I think I need to slow my roll.

I've been up on this big purge still with regards to my media collection. I just hit a wall with all this stuff and needed to clear some of it out. Do I really need a jillion CDs, 500-some-odd DVDs, 400+ Atari 2600 Carts, etc., etc., etc. Maybe this doesn't happen to everyone, but it happened to me. I mean, I have the Highlander on Laserdisc! I'm asking you, in this day and age, who needs that???

Up to know, I've purged a lot of stuff without incident. I'm talking probably close to 1000 cds, perhaps as much (if not more) 12" vinyl, countless videogames, old magazines, books and on and on and on. I think the last batch got me though.

I realized I had a save pile that got mixed in with the stuff to go. Ok, first time that has happened. The embarrassing part about it is, I'm 99% sure one of the CDs in that pile would have been by the band of the person who I sold the CDs to, who happens to be a friend. Whoops. (Antionio, if you see this, yeah, the Thin Fevers CD wasn't supposed to be in that stuff.)

I've also hit the first twinge of wanting to hear something I got rid of. Considering the amount of stuff I've ditched and that I started this project a while ago, I'd say that isn't doing too bad. Besides, if I'm still jonesing to hear some Ramones a week from now, well, I know where my old CDs ended up.

In related news, I'm quite a fan of Delicious Library. I was a user of Readerware back in my PC days, but my RW catalog was far out of date and Kristen was going to upgrade her Delicious anyway. Plus she bought a version bundled with a Bluetooth UPC scanner that I'd need additional software to run with RW.

A lot of people don't get the point of Delicious and software like it, but for someone with a large media collection, it's a massive help. Not only am I doing an inventory for insurance (the flood kind of renewed that idea for me) but also just to check what the heck I actually own. Once upon a time, I was actually really good at reeling that kind of stuff off the top of my head. Now, not so much.

A couple of complaints about Delicious: one being that it only takes info from Amazon. Readerware has a laundry list of sites it pulls info from so if Amazon has incomplete or missing info, you can find it else ware. It's also a little too easy to get ahead of yourself scanning and then discovering one of the 57 things you just scanned wasn't at Amazon.

My biggest complaint though is that there's no direct way to create a blank entry. You have to go to the search box and then choose blank entry rather than just hitting apple-n or whatever. This is going to be a real problem as I'm contemplating cataloging my vinyl and I'm pretty much going to have to enter it all by hand. I'm considering doing the records in Readerware (which, I think, will pull info from an LP site now anyway) and then exporting it to Delicious.

And speaking of Readerware, the biggest differences between these two programs (as best I can tell) is that Delicious is much prettier, only pulls information from Amazon and will publish a site of your collection to .mac, err... Mobile Me. Also, Delicious will handle videogames, toys and "gadgets" whereas Readerware only does music, movies and books. The videogames thing is a huge plus for Delicious in my eyes and was probably going to convince me to switch even if Kristen hadn't already been using Delicious.

Still, I don't have a huge amount of complaints about it. Oh, if you want to nose around in my collection, here it is. Enjoy.