1 post tagged “dick francis”

Although I take pride in being a geek, sometimes I wonder if I am a geek to the core or if I play it up a bit. Well, that question was answered for me the other day...

I had just checked the out the latest Dick Francis book 'Under Orders' from the library on CD. I immediately took it home and ignoring my portable cd player ripped the CDs and loaded up my mp3 player. This took a little while both to rip the tracks and to relabel them. Sure, it would have worked just fine to leave the tracks labeled like this '01-track01.mp3' as long as I left them in the folders labeled by their cd number. However, that just doesn't seem tidy so I tend to rename them all in the format of CDTR_<Booktitle>.mp3 or '0101_UnderOrders.mp3' for CD 1, Track 1.

Anywho, I didn't have room for all the tracks on the player because I had one episode of CrankyGeeks I hadn't listened to yet and five episodes of SQL Down Under which is a podcast about SQL Server. Frankly, I thought about deleting SQL Down Under because although I had listened to part of one episode it just seemed a bit too geeky and at the time it didn't hold my interest.

So, later that evening in the grocery store I'm listening to my audio book and dammit, my rechargable batteries die. So I leave my cart and stroll to the registers, buy some new batteries and head back to my cart. (No, it is not possible for me to brave Walmart without something to listen to so piss off! ) Then, two tracks later I run out of Audio Book tracks and further discover that I had, in fact, already listened to that particular episode of Cranky Geeks. I heaved a giant sigh and decided to give SDU a whirl. To tell you the truth, I rather liked it. In fact, I grew rather excited about the new indexing schemes I could try to exploit for some applications at work to the point that I called and left myself a voicemail. You see, I was aware of covered queries but hadn't actually realized the need to cover both the columns in the select list but also those in the.... Um, well, you get my point, right?

So let's summarize:
1. Ripped CD tracks to MP3 despite owning a perfectly good portable CD player.
2. Took the extra time to rename all the tracks so they were "tidy".
3. Actually had Cranky Geeks and SDU podcasts on my MP3 player - Just in case.
4. Purchased fresh batteries because I was unwilling to grocery shop without distraction.
5. Listened to a podcast about SQL Server, complete with interviews with SQL Server MVPs.
6. Grew excited about SDU podcast content.
7. Left message to self about said podcast.

On my own personal geek scale of 1-10 I've rated myself accordingly:
1. 8 - MP3 players are just nicer than portable CD players but... My wife overruled me on this one.
2. 9 - No real explanation needed is there?
3. 8 - Ok, the content was real geeky but the 'Just in case' is really more of a spaz thing.
4. 0 - Sorry but no one should be forced to grocery shop without some way to keep their sanity.
5. 5 - This was more a move of desperation. See point 4.
6. 10 - Excuse me while I push up my taped eyeglass frames.
7. 8 - Not quite as sad as getting excited about it but....

Final Score 48/70

How would you rate me?