Saturday, November 24, 2007

Thanksgiving 2007



We spent Thanksgiving at Carol's brother Bob's house in north Seattle with his family and Carol's nieces and nephews and other family. 17 people altogether. The feast was delicious and we all had a great time. Audrey and Charlotte ran and ran and ran with their cousins and came home exhausted. They both slept all night and "late" the following morning (until 7:15!). Carol and I went to bed at 9:30 and had our best night's sleep in a long time. We failed to get up at midnight to hit the outlet malls.

Charlotte decided a few weeks ago to give talking a serious try. All of a sudden she has a lot of words. The first color she learned was brown, which she says as "brr". Then she learned yellow ("lellow"). Anything that isn't brown is "lellow". She regularly says "uh oh" now. Carol is "maaa" and as of this week I am "la la" very consistently. Charlotte also clearly says "baby" and "happy". Carol heard her say "puppy" once but she hasn't repeated that. This morning Charlotte was sitting on my lap looking at family photos and she started saying "Audrey" clearly and repeatedly.

Audrey's favorite thing to do with me is play chase. We often play for a long time when I get home from work. Charlotte plays sometimes, too. Lately Audrey prefers a variation where once I catch her I wrap her up completely in a blanket and squeeze her, or reach in and tickle her. She could play this game for hours. Sometimes I pick her up in the blanket like a sack of potatoes and carry her somewhere else in the house. "Where am I now?," she'll ask from inside. When she's watching TV she loves to be all buried in a blanket nest so she just has a little opening to look through.

Audrey is also trying to learn letters and numbers. She's been singing the alphabet song. She can't quite get it right yet, but if we sing along with her she can make her way through it. And she's starting to do some reasoning with numbers. This morning at breakfast she said, "We have three girls and one boy." I started asking her questions like, "If your cousin Kristen came over, how many girls would we have?" Audrey was able to reason it out every time.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Halloween '07



It's been two weeks of Halloween around our house. That's how long ago Grandma and Grandpa took the girls shopping for costumes. The girls have worn their costumes almost daily ever since. They each chose their own. Audrey had been saying for weeks that she wanted to be Spiderman for Halloween. Charlotte couldn't communicate her desires, but we could have guessed it would be dog-related. Dogs are Charlotte's favorite thing. When they entered the toy store, Charlotte made a bee line for the dog costume and wouldn't even consider anything else.

On Halloween night Carol and I took turns taking the girls Trick or Treating while the other stayed home to answer the door. It was a little cool out, but not too bad. Carol took the first shift with the girls and they did both sides of the street on our block. When they came home for the handoff, Charlotte chose to stay home with Carol and Audrey and I headed out for Round 2.

Audrey was a very polite Trick or Treater. Several houses tried to get her to take several pieces of candy, but she'd often say, "No thank you, I already got one piece." We only visited about 5 or 6 houses before Audrey told me she was finished and wanted to go home. On the way home she told me that she wanted one piece of candy before she went to bed, and one piece of candy every day until it was gone. I told her that sounded like a very sensible plan. I think someone had been influencing her in the days before Halloween. Amazingly, Audrey has almost stuck to that plan. She is definitely not gorging on candy, even though she knows it is available. Charlotte, too.

We've had a couple of fairly lazy weekends. Carol's been working on her latest furniture project. I've been futzing with the pickup truck. This weekend I got a radio installed in it (it had none) and tried to fix the horn, which doesn't work (I tried a bunch of solutions, but there is a short somewhere in the wiring harness and all my attempts to outsmart it just blew fuses). Other than that we were unusually lazy. Nice for a change.

The midterm for my Biostatistics class was two weeks ago. I was feeling disheartened after the test (open book tests are the worst!), but grades came out this week and I scored well above average so I'm feeling more motivated again. I'm only taking the course for my own edification - there's not really anything riding on it - but an expectation of high grades was programmed into me very strongly as a child.

Since having kids I've lamented that I never "read" anymore. I realized this week that I still read just as much, I just don't read books. I read tons of material on the web, including news and whatever historical or technical topics grab my interest during the week. For example, I'm reading "A Tale of Two Cities" a little bit at a time from dailylit.com. That led me to do a few hours of reading online about the French Revolution. I'm also a throwback who reads the local newspaper cover to cover every day. I've done that all my life. Anyway, I was amused to have the sudden realization that my reading hasn't stopped, it's just changed shape.

Someone pointed me to dailylit.com a couple of months ago. "A Tale of Two Cities" was the thing that caught my eye the most, and made me wonder how I got all the way through four years of high school honors English classes and college without every reading a Dickens novel‽ I'm really enjoying it. I never knew Dickens was such a smart-ass. Right up my alley.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Bringing Vinyl Albums Into the 21st Century


Vinyl LP: Remember These?


When I was in my twenties and financially irresponsible, my favorite form of retail therapy (and debt accumulation) was buying records. I built up a collection of more then 500 vinyl albums. Most of them were acquired during the three years or so that I was a DJ at community radio station KCMU; they reflect my tastes at the time which were heavily influenced by the eclectic nature of the station.

