O boy. What can I do when I discover a duplicate like this. What else can I write that I didn’t already cover in my earlier post? Here goes. When I was very young and silly, I created a magic show for my parents and sisters. I had all the stuff I needed, including specially bought silk to make it look very exquisite. Somehow I even got the help of a friend to arrange the music in secret.
Back then, that meant using tapes and if I had them, records. The tapes contained more than just the tracks I needed, so I needed to be able to quickly find what I was looking for, in support of my act. Enter The List. I made a list of songs I wanted to use during the show, and noted down the setting of the counter on the tape deck. That way the song I needed could easily be found. It worked. If it was a success you have to ask that friend, and my parents and sister who were there. The enduring thing it left for me was an interest in databases.
Wait, what? Can you say that again? I realised my interest in databases by way of a magic show. I thought it might be a good idea to have a list of all the positions of the counter for all songs that I had in my collection. Back then that collection was no more than a few tapes and some records, but I wanted it registered more consistently. I devised a system of index cards (yes, on paper) and wrote down all my songs and counter positions. The next time I created a magic show, it would be a lot easier to find the tunes!
Those cards went into a database when I started studying (the university had computers). dBase 3.3 evolved into Microsoft Access, then into MySQL. I created many systems for it, each of them mirroring the latest developing fashions. And still, this database system has not stopped me from buying duplicates like this.