Book eating…

Well, I actually did manage to Get Stuff Done yesterday…The coffee did help. So did playing Nightwish albums loudly.
I spent a couple of hours gutting the CMS, as part of a redesign.
Previously I had it working well enough to be able to browse directories on the filesystem, and virtual directories in a database, and open simple files from either the database or the filesystem.
But it was kind of hacked together, and there were lots of ambiguities about how some of it should work. So I’m rewriting with knowledge of how I’m going to do it this time, and I’ve also started working security in too. I’ve set myself a fairly basic goal – basic filemanager functionality, eg. browser folders, add, delete, rename files. Once I have that base, I can start thinking about all the advanced stuff I want it to do.

I went to bed at about 10ish last night, reading Juliet Marrilier’s Wolfskin, and accidentally kept reading till 1:30ish. Not good, because I wanted to not be tired in the morning, and I also wanted to make Wolfskin and Foxmask last at least a week, I only bought them on Thursday.
I woke up at 10ish in the morning…and for some stupid reason, instead of getting up, I reached for the book again….and didn’t get out of bed until 1:30ish (pm) when I’d finished it. Doh!

I headed out to the Mall after that, to get some groceries, I told myself – but in reality it was an excuse to go have a coffee from the “Italian Bite Tratoria” in the food court, which is my favourite place in Canberra – or anywhere for that matter – for Coffee. It’d be even better if they weren’t in a mall food court, but oh well.
Anyway, had my coffee and a nice Chicken, Pesto, Eggplant and grilled capsicum Focaccia and headed off to Woolworths (where I didn’t actually end up getting any real groceries, just other stuff that I needed, and then home again.
I picked up two things of interest at Woolworths – first, a nice little pocket sized notebook. I’m hoping to use it to write down stuff that I’m always thinking about, but usually forget later when I need it – things like story ideas and lyric ideas, and how to approach various problems in programing projects both at home and at work. Often these things come to me when I’m either lying in bed, or sitting in the Mall drinking coffee, or some other place when I don’t have a computer handy. So now I can pounce on these ideas and trap them between little pieces of paper, to do with what I will…hehehehe!!
um…sorry.
Ok, the other thing I picked up was a 10 pack of DVD+Rs. Not particularly interesting in themselves, but they represent a rather obvious solution to a problem that I had. (It just took me a while to see the solution).
You see, I’m currently in the process of ripping all my music to disk. But I’m not encoding them as MP3, or some other lossy format (such as Ogg Vorbis), but to Flac – which is a lossless format. The general idea being, that If I rip them all to a lossless format, that I can re-encode them into whatever lossy format I want, whenever I want, without having to go through the laborious process of re-ripping. And it can be a completely automated process.
The problem I had, was that Flac, whilst better than raw .wav is still rather large – around 250 – 300MB per album – and I didn’t have enough disk space. I had been wondering what to do about it, as I didn’t really want to buy a new hard drive just yet – I’m trying to avoid buying _anything_ if I can avoid it (books excluded). But today, it occurred to me that there is no real reason why the .flac files have to be on the hard drive – they could just as easily be on DVD, as then I could just store the lossy version on the hard drive – for which there is plenty of space, and would only need to bring the DVDs out when I wanted to re-encode. It wouldn’t be quite as automated as if they were all on one filesystem, but since I can fit between 10 and 20 albums on a DVD, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much of a pain as re-ripping.
So I spent what was left of the day and evening fiddling with DVD burning and with writing the script to automate the FLAC -> Ogg conversion for normal listening.

And now, I’m off to bed to start on Foxmask. Hopefully this time I’ll have a little more restraint ;)