The furnace quit working the other day. At first, turning it off long enough to reset the system seemed to fix the problem, but it quit again and stayed quit.

The repair guy discovered that the gas igniter had failed, and the motor and bearings were giving out (explaining that it sometimes ran pretty loudly when first starting up). We decided to replace everything; he replaced the igniter but said he'd need to order a part for the motor bearing.

The next day, the motor quit completely, so the furnace got hot enough to give off hot-metal odors and the house didn't get any heat. The repairman came back and put the new motor in (he'd intended to wait for the bearing part so the whole package could be done at once, but the situation couldn't be allowed to stand like that).

So far, so good.

Thursday morning soon after I went to work, starmalachite  got a call that the repairman was coming over "for your appointment". She explained that she hadn't heard of any appointment, and that we were waiting for a part to arrive for the final repair visit. The person at the other end of the phone said that was taken care of. starmalachite  asked the dispatcher to tell the repairman come in about half an hour so she could get ready.

After getting ready, and then waiting for an hour and a half, she called to ask what was going on. The answer: "The part hasn't come in yet".

It turned out that the repairman showed up late that afternoon with the part and finished the job. And so, several hundered dollars and thoroughly disrupted day for starmalachite later, we have the furnace back in shape.

I hope that the outfit's repair abilities are better than their organizational abilities. (On second thought, I can chalk this up as a confirmed fact. If the former were as bad as the latter, the furnace surely would have exploded the next time it turned on.)
 

I ended up switching to Exact Audio Copy, because it turned out to be easier to get it to neatly integrate FLAC encoding for fire-and-forget ripping and encoding. Also, it gives more information on potential timing problems during the rip (though it's always been a false alarm when I did a test rip and CRC checksum comparison).

I also had the idea of making backups on DVD-R with a cumulative index.

So far, I've gotten a hundred-odd (with or without hyphen) CDs backed up in lossless format; I've paused to back them up to the new external hard drive (about a half hour, but can be done in the background).

I've also unearthed the batch of jumbo CD albums with the bulk of my filk and folk collections.

Inspired by a fortuitous find (a 500 GB external HD on sale for $85), I've finally gotten around to getting the various piles of CDs ripped. The plan of attack is to rip them with Audiograbber, convert them to FLAC (a lossless compressed format) to reduce the space needed for the master archive, and to convert files to MP3s as needed (or as Round TUITs are gotten) for routine listening.

A Washington Post story that possibly sheds a bit of light on our ongoing home-renovation snafu:

"Fairfax County's residential building inspectors carry workloads that exceed their ability to do their jobs competently, according to a firm that evaluates government inspection programs for insurance companies....
The company's findings do more than raise questions about the county's building inspection program. They shed light on the way Fairfax officials, protective of the county's national reputation for efficient, well-managed delivery of services, deal with unwelcome news...."

Their method of dealing with unwelcome news appears to be a clever procedure known in the political trade as "hushing it up":

"Although the company informed Fairfax of the rating reduction May 18, 2006, County Executive Anthony H. Griffin did not disclose it publicly until The Washington Post made inquiries last month...."

The Friday night gaming session went particularly well; I handily won games of Puerto Rico (for the first time -- much as I like it, I never seemed to get the hang of its strategy, but this time everything just seemed to click into place) and the new "Power and Glory" version of Thurn and Taxis. (The name struck me as a bit odd; "Power and Glory" seems like it ought to be the name of an old-fashioned combat wargame instead of a classic resource-management German boardgame. It may have something to do with the historical background of the game(s).) That degree of success surprised me a bit; my brain had been dragging a bit all week for some reason.

We finished the evening with the Alhambra dice game; I didn't do as well in that but I think I've got a feel for the strategy for next time.

I also hit upon a graphics-tweaking trick for the Erfworld cartoon image I most often use as a userpic to make the "kritch skritch" sound effect come out clearly at userpic size.

(As credited in my userpic notes, Erfworld is copyright 2006 by Rob Balder and Jamie Noguchi. I adapted and used the art under the Creative Commons License (attribution, noncommercial, share-alike, as indicated by the icons to the lower left of the giant Elvises creating the world) and the specific policy statement re this image.)

Now, I need to go mow the lawn. I've been looking for a lawn service (my Puritan streak was trumped by the fact that I come out ahead both financially and aggrivationally by spending the same hours putting in overtime at the office), but most of them seem to be oriented toward people who want a parade-ground perfect lawn rather than people who are satisfied if the neighbors don't show up with pitchforks and torches. (The most lawn-obsessed person I've ever met was the same one with the most pronounced "get a life" attitude toward fandom. Go figure.)