The last time I had my album collection available for use was when I lived in Boston before moving back to Seattle in 1997. Since then they have been in boxes in storage. A few years ago my storage locker was burglarized and my turntable was stolen, so I didn't even have a way to play albums any more. But I would still occasionally think about favorite music that was languishing in those boxes. Once I moved everything from the storage locker to the attic in my new garage, I also started worrying about all that weight up there.

In May, I bought a USB turntable at Costco and started the project of ripping albums to MP3s. Carol's father is interested in doing the same thing so we split the cost.

I ripped a few LPs in June but then got busy with school and the garage and stopped for a couple of months. At the beginning of September I started again and got pretty serious about it. I just finished this week.

A lot of the music I was buying in the 80s was pretty experimental. Much of it is outright angry. Many albums I would just bypass without even listening to. Others were borderline and I'd drop the needle on a few tracks to decide if I wanted to invest the time to convert them. Much of it is interesting, but I know I'll never listen to it again. Other albums had historical interest (some local New Wave bands, for example) but I knew I'd never want to listen to those again either. I think in the end I ripped about 1/3 of the albums I own.

I also came across many albums I know I never owned - I must have inherited them from a previous relationship. Most were junk (and in poor condition), but there were a few gems. Some Sergio Mendes from the 60s, as well as a couple of "Disneyland" label albums that are stories: "Snow White", "Peter and the Wolf", etc. from 1960. The latter are humorous because they tell the whole story on one side of an LP - limited to about 15 minutes - by speeding up the music and speaking very quickly.

I figured I'd write about my experience so that should you tackle such a project you'll know what you're getting into.

First of all, if you have a sizable collection your project is going to last weeks or months. I recommend that you set up a dedicated "station". You need room for the turntable, a staging area for the records, and a place for the computer within reach of the USB cable from the turntable.

Once you start ripping it's a multi-stage process:

1. Put on a record.
2. Fire up the ripping software (I use Audacity, an open source audio tool that came packaged with the turntable)
3. Start the record. Set a kitchen timer for 18-20 minutes.
4. When the timer goes off go check on the record and wait a few minutes if it isn't done yet. "Pause" the software, flip the record and start side 2, un-pause software. Set the timer again.
5. Timer goes off for side 2, "stop" the software. At this point you have the entire album as one big waveform in memory. You can save the raw data to a file, but I never did.
6. Using the software, pan and zoom around in the waveform to find song boundaries. This is easy for most "song" albums (the song breaks are readily visible in the waveform) and harder for less commercial works that have sounds between "songs" or pieces that blend together. You also probably want to clip out several seconds of silence at the end of every song.
7. Make markers at the song boundaries and type in song names at the markers. Audacity's UI for this is fairly crappy - double check before hitting return on each title. Depending on the album, you need a place to put the album cover and or the record itself to read the song titles from during this process.
8. Tell Audacity to store songs as MP3s. Enter artist and album title and "go". It takes about 5-10 minutes to write out the MP3 files. I made a file hierarchy in c:\<artist>\<album>. I knew I'd eventually import it all into iTunes so the structure didn't really matter, but I'm anal that way.
9. (optional) I edit the filenames that Audacity creates and put the track number as a prefix (e.g. "01-<first song title>.mp3") so I get file ordering that mirrors song order on the album.
10. Go to step 1.

Overall it takes about an hour per single album. I worked it into other stuff I was doing. For example, I can rip an album in the morning: start side 1 as soon as I get up and then go make breakfast for the girls. Turn the record over and then make breakfast for myself. Then maybe do the editing and title entry and saving (or leave it until evening). In the evening I can do several albums while doing other things like homework and dinner.

Note that Audacity has a feature to find "quiet" spots between songs automatically, but I never tried it. I liked doing it myself so I could put cut out as much blank space as possible and put the song start points exactly where I wanted them. This step is best accomplished using headphones. Audacity can also attempt to remove pops and other vinyl noises, but personally I find them charming so I didn't bother.

Once I was done I imported the ripped files into iTunes. Audacity sets the ID3 tags pretty well, but it has a weird list of genres so you have to fix some of those in iTunes. I also like to set the y part of "track x of y", and the compilation flag if appropriate. Then adding album art is a whole different task since you have to do it manually for LPs. iTunes does it by Gracenote signature - i.e. number of tracks and length as they are on the CD; your ripped tracks are never going to have the same time signature so iTunes rarely finds album art automatically. I find the album art somewhere (amazon, usually, or by Google image search) and drag it to iTunes. An image size between 200x200 and 300x300 works pretty well without wasting disk space.

I also add "from vinyl" to the comments for every ripped song. I have a smart playlist called "Vinyl" that automatically includes everything I've ripped.

I ended up ripping 173 albums (some were double or triple LPs) totaling 1,713 songs and 8.71 GB.

It was a long process but overall fairly painless. It's great having all that music available again in a format as convenient as iTunes. I rediscovered a lot of wonderful music along the way.