Life

I have a confession to make: I’m starting to hate my CD and DVD collections.

Don’t get me wrong.  I absolutely love to collect and listen to music.  I have a bad habit of going all-in when I discover a new band or artist, quickly collecting all of their albums and spending the next weeks or months on a bit of a musical binge.

The problem? I’ve amassed a sizable collection of shiny plastic discs.  By my estimate, it’s roughly 500 albums from just over 200 different bands or artists.  My wife has a smaller collection, roughly 100 discs, that adds a good chunk to the problem.

We have a similarly frustrating DVD collection, hovering somewhere around 300 discs, if you exclude our TV sets (which would easily double our DVD count to around 600 discs).  The TV sets don’t cause much trouble, due to their high density (calculated by number of  discs per unit of volume), but they add their own weight to the situation.

That adds up to around 1,200 discs to store.  That’s not much, compared to some collections, but it’s enough for us that it’s a problem.  This has been easily avoidable for a while: put ‘em in boxes, stack ‘em in the spare room. Out of sight, out of mind. Right?

We can thin out some of our collection (Why do I have an Eminem CD? Do we really need two copies of Tori Amos’ “Boys for Pele”?), but that gets us down to around 1,000 discs in a best-case scenario.

With our young’n on the way (my mother-in-law called him “Spock” today, which was pretty awesome), the spare room is no longer a room to spare.  We now have to find a way to solve this.

I’ve cooked up a few options:

1. Install custom shelving to house the entire collection. This isn’t unreasonable, but we don’t have an obvious place for such an installation.  Furthermore, we’d simultaneously be creating a serious climbing or tipping hazard within 18 to 24 months.
2. Rip the entire collection, then sell it. This is tempting, but I have some ethical objection to doing it. I also have quite an attachment to these stupid, shiny discs. I just can’t bring myself to part with the vast majority of them.  That said, I’ll be re-ripping the entire CD collection to Apple Lossless soon.  The DVD collection will probably not be ripped to a drive within the foreseeable future, so this is only a partial solution.
3. Get rid of the bulky cases, then store everything in a set of CD or DVD binders. This is actually quite tempting, and the most probable solution.  The only catch is that I will want everything sorted in a specific way (alphabetical by artist, then chronologically) and I have nightmares about buying any new album that fits somewhere between Aphex Twin and Widespread Panic.  Shifting an entire collection three slots to the right could be incredibly difficult.
4. Forget the binders. Use disc sleeves and a sturdy box or cabinet. This easily solves the problem of keeping things sorted how I like them, but maintains part of the storage problem.  I could use a small dresser (via craigslist?) to house all of the sleeves in the corner of the family room or under the window in the master bedroom.  But what about multi-disc albums?
5. Leave it all in the boxes and find a new place to store them. We have some closet space, and limited attic storage, but this only delays the inevitable.

None of these are particularly groundbreaking, but I’m leaning toward options 3 and 4.  Case Logic has some great products for this sort of thing (check out their 320-disc CD binder, 200-disc DVD binder, and storage sleeves) at relatively affordable prices, so that helps.

I know that I’m not the only one out there to have tackled this, so I’m asking for your help: What do you do with your collection of plastic discs? What do you like or dislike about your current storage and sorting situation?

Yesterday, in reading John Gruber’s excellent iPad review, I came across this photo:

"I should have bought two."

It took a minute, but this photo blew my mind.  Here’s why.

When I was his age, circa 1988, I was just learning to use a computer.  It was an IBM XT, running at 6 MHz, with a 10 MB hard drive and an amber monochrome monitor.  I could never have dreamed of filling the 10 MB hard drive, despite my growing collection of installed games.  It ran MS-DOS 3.0 in an 80-column ASCII terminal.  I played the crap out of a game called Rogue.

To put that into some temporal context, I hadn’t yet been introduced to the original Nintendo Entertainment System.  That happened some time in the spring of 1989.  The now-legendary multicart version of Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt wasn’t introduced until November 1988.  Windows ’95 wouldn’t be released for another 7 years.  America On-Line didn’t exist.

At that time, as a child, my imagination seemed to know no bounds — partially out of necessity, but also out of stupefied wonder.  I built fantastical worlds around simple graphical presentations.  The caves and passageways I explored in Rogue were full of hulking monsters and magical creatures.  I was somewhat afraid of the dark, for fear that I would be eaten by a grue.  This giant beige box, in all of its magic and magnificence, held the key to some of my most cherished memories.

(I knew, even then, that I would “program computers” when I grew up.)

There are dozens of other examples, I’m sure, but the basic idea is this: Even with its limited technical capabilities, that computer opened the door to a world of wonder and amazement that I otherwise might not have known.

I still remember the first time I saw an NES in action.  I stood there, with my jaw slightly agape, as my mind was boggled by the tiny box that found its home on our neighbor’s console TV.  Before that day, I probably would have never created a world where a plumber and his brother throw fireballs at turtles and goombas to rescue an unknown princess from a giant turtle-dragon.

Of course, I also wouldn’t have imagined that I’d conquer seven other castles before finding the one that held the Princess.  Also, what the hell is a goomba, anyway?  I digress.

As technology advanced, the necessity of my imagination seemed to diminish, but I only found myself using it more and more.  Brighter worlds, more vivid and more detailed, came to life through other magical boxes (the SNES, Genesis, et al.), but that only fed my brain what it needed to create bigger, better, more adventurous worlds.  Gone were the days of exploring the caves in a nearby mountain to find a magical sword and slay the Dragon King.  Instead, I was traveling to a far away kingdom to destroy a new and terrible army of bad guys.

