Album status

After a nearly-two-week dry spell during which I did little besides think about the insert text, I finally got back to working full bore on the albums this week. Spent Thursday evening and most of my non-work time yesterday working on the build scripts for About Bleeding Time!, and was able to burn a test disk with very little trouble. I added a step to normalize the tracks; hopefully that will smooth out the volume differences between the two concerts I pulled tracks out of. I also added a Software directory to the CD-ROM portion, with versions of Audacity 1.3 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Got drafts of four different versions of the cover art from artbeco -- looks great! It's going to be a hard decision, but I'm leaning toward the one based on this one for the cover, and this one (with totally different text) for the back of the booklet. The inside of the booklet will be pure text -- the annotated tracklist, dedication, and credits, and the tray card will be a simulated screenshot with the un-annotated track list, barcode, logo, and other info in an assortment of windows. With luck I might be able to make drafts of both of those this weekend.

I also have Joyce coming over this afternoon to rehearse for my Consonance gig and record some vocals. And I still have to do data-entry and send email, don't I? Urk!

Productive day

Started the day with computer problems: work up to find that the server had frozen overnight -- sometime around 3am. Nothing in the logs; this has happened a couple of times before. It froze again a few hours later a little before 10am (I know because I was writing an LJ post at the time). Grumf. I chased down a 2.6.17 kernel from a couple of months ago, rebooted, and haven't had any trouble since. 2.6.18 has been a lot flakier than I expect a Debian kernel to be; hopefully 2.6.20 -- the official Etch kernel at release time -- will be better.

Between reboots, though, I got quite a lot of work done.

Went for a 3-mile walk about 10:30. It took me a while to get out the door -- I kept forgetting things. Including my glasses. I'd forget my head if it wasn't bolted on. Still a little pain in my left ankle; it went away when I tightened my bootlaces on that side. I'm not going to worry about it too much. Along the way I listened to the latest burn of About Bleeding Time! (that's the bonus you get if you pre-order Coffee, Computers, and Song!)

More album work in the afternoon. Joyce arrived about 4:30 and we rehearsed the songs we planned to record, and the ones for the concert at Consonance that she was less familiar with. Unfortunately she's getting over a cold, and her voice wasn't quite up for the actual recording. Between that and some pilot error getting started, we just bagged it and had dinner. The symptom of the pilot error was that Audacity hung when I hit the record button. Turned out it was waiting for input on a device that wasn't there -- this was the first time I'd logged in as record since setting up the new machine, and I had the wrong input driver selected. [headdesk]

Joyce is coming back Monday; hopefully by then I'll have a couple more loose ends tied up and out of the way.