Pack-a-touille

You know one thing I really don't like about myself. I'm a pack-rat. Not as bad as the worst, but bad enough. And the thing I pack the most? Books. Not only is it an expensive habit, it's a pain when I have to move. It's perhaps a rare perfect storm when there are two of us in the house that have tons of books, but to credit my housemate, she's probably read a good deal of her books, and if need be, her books would fetch more than mine would.

It's not that I read (or more precisely, buy) trashy stuff that no one else would buy. No, I buy stuff that goes bad quickly. I buy books on technology. Thus, I have a book on Windows Millenium (useless) and on XP (still OK) and on old versions of Java (useless). And I'm not often content getting one book on the topic. I need like every book on the topic. There's some kind of weird insecurity going on there, I have to admit.

How many books do you think a person needs on Python, a programming language? 2-3 tops, right? Perhaps some specialized Python books and one intro one. I'm sure I have a dozen on the topic, half of them intro.

What I'd really want, oddly enough, is a bookstore that I could just go to at anytime, that would never throw out books. I don't actually need the books at any point in time, and I'd like to get rid of them once their usefulness has declined.

But the painful part, as I mentioned, is moving. Let's say you have hundreds of books, as I do. You can box up maybe 15-20 books in a box. That's still, say, 50 boxes, if you had 1000 books, and I'm sure I easily have a thousand, possibly even two thousand books.

Insecurity, I think. If I don't know it, I want a book to tell me about it. I wouldn't mind using the web so much but there's something funny, don't you know? People seem to write far better stuff when it's for a book they intend to sell then when they will make no money off of it. Dave Thomas is a great writer of Ruby books. But does he want to make no money off it? Were people willing to lavish him with computers, food, and anything his heart desires, maybe that answer is yes. But for now, the books allow him to make direct and indirect money.

I was talking to the wife of a friend, who admonished me by saying that libraries have plenty of books for free! I decided not to engage her in debate saying that libraries don't have my books, and are likely never to have my books. They are so specialized, that it would be like having books on the classification of different Amazonian insects.

I suppose I wouldn't even mind if it was cheap, cheap, cheap to get someone to do all the heavy lifting, but in reality, it isn't. You can get some friends to help out, but they want to do it in one short burst of a few hours of time. They don't want to continuously help you like actors in a Stanley Kubrick film, who, in case you don't know, was famous for working on films for years, and getting actors to do a hundred takes.

It's so bad that I think I couldn't even sell the books for a dollar a piece, thus making the poorest return on my investment, but still better than nothing.

It's depressing really.

And so it goes.