First, the frustration: I downloaded a torrent, available on several 
sites, of "46,000 oil paintings of Western Masters".   All well and 
good, except...

It's basically a site rip of http://www.classicartpaintings.com/
...which is broadly sorted into three categories:  artist sorted by 
FIRST NAME, artist clumped vaguely by country (not very accurately, if 
you actually look them up), and 'miscellaneous'.  But many had, nicely, 
(born-died) as part of the folder/file name.  So I decided to add that 
info to as much of what's in the collection and what I already had as 
possible, while organizing everything consistently

(Distraction!)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346905,00.asp

by artist family name and entering all the data in a spreadsheet, since 
it's a bit unwieldy just grouped by alpha, so I'll see if it's practical 
to also arrange by country of origin or time period or...wait...time 
period?  Art style!  Oh great.  Now I have to look up everything I'd 
already entered...and I need to make sure there aren't any duplicates 
images...so I've barely even scratched the surface of this undertaking. 
  Especially since I've only got the artist-by-name section organised 
(but not fully indexed in my spreadsheet).

It turns out someone cleaned up the contents of the torrent, got rid of 
bad data (it had some garbled files) and some duplicates, dropping the 
total image count by 2,000, but I didn't find out until after I'd 
started my own cleaning, and I don't know how far they went with it.  If 
I ever finish this, I should torrent it myself.

I know the forensics team analysing my desktop isn't doing nearly as 
much, but they (assuming plurality) have over five times the data to 
look through and they aren't going to be spending as much time per day 
as I've been, lately... things look bad for me ever seeing those 
computers again, even in the best of circumstances.

--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

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On 5/11/2009 4:41 PM, Tim Cook wrote:
> (Distraction!)
> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346905,00.asp

I like how they said the problem with Deus Ex 2 was the small levels 
leading to frequent loading screens.

> I know the forensics team analysing my desktop isn't doing nearly as
> much, but they (assuming plurality) have over five times the data to
> look through and they aren't going to be spending as much time per day
> as I've been, lately... things look bad for me ever seeing those
> computers again, even in the best of circumstances.

Wait, what?

-- 
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Chambers wrote:
>> I know the forensics team analysing my desktop isn't doing nearly as
>> much, but they (assuming plurality) have over five times the data to
>> look through and they aren't going to be spending as much time per day
>> as I've been, lately... things look bad for me ever seeing those
>> computers again, even in the best of circumstances.
> 
> Wait, what?

When the guy I was renting from got arrested (v&, in the modern 
parlance) they confiscated all computers on the premises including my 
own to use as evidence and see if I had anything worth arresting over. 
Unfortunately, as a compulsive data hoarder, I had well over 200,000 

batch-downloaded image collections *other people* had made (like this 
mess of 46,000 paintings I'm trying to sort--forget actually looking at 
each file) and never fully looked through them, so don't even know what 
all was on the hard drives.

--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

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