The Master

I have an ostensible master ready to ship to Oasis, and have put a sizeable but not excessive payment on my Amex card. The sensation is surprisingly familiar from having been in at the birth of my kids. It's mostly fear.

I don't have any really good way of verifying my disks; the only program I know of on Linux is qpxtool, and it only seems to know about Plextor drives. If anyone knows of something better, or knows whether something free that runs on a Macbook Pro or a Windows XP machine will do the job, I'd appreciate a link. I do get a little feedback from cdrdao read-toc; found out that the Fuji inkjet-printable disks I have a spindle of have a lot more CRC errors than the Memorex disks.

I did determine that cdrdao wasn't writing the CD text correctly, so I ended up falling back on k3b, which just fscking works. If only it could take project info from a text file... Especially if it were the same toc file cdrdao uses. Grump. Also discovered that my drive won't go any slower than 8x. Should be OK, but...

Things are going to be a little tight tomorrow, since I'm flying up to Portland for OSCon around noon. I'm going to give the disk one more listen in the car on my way to and from work today, and live with it on headphones for a while.

The Master (reprise)

I am currently listening to the master for Coffee, Computers, and Song! "Little Computing Machine" needed one last tweak, so I had to burn a couple more (on the good media, thank you -- next time I'll buy the really good stuff; recommendations gladly accepted). I burned one on the Samsung drive in Trantor, and another on the Plextor on Harmony. The Plextor won, which was a little surprising. Both wanted to run at 8x; that may be a media thing.

Tomorrow I'll run it up to work -- we get a discount from UPS, and they pick up every afternoon. Then I hop on a plane to Portland. This time tomorrow I'll be at OSCon, and my master will be on a plane to Oasis in New Jersey. Hopefully by this time next week my artwork will be on a server somewhere at Oasis, and on its way to an offset press.

There are flaws. Unlike some folks on my flist, I'm not really in a position to say it's entirely made of awesome, but it's all pretty good, and parts of it are excellent. cflute's vocals on "Silk and Steel" are heartbreakingly beautiful, "Vampire Mega-Byte" has some cool special effects (if I may say so), my kids (who appear to have inherited my inability to sing consistently on key) come together so sweetly at the end of "Daddy's World" that any earlier flaws are entirely forgiven.

If I were starting now, it would be much better and take a lot less time. But it wouldn't be on its way to a date with destiny dare we hope ConChord? the duplicators. Tomorrow.

It's still available for pre-order. For a little less than a month.

Why do I feel like I just jumped off a cliff? Am I really crazy enough to get started on the next one? Where am I going, and what am I doing in this handbasket?