It's been a bad day - please don't take a picture

Our Director Writes:

Notes from the CD Mines, Volume 4

So an end is in sight, although what was a labour of love became a Herculean task relatively quickly.

Basically, all the easy stuff is now done. All the CDs that were sorted - i.e. in their own cases, etc - have been either sold or given to charity shops.

This leaves quite a few CDs not in their own cases.

And I know this isn't riveting stuff, but it's been kind of a strange afternoon; the re-uniting project has meant that CDs which haven't seen their cases for years - up to a decade in some cases, I suspect - are now warm and snuggly in their right place, etc etc.

It was the point at which I found an entire CD collection of Michel Thomas' teaching French that I thought things might be on the up-and-up, and now I only have about a hundred CDs to process before the end of this terrible, strange project.

Now, of course, we're into the weird territory. Or, at least, the weirder territory, because having traversed the plains of the normal, cased CDs, we're now into the realms of the uncased, the free, and the magazine promotional copies. The last of these promises to be the most annoying, primarily because they may have rare tracks or versions of tracks, but iTunes will probably refuse to legislate their existence. Still, if this is the worst thing about today, then today is a good day.

I know this is not exactly a fascinating topic - especially for a film student - but it is kind of pertinent, as we're talking a massive switchover from harcopy to digital copy on every single piece of music I own. The only reason I'm doing this with the CDs and not the DVDs is because it's free to do with the CDs; if owning a DVD meant having access to a digital copy, you can bet most of my DVDs would be gone now too, because, hey, the future is now, apparently.

On a film-related note; I keep hearing good things about Inception. Hearing good things about a film is not exactly a rarity, thanks to hype and press etc, but the good things I'm hearing are from film graduates and film students. Remember, however, that this in itself is not necessarily a good thing, because it's something being recommended on merits that only a select population think they know about, and I've seen many films that have been recommended by people who think they should be recommending the film.

In the old days, it was called wanting to look cool. There's probably some new youth slang for it these days that as an old, decrepit person I don't know. My bones are weak and my mind is feeble, etc, etc.

But I'm going to go and see the damn thing just because it looks interesting. This too is a double-edged sword, because it's not difficult to make something look interesting, but it is difficult to make it be interesting and because interesting is a moveable feast as far as terminology goes.

So maybe once I've digitised my life, I'll take a break from staring at a small screen to go stare at a bigger screen...