Lisp job was not a prank; trying to learn Common Lisp now

Apparently, I wasn't hallucinating when I found a want ad in the local Craig's List for a Lisp programmer. The poster replied, we got to talking, I sent my resumé, et voilà: I have a new prospective client!

We're sticking with my proposal in my introductory email: two weeks of part-time work, in return for a dead-tree version of a Lisp book (told you I was serious). If, at the end of two weeks, I'm deemed worthy enough to call myself a Lisp professional, we'll talk about... er, more traditional compensation.

In line with this new gig, I'm reviewing everything I ever learned about Lisp. I've dabbled with a few Lisps, though I've never managed to get into Common Lisp (and wouldn't you know it: the job requires the one Lisp I never tried seriously before). Just goes to show you: It pays to learn as much as you can while you're still able to.

Anyway, I installed Tracker tonight, in order to try and make it easy for me to wade through more than half a gigabyte worth of books in the form of PDFs and HTML. I'm trying to find all the Lisp books I've ever downloaded, to try and gleam whatever information I can from them.

I'm a hoarder when it comes to soft-copies of books, and have been building quite a library over the past few years (though I lost quite a bit due to hard disk failures). I figure, all they cost are hard disk space, and I've got plenty, so I download every half-interesting, freely available book I can find.

I'd try to organize them (by author, by title, by topic), so it'd be easier to find them. Then, I'd promptly forget to read any of it. After a few months, I even stopped organizing them.

So I need a desktop search toolkit in place.

I'd still need it, anyway; even without the books. I tend to be sloppy with anything I'm not currently working on, unless whatever program I'm using has a bum-proof way of organizing files (like Pidgin's logs or Firefox's bookmarks). So I need something that will index my crap for me, and help me find whatever it is I need at the moment.

Being on GNU/Linux, I've quite a few options. Chief among them is, of course, Beagle: for some reason, the first thing that comes to my mind when talking about desktop search (even before Google Desktop). Except it uses Mono, which I'd die before I ever use.

So far, Tracker's working out fine. Except I wish it has a "server mode", so I could have it installed on my desktop-slash-file server and query my (larger) collection from my office. But, then again, if the file I'm looking for is on the desktop, I'd have to get at it, anyway. So I guess indexing my autofs-managed mounts aren't such a big deal, after all.