Last night, starmalachite and I met gorgeousgary, the_sheryl, jannyblue, and a friend of hers whose name I'm blanking on for a Paul & Storm / Jonathan Coulton concert at the Birchmere. (Unfortunately, partiallyclips was fighting off a case of con crud and couldn't make it.) The show was sold out, and even getting there at 6:00 we only got so-so seats, but other than that it was a very nice evening.

Heidi and Vir were both a bit clingy this morning; I think they were annoyed at being deserted again after last weekend. Vir did his "mimic Heidi's voice" trick again today; starmalachite thinks he's figured out that her voice gets more attention than his (Heidi hardly ever makes a sound; Vir yammers constantly in his Siamese way).

A little later, we're heading out to pick through anything interesting left at Circuit City, get dinner, and have a Saturday night gaming session to make up for the usual Friday one we missed. (Apologies to thelongshot; we should have made sure you knew we weren't going to be there this week.)

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.