likely, it's most likely because I would have needed to use another floppy disk to store these files.  At the moment, the main spreadsheet file is just under 800 KB -- still quite a bit less than the 1.44 MB capacity of a floppy disk, but as I said, I could see where it would eventually use all of that capacity and more.  Even with the relatively small 2 GB capacity of the flash drive which I use solely for the library's record-keeping, worrying about running of storage space is no longer a problem.

Both of the new files deal with the tracking of my acquisitions.  Trying to go into more detail than that would probably require using a sheet or two as an example.  And I'm not particularly interested in doing that; not the least of which is because I know that most of you would be asking, "Why are you doing this?"  Remember I said that I was more than a little OCD?  That would be why I'm doing it.

Creating the first sheet in each of the files is usually the most time-consuming.  Once that first sheet has been formatted to my satisfaction, I can copy and paste the formatting to the second and subsequent sheets.  When the sheet has been formatted, it's simply a matter of punching in the numbers, and double-checking them with the handwritten pages to be certain I entered everything correctly.

Now, it's more a matter of finding a few minutes here and there to transfer the information.  Yes, I'm certain I could finish it within an hour or so if I focused solely on that specific task.  Most of the time, though, I'm thinking about it when I'm also thinking about doing three or four other things at the same time.  And this task requires one's full concentration -- multi-tasking doesn't work as well when handling all of these numbers.

I should be able to transfer all of the information to the spreadsheet files in another week or two.  I'm not sure what I will be doing after that in the way of records.


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