Merge

The Great Consolidation is underway.

I have more than nine thousand music files.

Unfortunately, each of the machines around here has a slightly different set of them. The iMac got a lot of duty ripping CDs over the summer, there's a bunch of stuff I bought online on the iBook, and the MacBook Pro has lots of strange stuff I've found free online. All three of them have various podcasts on them, or music grabbed from Pandora or various streaming internet radio stations.

I can't even remember what's on the AppleTV.

You try to sort that out so that it's all in one place, without duplicates, keeping the best-quality files and making sure all the ID3 tags are complete and accurate.

I repeat that number: nine thousand.

Thanks to some dumbass who wandered down the valley last summer stealing iPods, the iPod 30Gb I have cannot possibly contain them all. The total space they all take up is somewhere around 45 gigabytes, and none of the Apples has enough free space to really hold them all at a given time on their internal drives. So, I have to pick and choose what's on any given machine.

However, I have a five hundred gig external drive and a great deal of patience as I watch yet another high-ranked college team lose unexpectedly (in this case, it's Kansas, one of the last undefeated teams this year).

So, the Great Consolidation is underway. Put everything in one place, and know what I've got and what I don't. All on one single external drive. Once it's done, I'll mirror that drive to another external drive (knowing as I do that no drive is entirely reliable).

And then I can start on what I think is somewhere around 44,000 photographs.

Hey, Kansas just scored again. All they need to do is grab the onside kick and score once more, and they can win this.

Maybe.