"Necessity is the mother of invention."

In August '99, on a very normal day, I came home from work. It was the day before a major rollout, and I had forgotten to make several hundred copies of an instruction sheet that the users would need very early the next day. Because I only work 10 minutes from my house, I figured that I could go back, make the copies, and be back within a half hour. So, I went.

Exactly 1/2 hour later, I was was about 3 blocks from my house, when I came to a full running fire hose in the road. Rather than run over it, I pulled over, with my brain racing. From my vantage point, I could see that one of my neighbor's houses might be on fire.

I live next door to a couple with very small twins, and a very old couple. Feeling that any of them might be helpless, I sprinted 3 blocks with my heart racing and mind very intent and focused on helping whoever I could.

Pushing through the crowd, I came to the abrupt realization that the neighbors were fine. It was my house that was on fire.

With nearly everything destroyed, my wife and I sought to salvage anything that we could and record our losses for the insurance company. I spent days sifting through the soot trying to find something worth salvaging. Being big into music, we were disheartened to find that all 1600 of our record albums were fuzed into what had become a giant, solid tube of vinyl. I didn't have much hope for the thousands of CD's that we had collected over the years.

You would be surprised at the resiliency of CD's. The cases of the CD's had taken most of the heat, and twisted into a Dahli-esqe mess, but a good portion of the actual CD's were still playable. What a break! After a few weeks of cleaning and re-casing the CD's, I thought that I should catalog the collection, lest this ever happen again.

None of the apps that existed for catalogging CD's at the time had all of the features that I wanted. No MP3 support here, no web page support there. I decided that I was going to build an app that would catalog my CD's. Because I was not proficient in any programming language that could handle the task, This was going to be interesting.

10 months after the fire, I found the time to look for an answer to my CD problem. I found it in Perl. I salvaged/rebuilt my PC, picked up a book, and started learning. When I wasn't physically tearing down the building, Perl gave me a good mental project to take my mind off of the house. 11 months after the fire, I joied the monastary. 12 months after the fire, I completed a script that catalogged all of my CD's.

It's not a good script. I still have to introduce it to my new friend, Strict. It does the job, though. Lately, introduced Perl to my co-workers as a method of Network administration. I build more scripts daily, and learn more from the Monastary than I could have learned on my own.

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

If you want to see the results online, let me know, and I'll drop you the link, or the scripts, or a friendly note, or whatever.

Update: Here is the aforementioned script...

-OzzyOsbourne
mr_ozzyosbourne@yahoo.com