Monday, May 16, 2005

BUYING YOUR WAY OUT OF LOSING

I want to listen to my Daft Punk CD.

I can't find my Daft Punk CD.

The idea that I will have to search high and low for my Daft Punk CD distresses me.

I may buy a new Daft Punk CD so I don't have to look for the old Daft Punk CD.

This is how Damon finds things that he loses.

Is this how all blind people deal with losing CDs?

Background: I have about 500 CDs in the house, it could be any one of them, I don't wish to start stuffing every CD into the player to hear what it is before discarding and playing the next. Did that make sense?

Until everything have a smart chip in it, the world will be invisible.

6 comments:

The Goldfish said...

The secret is to keep everything in strict alphabetical order. I do this on the insistence of my partner who, well, I think Freud described it as "anal retention".

Another suggestion that comes to mind is to get some of those kid's embossed stickers of musical instruments and label your CDs at least according to genre; a saxophone for jazz, an electric guitar for rock etc. This would mean that having alphabetised your collection, you wouldn't have to work through all the Beatles albums when you wanted Beethoven's 9th.

Alternatively rip your entire collection to computer. I have 56 hours of music in WMA format taking up 3GB - no space at all! Even if you can't get this software to speak to you, at least you don't have to change CDs during your search and if the actual CD goes missing you can burn yourself a new one.

Kev said...

Mr Kev labels everything in Braille. CDs are hardly through the door before they are labelled. Forget actually listening to one's new purchase, what could be more pleasurable than labelling it?

But I suppose at least it does mean he can find them when he wants to listen to them, so it can't be all bad, can it?

Ruth said...

IMHO smart chips should be included in CD's for blind consumers. The technology is there-lets use it. Im a quadriplegic-found your site through fangworld. Like yr blog. Feel free to stop by mine

Agent Fang said...

Having a similar number of CDs, I have occasionally rebought something online - usually just a couple of tracks rather than a full album - rather than go downstairs and find the damn thing (can't wait to be rid of stairs...!)

It's cool - why should inaccessible things beyond your control hinder your life? Its a simple Crip Balance Equation - e.g. what you save on the train fares you squander on the CDs, innit...?

Katie said...

Hi Damon, wow what a lot of CD's you have, I agree with Kev you could label them in braille or get talking labels where you record your voice on to.Then you you will able to clearly find the CD you're after.Good luck mate!

Damon said...

Ooh what a lot of responses! Thank you all.

Actually I was considering ripping them all onto my PC - another classsic blindie solution, a techie one. I have however run out of disk space. I've been told about a new hard disk I could get that is 50 quid for about 100 gigs which sounds quite good. Err, was it from a website called Spin or something? I'll have to look - not that I can afford 50 quid at the moment, I'm broek.

Fang: glad to hear this is a pan-disability 'issue'. I shall add it to my long list of issues for future pondering ;)