Dag 1428: Mellan God Jul och Gott Nytt År

I thought I had better drag myself out of my sick bed to do one final post to round off the year - I hope my bed feels better soon.

This year I seem to have been getting more and more into listing things. This may be something to do with my age, or maybe it's just something that has been built into the very core of my personality since I first had one, but is only now beginning to manifest itself in an outward kind of manner. A bit like when someone suddenly starts making lists of various stuff.

2007: The Year of the List

In fact, I think I have always wanted to make lists of things, but its only now that I have discovered the tools that can enable me to do so easily. I remember once getting a free application for my Amiga that would allow me to create a database of the videos I owned. I spent quite a bit of time adding details of my video collection and then I replaced the Amiga with my first Apple Macintosh computer (a colour classic with 80Mb hard drive) and so that was the last I saw of that program. There is probably a dusty and cobweb ridden floppy disk in some dank, dark corner of an attic, in a house I once lived in, that still contains my video catalogue in some obscure proprietary format.

So, I made a major listing breakthrough a few months ago when I discovered last.fm, which enabled me to list the gigs I have been to and allow other people who were there to mark their presence and also add any pictures they may have taken. I first started trying to catalogue the gigs I had been to about 2 or 3 years ago and since I discovered last.fm I have managed to add quite a few I hadn't been able to track down as well as correct a few errors. The other good thing about last.fm is that you can also add events you will be going to in the future.

Next I bought myself a new scanner so I could start scanning things, thus creating a sort of list of images. I started off with some of the oldest photos I have, which for some reason is nowhere near as big a collection as it ought to be. I used to have an old Pentax SLR camera which had a separate light meter and I used to take loads of photos back in the first 2 or 3 years of the 1980s. I managed to locate a small number of these but I have no idea how the rest came to leave my possession, for, just as Mr Lewis is never knowingly undersold, I would never knowingly have got rid of them. So, I started off scanning old photos and then decided to scan everything I could find that had been signed. I discovered a few things I had forgotten about, but I also found that I had mysteriously lost a few things also.

In my garage I have 2 boxes full of cassettes. I raided this box some years ago when I was rediscovering all the music I had previously recorded in my old home studio, and I raided them again when I was looking for autographs. Once I had finished scanning the things that had been autographed I started scanning some of the more obscure cassette covers I have. I now intend to scan all of the cassette covers I have, though this is going to take me some time to complete (and don't worry I won't be publishing them all here).

Looking up some of these cassettes on the internet led me to the main feature that this rambling passage has been winding its slow and deviating way towards, and that is that I have discovered yet another site that lets you list things and that is www.discogs.com. Google searches had brought me upon it a few times before, but I just thought it was a database of albums, but it is much more than just that. After creating an account you can look up albums (CD, cassette and vinyl etc) and mark off the ones you own. In fact, its a bit like those old I Spy books only better because it's about music. If you don't find something you own in the database you can add it and upload a scan of it (so scanning all those cassette cover is not going to be quite the fruitless task it may have first appeared to be - in fact I have already added my first submission, complete with scan.

The ones you have marked can then be viewed as a list in your home area and also downloaded to a spreadsheet, should you so desire. As well as all this you can also rate items and even add things to a wish list so you can keep track of albums you would like to buy at some point. It also has a marketplace where people can sell albums and each time you view an album it has links to any that are currently for sale in the marketplace. The whole site is perfect for music collectors and if you aren't already one it will definitely make you start having dark thoughts about becoming one. I have already been toying with the idea of buying up all the records I regret selling in the past and I don't even own a record player (yet!).

I currently have 104 items in my discogs collection, but that is probably less than a quarter of my actual collection so it may be a while before I get up to date with it, but while I'm doing so I'm going to be in some sort of list heaven or something.

Grecian 1983?

That only leaves me to add that just before Christmas I met up with Mr Cloudhand and partner along with the incorrigible Mr Tweedy for an evening of drinking, eating and reminiscing. I arrived thinking I was just getting over a cold, but little was I to know that rather than it being on its way out it was in fact still in the early stages of building itself up inside me ready to unleash its full force. We followed the same format as our previous night out and had a few drinks in the Hotel Du Vin. There was quite a large wedding reception going on so there was no chance to have a game of pool his time and no chance for photo oportunity as I had forgotten my camera. After a couple os absolute vodkas with lemonade I had forgotten all about my cold, and after a few more I forgot pretty much what we were talking about too, but we had a very enjoyable meal at the Drum and Monkey. The fact I had mentioned that I had lost many of my old photos had not gone unnoticed in the Cloudhands office and Adrian had kindly brought some of the photos from his collection up with him so I could scan them. I have included one here as it is the only photo I know about that features my favourite Inductrial Records t-shit.

My thought for the year is "Isn't it amazing how things can disappear from your life without your knowledge".