Every 8 Days

I keep a hard copy journal. It is a 10 year project that began on 1/1/2012 and ends on 12/31/2021. Its duration is 120 months. I divided up the 120 months into 24 5 subject 200 page spiral notebooks. Each section of each notebook is assigned a month/year combination. For example, I am currently writing in volume 21, section 4. This volume has the following month/year combinations:

1. Section 1: 9/13
2. Section 2: 9/20
3. Section 3: 8/20
4. Section 4: 6/14
5. Section 5: 7/18

The reason I am writing about this project on this blog is that yesterday, I was talking to a co-worker, Jay. He and I were looking at examples of technical documentation and we happened to come to a math website where you could enter equations and have the website give you the answer. I said, "I wonder if it could figure out every 8 days from a starting date to an end date." Jay looked at me with a puzzled look and said, "Every 8 days?"

That led into a description of the second element of this 10 year project. I have a separate spiral notebook that has a page for each month of each year in the project. At the end of the 12 pages for a year, there are empty pages for me to write a summary of that year. I wanted to have a set schedule for when I would write in this volume so I came up with the idea of every 8 days. In this way, I am not writing in it the same day of every week. I started with Monday, January 2, 2012, and most recently wrote in this volume on Sunday, June 8. The next scheduled entries are

• Monday, June 16
• Tuesday, June 24

Then, in July, the scheduled entries are:

• Wednesday, July 2
• Thursday, July 10
• Friday, July 18
• Saturday, July 26

Then, I skip a week and write on Sunday, August 3. So, when I said I wanted to figure out "every 8 days", I wanted to do that so I could put the dates in this volume on each month's page. I write on the front and back of the page and I write roughly a 1/2 page for each day. There are never more than 5 entries per month so it works out well. For some months, like this month, there are 3 entries and then I write a full back of a page for that last entry.

All of this windy prose is leading to a point. Jay mentioned Google Calendar and wondered if setting up a recurring event that is scheduled for every 8 days would get what I wanted. I opened it, created a new event, scheduled it for every 8 days and set an end date of 12/31/2021. I now have what I want and can enter each month's dates in my summary volume.

When I write about having a lot of projects going on in my busy life, this journal project is one of them. It doesn't mean I am not stopping / continuing with my other projects. For example, I just finished another spindle of CDs. One of them, from the death metal band Hypnos, has a track called "I am the Wind" buried as track 8 of 9. I have always loved this song. It has such an awesome tempo and structure. The drumming is interesting, especially at the 3:57 mark when the growly vocals kick in, followed by the guitar solo that isn't trying to cram a bunch of notes down the ear - it's quite melodic.

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As for a count of how many music files I now have as a result of the conversion, I don't have that number. I have been dismayed by the number of duplicate files that exist from the effort to consolidate my files from multiple directories into a single directory. In some directories, like for Metallica's Black album, there are 72 files when there should be 12. I know that the number of these files is artificially inflating the count of files in my music directory. Additionally, I have also noticed that I have a lot of files with @(random numbers) appended to the end of the file. Those files are a result of copying from the other directories into the main music directory. I also want to eliminate those files as well to avoid inflating my progress.
I wrote some DOS commands to locate these files similar to these next lines.

Dir *(2)*.mp3 /s >2s.txt
Dir *(3)*.mp3 /s >3s.txt
Dir *(4)*.mp3 /s >4s.txt
Dir *(5)*.mp3 /s >5s.txt
Dir *(6)*.mp3 /s >6s.txt
Dir *@*.mp3 /s >at_files.txt

After I review the list from these commands, I will use more DOS commands to delete them. I don't want to blindly do that now because I don't really know whether I will be deleting files that legitimately have those characters in the file name. I suspect most of them are legitimately duplicate files, but I don't know that for sure.

There is a lot going on in my life that I hope to address in future posts. None of the things I want to write about are awful / bad news. Life is pretty damn good, especially after a conversation last night about a former employer with a parent of one of Alex's teammates. The parent I spoke with still works there and the more we talked, the more I felt that God truly does make things work out for me.