Albumage

Finally managed to get back to work on the album, thanks mainly to a bit of inspiration on my walk this morning. (It was a longer walk than usual -- more about that in a separate post -- and it's possible that I needed the extra time.) It suddenly hit me what to do about the back cover.

It's so obvious that it really should have occurred to me sooner: since this is an album of computer songs, obviously the track list should look like a terminal window (green on black, probably) showing the result of running the list-track-info command. The barcode would be floating above it in an image-viewer window.

It's also possible that the theme could be carried all the way over to the insert, to the point of framing the cover photo in a Gimp or Photoshop window. This would give the cover the air of mild virtuality that I was originally thinking would have to be done by mixing obviously-computer-generated elements into the background.

By the way, I'm still looking for help with the cover image; I'll confess that this idea makes me much more confident about doing the rest of the graphics myself. No way I'll do the next one, though.

In other notes, I've done a little more work on the Worldcon concert tracks. Specifically, I ran normalize-audio on them -- the various intro tracks became a lot noisier due to a 15-20dB boost; I don't think I'm going to worry about it much. Audacity's noise removal seems to work really well on them, so I may go with that. I'll probably upload it sometime this week.

[15 minutes] Clutter reduction

Following ravan's example, I'm trying to devote at least 15 minutes / day to clutter reduction. Spent about 20 minutes just now sorting some of the pile of receipts that have accumulated since the beginning of the year. I should have been putting them in their proper file folders all along, but I hadn't put away last year's until a few days ago. Looks like there are several hours' work to go on that project.

Also did some yard work: specifically attacking grass and weeds in the front yard. Again, some progress; more to go. I'm not going to count laundry or dishes toward clutter reduction; I've been doing those all along.

Weekend Wrap-up

Now, let's see. Where was I? Home, mostly: there were no trips, parties, or events planned for the weekend.

Managed to get in a fair amount of walking: about 4 miles yesterday, and 5 miles today. There's a nice trail along Los Gatos Creek that intersects Leigh about a block north of Hamilton. I usually walk up a little past the little park on Campbell Avenue; today I added the loop up to the new bridge just north of San Thomas/Camden. I used to do that every weekend, but slacked off considerably the last two years. Good to get back to it. Hopefully I'll lose a little weight.

Stopped off at REI yesterday and bought a computer sleeve for the new laptop -- they have a good one that opens on two sides, so you can position it vertically or horizontally, and has rings for attaching a shoulder strap. I had a Targus sleeve that was nice and thin and had a bigger accessory pocket, but didn't have a strap attachment. Didn't work out.

After noon yesterday the flower_cat asked to go for a drive, so of course we did. There's a nice 50-mile round trip down to Morgan Hill via Blossom Hill and Santa Theresa that's become one of our usual routes when we don't have time for the coast.

And today I scouted out the route to the chaoswolf's new job. I had originally thought I could save her about 1/2 hour on her commute by dropping her off at the point downtown where she would normally change busses. Turns out it's faster to take her all the way to work by freeway. She's on her own getting back, of course.