I finally got Fedora working. I really should be smacked next time I start on another Linux drama queen tirade. Fixing the network card problem was as easy as installing a generic NIC card I had around the house and reinstalling Fedora. “Yum” (Duke University’s answer to “apt-get”) is really brilliant: just type the name of the package you want to update and it just works. What’s that? MySQL doesn’t come default in my Fedora install? No problem: yum install *MySQL*. Done. What’s more, I finally got Alex King’s Photos to work. It is truly as cool as I anticipated. Photos acts as a sort of client-server iPhoto, with a comprehensive search tool for parsing all that jpg metadata. My wife and I can now copy our photos onto the server using a shared drive (via Samba, of course), add some details about the event that took place and the people there, and we suddenly have a queryable photo catalog available through our web browsers–no file sharing required. This is fantastic. Now if only Alex could find time to build in a ratings system so I can rate my photos as obsessively I do my music.

Speaking of, I can’t get over how iTunes has completely changed the way I experience music. Sounds like a tacky marketing cliché, I know, but every once in a while a bombshell product will come out of nowhere and answer a huge need that you didn’t consciously know you had. To date, I’ve collected 2,309 songs (11.54GB) in iTunes. And, I’ve rated over 85% of the songs in that library to to ensure that my precious hard drive capacity is used only by the songs that are worth listening to. Anything I rate 2 stars or lower is purged out of the library on a periodic basis to make room for more worthwhile listening. I’ve also gone through and grouped almost every song to which I don’t have a legitimate license in order to either buy them (in some cases by redeeming Pepsi caps) or delete them, depending on my listening habits.

Remember when all of this stuff was locked away in shoeboxes and on cassette tapes? When you had to spend time actually digging through the crap you didn’t want to find the few gems you wanted to view or listen to over and over again? Though the Semantic Web naysayers have solid arguments, it’s hard not to get carried away at the thought of loosely defined metadata for every bit of text and media our lives generate–metadata that’s cataloged and pivoted in new and interesting ways to help us recognize insightful patterns. Just the other day I was able to use Microsoft Money to print out a graph of Sarah’s income by month last year to point out–if this year follows the trend in 2003–that April and May will bring a significant amount of overtime at the clinic. That graph took less than five minutes to build. Imagine having that kind of insight on all kinds of data–like tying together your bank transaction information, your photos, your family calendar, your weight-loss trends, your TiVo viewing habits, and your music and lighting preferences into one central digital dashboard viewable through your television!

Woah, I think I need to take a nap.

Metadata is just kind of like that–it makes you think you can solve world hunger with a few extra bits of information and a database engine. I should know, my day job currently consists of working with the project team that manages our global customer data warehousing system. These people are performing miracles through well-thought-out information architecture. My day job also consists of learning the ins and outs of how my company does project management–an extraordinarily humbling experience–but more about that later.