Ready please, Mr. Music!

Well, I might not have been doing much today, but himself has been a very busy boy!  For ages he’s wanted to go through all our music files, de-dupe them (get rid of duplicates), delete corrupted files, and roughly categorize them into genres. He created a list of all the directories involved, and printed it out. The directory tree ended up being 44 pages long… That’s a reasonably large amount of files! Before getting rid of the dross (duplicates and corruptions), there were 26,500 mp3’s spread over 7,000 directories… which equated to 200Gb of data.

How did we come to have so many music files? Most of it is from our combined collections of old vinyl records, tapes, and CDs, “ripped” (or converted) to mp3 format over about twenty three years. We still have a awful lot of ancient vinyl records left to convert, and who knows? we may even get a round tuit one of these centuries 🙂 As to the why we copy them? It’s always a good idea to keep backups, especially with the old vinyl records, most of which are irreplaceable – one of them even comes from as far back as before vinyl, or even shellac, or acetate were invented, but seems to be on some sort of thick waxy material on top of a light cardboard-like backing! That one is an oral rendition of the old fairy story, The Princess and the Pea, spoken in Italian! 🙂 Try replacing that one in a hurry! Anyway, the main idea is to make a backup of as many as we can, storing them on our 3Tb hard drive on our file server (which is going to have to be replaced – erm, the hard drive that is – we’re rapidly running out of room on it, and that’s not just from music files!) Apart from the backup idea, it’s also great to be able to play whatever you want, whenever you want, without having to go through tapes and CDs – some of which will invariably be in another room, or a storage box, just when you want to listen to them… So it’s kept him busy nearly all day (and he’s not finished yet, by a long shot!), whilst I….

…Played “shuffle the character” on Rift. I know I said that I didn’t want to do that again, but I needed some good old fashioned, boring, “bringing up baby” characters on Laethys, and I’d managed to find a name that I liked, that apparently no one else had thought of (seeing as how we’re on the Oceanic server, and not the European one 🙂 ) So Lastrega was born, off-shard, raised to 15, and “shuffled” over to Laethys whilst I “shuffled” one of my level 60 girls across to yet another shard. Lastrega – a contraction of “la” and “strega” – because you can’t have a two part name, though you can have a first name and a second name… I wonder if you could get away with calling your character “La” and then buy a second name of, say, “Strega” – more than one person can have the same second name, so you can create “families”, I guess – Hmmm… I must try it sometime!  However, I digress… La Strega means “The Witch” in Italian, which I thought was rather fitting 😉

Weigh-in this morning was unexpected! I thought that for sure I’d have gone up again, but I didn’t! I’m still not far enough down that I’d be willing to risk saying that I’d broken the 120kg barrier, but if I go down again tomorrow, instead of up, as I’m expecting, then I might be willing to say “Yay! I’ve finally broken the 120kg barrier!” This morning I clocked in at 119.8kg – one point down on yesterday’s effort… So here’s hoping, but I’m still not holding my breath! 😉

Stay tuned tomorrow for all the latest in the Weight and See Game – if we all cross our fingers, toes, eyes and teeth, I might go down again! Here’s hoping! 🙂