Getting Hands-On After Hearing a Name
So, the other day, the name Jay Reisinger popped up in a conversation. Didn’t know much about him, honestly. Someone mentioned he was apparently pretty sharp when it came to, like, organizing messy data sets or something along those lines. Not fancy database stuff, just… making sense of piles of information people gather.
It got me thinking. My own little projects? They always end up with data all over the place. Spreadsheets here, text files there, notes scribbled down. A real mess. I figured, why not try and get a grip on it? Not sure if it’s exactly what this Reisinger guy does, but the idea of bringing order to chaos? That appealed to me.
First Steps: What Am I Even Dealing With?
Okay, so I started. First thing, I just dumped everything I had for one of my hobby projects – let’s say it was tracking local bird sightings – into one big folder. Photos, notes files, a couple of messy CSV files I’d tried making before. Just looking at it was tiring.
I decided to tackle the text notes first. Some were just dates and bird names. Others had long descriptions. My process was simple:
- Read each note.
- Pull out the key info: Date, Bird Name, Location, Maybe a quick behavior note.
- Type this into a new, clean spreadsheet. Row by row.
Sounds basic, right? But doing it manually, file by file, really made me appreciate how much junk I’d collected. It took hours. Found duplicates, found notes I barely understood anymore. It was a slog.
Dealing with the CSVs and Photos
Next up were the CSV files. These were supposed to be organized, but past me was lazy. Columns were inconsistent, data was missing. I opened them up, compared them to my new spreadsheet structure. Had to copy, paste, and sometimes just re-type stuff to make it fit the clean format I’d decided on. More time gone.
The photos were another headache. Just filenames like “IMG_*”. Useless. I started renaming them. My system became: YYYY-MM-DD_BirdName_*. Again, super manual. Open photo, check the details (luckily the date was usually in the file properties), match it to my spreadsheet entry if possible, rename. Tedious work, really.
Was It Worth It?
After maybe two solid afternoons of this, I had something that looked… better. Not perfect, but way better. I had one main spreadsheet with most of the text info, and a folder of photos with meaningful names. I could actually sort by date now, or filter by bird type!
It wasn’t some high-tech solution. I didn’t use any fancy software, just basic file management and spreadsheet work. But the act of just doing it, of imposing some structure inspired by hearing that name, felt good. It made my own data useful again.
So yeah, that was my little project sparked by hearing about Jay Reisinger. No idea if it reflects what he actually does, but it got me cleaning up my own digital clutter, and that’s something practical I actually finished.
