Intel's Ronler Acres Plant

Silicon Forest
If the type is too small, Ctrl+ is your friend

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Folder Dates

I've taken to filing stuff by the month, both paper and electronic. I used to diligently file all my papers by subject: utilities, bank statements, insurance, yada, yada, yada. But a few years ago I realized I didn't really need most of the stuff I filed, so I started just dumping it all in one bin, and then once a month I dump all that into a folder and drop it in the bottom drawer. Occasionally I will need something and I will have to dig through a few folders to find it, but compared to the tedious business of filing everything all the time, it's a piece of cake. It's also interesting to see what I come across. Hey! Look what I found!

I also do that with the digital photos I take. Only problem here is the computer likes to arrange the folders in order. If I use alphabetical order it screws everything up: the names of the months aren't in alphabetical order.

This evening I tried to come up with some kind of scheme that allow the computer to automatically arrange the folders and still allow me to use the names of the months as names for the folders. As soon as I started playing with the names I realized that most of them were in reverse alphabetical order, but not completely. Eventually I determined that if you break the year into three groups of four months, each group is in reverse alphabetical order, except March, which we all know is a contrary month:
  1. April
  2. *March*
  3. February
  4. January
  1. August
  2. July
  3. June
  4. May
  1. December
  2. November
  3. October
  4. September
Then I realized that since I don't create the folders till I need them, I might be able to sort them by date. That works fine for Picasa, but not so good for Windows (XP), as Windows uses the modify date. But Windows does allow you to arrange folders manually and it does seem to remember that order.

I'll think I'll scrap my scheme for trying to automatically order things by month names.

Update: I just figured out why I was doing this. When you insert a picture in blogger, it pulls up a Windows dialog box, and the box doesn't display the folders in any kind of order. Bah.

No comments: