you little smokestack

At the end of a week of management-induced stress, rather than getting to coast for Friday afternoon, we were treated to real live equipment-induced stress. I think things are now in a state where we can go home for the weekend, but the problems were that much harder to fix because we were laboring under the terror of having our Saturdays sucked away.

Dewey defeats Library Of Congress Classification

Finally alphabetizing my CDs at home. They were in no order at all, filling two of three large shelves (currently arranged in a cul-de-sac). The current procedure:

- Go through the shelves for all CDs beginning with (e.g.) A or B. The goal is about 200 discs per cycle; by computer I generated an alphabetical list of bands with numbers next to them, so I can estimate how many letters forward to jump. These CDs are piled on the floor.

- Sit down and sort into piles that go (e.g.) Ab-Ae, Af-Ai, Aj-Ao, Ap-Au and B. This makes much more sense with consonants, where the number of possible second letters is much more limited.

- Go down the list, pulling things out and shelving them. Put dots next to things that are missing. Fill shelves to 2/3 of their width. (Conveniently, on 75-disc shelves, this leaves just enough space for two horizontal piles of jewel cases, so the excess space can be used for as-yet-unsorted discs without fear that they'll get mixed in with the alphabetized stuff on the same shelf.)

- Sort the (e.g.) B discs by second letter, alphabetize from list, repeat if necessary.

- On later culling trips, it's very easy to pick up the things you missed the previous time, because now you've thought about them (when dotting their names on the list). Those discs go into a smaller separate pile to be handled later.

- Voila!

I keep thinking that there should be a way to speed this up, because the process is very unwieldy. What's really unwieldy, though, is any kind of sort that uses insertions or rearrangement too much. If there were more floor space to sort in maybe it would be worth it to pull down 3-400 discs at once instead, but circumstances prohibit that.

Another refinement I'm not doing:
It's a pain when shelves fill up over time and to get any substantial new space on it, you have to move a bunch of discs to the next (or previous) shelf, then move almost as many discs off *that* shelf, then slightly fewer off the next, and so on until you've essentially reclaimed a teensy bit of space from each of the other shelves while keeping everything in order.

However, I already know that my shelves, all being carefully filled to 50 discs now, aren't going to fill up at the same rate. The shelf with 16 Blue Aeroplanes discs on it, for example -- those Aeros albums mean that the alphabetical space subtended by that shelf is much lower than average, so it'll fill up slower. I don't have any good distribution information on band names but just for an approximation it wouldn't have hurt to count band names, divide by 30, and break that way.

But no.