Back in the day when I was living in a university dorm (all of three years ago) my computer was hooked up to the campus file sharing hub. It was a valid hub sanctioned by the university to assist in the sharing of documents and such. The vast majority of the time it was used by the students to download music, movies, and all other sorts of random stuff. I was no different in that I used the system to load my cpu up with loads of free files, mostly music and old cartoons. All legal debate aside, pretty much everyone did it and only dorm residents really had access to it. There was no limit to the amount and variety of files you could discover if you had the imagination and presence of mind to look for them. You could find all the popular favorites of famous music artists and movies and plenty of obscure things you very well may never heard of. And the speed was unparalled. You could download whole albums in under thirty seconds most of the time. If you are a lover of music but were unwilling to shell out the cash (guilty of both charges) it was heaven.

Needless to say after a year of this my hard-drive got choked up. So much made its way inside so fast it was akin to a Mongolian invasion. And the funny thing is that the vast majority of what I picked up just sat there taking up space without me ever really looking at it. But things were fine so I just continued on without doing anything about it. And then recently I get one of those little pop-up warnings stating that I am dangerously low on memory. After a moment of trying to decide if this meant that my intellectual capacity had reached its limit and I was going to retain the mind of a twenty-two year old for the rest of my life it clicked that the little bubble was declaring that my hard-drive was dangerously low on memory. Who this poses a threat to or how it's dangerous in the first place is never really explained to me. But still I did a system scan and discovered that of computer's 38.2 gigabytes (I rather small amount I'm told) I had only 211 megabytes left. So what's a guy to do? Well naturally I begin to go back through all my old downloaded files, which are pretty much all mp3 files at this point, to archive and delete them to free up some space.

This is a rather daunting task in that there is so much of it and personality-wise I am not a person who can just throw something away without looking at it first to make sure I don't need it or not. This applies in many factions of life. Not long ago I decided to sort through all my greeting cards and keep only the ones that were meaningful or exceptionally funny or whatever. This process took over and hour as not only did I save every card I ever got dating all the way back to my fifteenth birthday, but I had to sit and read everyone to make sure I wasn't throwing away something I wanted to keep. Translated into the digital relm that means the task is about a hundred times worse. As you might guess I can also be a compulsive organizer when it comes to stuff like music. Every album has to have every song in the right place with the correct name. Why? Because I said so.

So now I've spent several hours rooting through a bunch of old music files, getting them in order, burning them to CD's, making a record of what I burned, and deleting it from my hard-drive. And I have to go through and look at each file because when I was downloading stuff I was never very organized about it. You could either download single files or you could download whole directories willy nilly. I, being an admited nilly, opted most often for option B. This led to having a lot of duplicate songs, a lot of disorganized songs, and a lot of files that I have absolutely no clue what they are or why they're there. And now because of my perfectionistic nature I have to go through every blasted one of them. Is all this really necessary? Of course not. I could just dump my entire music folder and be done with it, but I'd hate to think I got rid of something I'd really want to keep now wouldn't I?