Frankly, My Dear . . .

My obsession – and make no mistake, it is an obsession – had humble origins. It began with music.

I bought an iPod in 2006, and quickly became enamored of the ease with which I could carry around my music library. Of course, I immediately transferred all my CDs to my iTunes account, and subsequently to my iPod. That was the easy part. The hard part was digitizing every album, eight track tape, and cassette tape in my library. This task was made more difficult when my friend Charley gave me his jazz record collection, which included some fairly rare 78s. The process of digitizing all this music took a couple of years, and it isn’t finished yet. (I have run across some old albums and 78s that Charley gave me that were somehow misplaced for a few years.) Yes, I even bought a few hundred tunes from the iTunes store (the invention of which should be celebrated as a major historical event, even if the Apple folks are beginning to aggravate me with all the changes they keep foisting on me). But most of the 17,872 songs in my iTunes library are from my record collection, or from Charley’s record collection.

By the way, let me put in a good word for Carbonite. As I noted above, Apple keeps changing iTunes. I hate to download any new version. I believe they honestly think they are making it better. They aren’t. Recently I hit a button in iTunes that should have backed my record collection up to the cloud. It backed up all the music I had purchased from the iTunes store. Unfortunately, it DELETED all the music I hadn’t purchased from the iTunes store. After watching years of work just disappear, I was fit to be tied. Then Kathy reminded me that I subscribe to the Carbonite file back-up system, which operates quietly in the background, backing up files to a cloud somewhere. Within seconds, the 17,000 plus songs had been restored.

Then came video.

I moved to Madison, GA in 2005. After hooking up my television, I discovered that the only channel I could receive was a Spanish language UHF channel from Athens, some 25 miles away. The picture was snowy, and as I don’t speak Spanish, it was useless to me. So I contacted the local cable company, and signed up for the basic service at $60 per month. (You know THAT had to be a long, long time ago!) After a couple of months, it dawned on me that I had only watched one half-hour show. At that rate, I would watch an hour of television every four months, for a price of $240 per hour. I called the cable company and canceled my subscription.

Thus I entered into a very happy time: no television in the house. I spent my evening hours reading, watching movies, and listening to the radio. I discovered an absolutely outstanding radio program, The John Batchelor Show, out of WABC in New York. (If you don’t have an internet radio, you can either stream the show or download the podcast.) Twice a week he focused on book reviews, conversations with the authors that might last as long as two hours. I found myself jumping back and forth between the radio show and my computer, ordering books from Amazon as I listened to the reviews.

All this changed when my son introduced me to WDTV, a little box manufactured by Western Digital, that, one one side, hooked up to a television set, and on the other side, hooked up to a hard drive or flash drive. The Western Digital box allowed me to play video files (that formerly could only be played on a computer) on my television.

Thus began the obsession.

My son loaned me a hard drive that contained maybe 50 or so movies and television shows in either avi, mp4, or mkv format. (Although WDTV plays a wide variety of files, these are the three most popular.) I remember that the drive included the Addams Family television show from the 1960s, as well as the complete Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes, also from the 60s. Hard drives, and the little WDTV box, take up such a small space in the entertainment center! I soon got rid of my DVD player, ripped all my DVDs to (mostly) mkv files, and settled down to enjoy a little television.

And so it began. I copied the videos from friends’ hard drives. My video collection grew. Every boxed set of DVDs I purchased, along with every bargain movie purchased from the reduced price bin at Wal Mart, and
every gift of a DVD, was added to the hard drive. And somehow, over the course of the years, I ended up with quite a video library. It stands, at the time of this writing, at 9,461 video files (either movies, documentaries, or television shows). They reside on an eight terabyte hard drive.

I have copied the video files I have not yet seen to a two terabyte hard drive. At the time of this writing, there are 3,046 of these files. (This doesn’t include the cartoons and children’s movies that I have for the grandchildren.) I have my work cut out for me.

If I use 365.25 days per year (which takes into account leap years), and if I watch one of these not-yet-viewed videos every day, it will take a bit over eight and one-third years for me to go through my current inventory of videos. This takes me through August of 2028. I should be caught up a bit before my 76th birthday.

Does this seem a silly obsession to you? If so, I have to tell you: frankly, my dear . . .