Each time I was introduced to new technology, it was like I got a +1 to Imagination.

That imagination, and our fascination with it, are what lead to new and exciting achievements in technology and engineering.  If you don’t believe me, just look at what Star Trek has done for modern technology.

To you and me, the iPhone and iPad are significant technical achievements, far surpassing the tools that we used as children.  My sister-in-law, now a college freshman, probably doesn’t remember when high-speed internet wasn’t common.  On the other hand, I fondly remember dialing in to local bulletin board systems with my modest 1200 baud (or 2.4 Kbit/s) modem.  Kids these days have probably never seen a printed encyclopedia.  Most of them have never used a floppy disk.

Today’s very young people are growing up in a world where things like the iPad are commonplace.  They don’t have to imagine what it would be like to have a computer in their pocket, because they already have one.  When I was his age, I could barely imagine what it would be like to have a computer on every desk.

I’ve said for years that I have a tremendous belief in the power of young people to change the world for the better.  This photograph, to me, sort of embodies that entire idea.  His generation may well be the one to find a cure for cancer, or AIDS, but they may also build an outpost on Mars or send research satellites to the Andromeda Galaxy.

When I was young, my imagination felt limitless.  My grandfather told me many times that it far exceeded his own as a child.  He grew up in a time when there was no TV; I grew up in a time when you could easily have a TV in every room.  I grew up in a time when cameras used film and the internet was a still only military network; my kid is going to be born into a world where I can send a picture to everyone I know, from my phone and across the internet, within moments of his (or her) birth.

So, just as I dreamed of worlds and gadgets that my parents could not have ever imagined, and my parents did the same to theirs, I suspect that the next generation of young people will do the same to me.  I tend to have pretty vivid visions of the possibilities of tomorrow, but I know that my kid will blow those away.

That is what blows my mind.

The Boy Scouts of America was officially founded on February 8, 1910. A century later, it has seen more than a hundred million members join its ranks and has awarded the rank of Eagle Scout to nearly two million young men.

I am an Eagle Scout.  My father didn’t earn his Eagle, but his father and three brothers did.  Three of my cousins are Eagle Scouts.  My wife’s father, brother, and great uncle are all Eagle Scouts.  Suffice it to say that I am enthusiastically supportive of the program, even if I sometimes find myself at odds with the policies and decisions of the national committee.

I make no qualms about my opposition to the discriminatory policies held by the BSA against atheists and homosexuals.  However, I have long held the belief that, ultimately, the positions and the policies of the national committee affect the organization on a macro level.  The problems seen on that scale are quite marginalized on a micro scale (ie. individual councils or units).

Instead, I participate in Scouting — despite my opposition to specific policies — because I still feel that the program is important and that it makes a difference.  I had been drafting an essay for this site, largely touching on this topic, and whether Scouting was relevant in today’s society, but GeekDad beat me to it.

This morning, in a similarly-titled essay, Dave Banks hit the nail on the head:

At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, hundreds of delegates booed a group of Boy Scouts as they led the convention in the Pledge of Allegiance. While this show of disapproval must have been heart-felt, it was misguided. The frustration that some have with the Boy Scouts is understandable, but a group of 14 and 16 year old boys doesn’t dictate organizational policy. The argument the delegates had was with the BSA administration.

This is the heart of the argument about Scouting’s relevancy. While the Scouting program provides plenty of opportunity to boys to develop important and unique skills, hone leadership traits that will pay off outside scouting and help boys to live up to their potential, most of the complaints people lodge against Scouting’s relevancy are tied to decisions that the BSA’s adult leadership makes. And so we’re faced with a decision: should we withhold the potentially outstanding experience of Boy Scouts from our sons because of the unbending rules of the organization’s administration?

To make matters more complicated, on the local level, there is often a flexible interpretation of the laws. Homosexual parents and scouts serve Boy Scouts without fear of reprisal (even in America’s Bible belt), and atheists simply keep their mouths shut during the scout pledge to God and claims of reverence. Like many issues, at the local level, we’re all just people and local administration understands that. At its core, Scouting is a program they believe in and want to share with others, no matter who they are or what they believe. And ultimately, the biggest knocks to Scouting’s relevancy don’t make much sense. As a parent, I wouldn’t expect a heterosexual Catholic leader to proselytize to my son about his religion or his sexuality, any more than I’d think a homosexual atheist would be discussing those subjects with my kids.

This is quite representative of what I personally see in most criticisms of Scouting.  The topics of atheists and homosexuals in Scouting have served as a lightning rod, but I think that they get a largely disproportionate amount of attention from the media and the public.

These critics generally don’t loathe that we raise young men and women to be thoughtful, meticulous leaders.  They don’t sneer at the millions of hours of community service rendered each year by local units.  They don’t complain when we donate warm clothes to homeless shelters, serve dinner at a community kitchen, or team up with Habitat for Humanity to literally put a roof over someone’s head.

Ultimately, however, the collection of those experiences are what define Scouting, they’re what define a Scout’s experience, and they’re what make Scouting great.

I wouldn’t trade my knowledge or experiences from Scouting for anything.  These experiences have given me a way to relate to my father (who died when I was only 7), helped me learn to communicate with my grandfather (who was a very stubborn old man), taught me things that I probably would not have learned on my own, and has shown me things — in nature and in myself — that I could’ve never dreamed of finding on my own.

When the day comes, I hope that I have a son with whom to share a similar experience.  I don’t think that a better case for relevancy can be made.