Piano - We got an invitation a few weeks ago to attend an "Evening of Music" at a friend's house. Professional pianist George Lopez from the Manchester Music School would be performing a number of classical pieces. There was quite a turnout and even with all the additional seats brought in, there were two rooms filled to capacity. I went with Claire since she usually enjoys the piano recitals that her teacher holds periodically. Claire especially enjoys hearing all the "good kids" play and has been wondering when she might get to hear her teacher's teacher play some day. I figured in the near term this might be as close as she gets to hearing someone at that level.
Alas it was a long night. Claire takes after her mother and the performance went on a couple of hours past Claire's bedtime. I felt bad for her since I could tell that while she also thought that the music was beautiful, her exhaustion was starting to outweigh her interest. She was too embarrassed to walk out in the middle so she stuck it out.
Misc - Today was an ordinary day. Compared to the last several weekends, I liked ordinary. No one had to go to the hospital, nobody died, no new cases of lice, no power outages. Just a sunny albeit windy day with temperatures in the upper 20's. I gave the main floor wood stove a thorough cleaning so that its heat exchanger would be more efficient. It needs that about once for every ton it burns. Michelle let me nap since I didn't get home from the piano concert until 11pm. Later we took the vehicles for car washes to rinse off all of the salt the had accumulated during the recent ice storm. In the early evening we took the family out for dinner at Elisha's since Michelle had a 50% off coupon.
Audio - Later on in the evening I purchased Audio Hijack Pro and Fission for some audio work I've been doing. As a quick test of the tools, I re-recorded the Ella Enchanted's Somebody to Love track from the DVD. The last time I did it, I used a separate DVD player and a cable to capture the analog audio output and resample it on the computer. With these tools I was able to play the DVD on the computer and capture the digital audio directly before it was output. The results are much cleaner with far less noise (and hardware setup). I plan on using the setup for some other transcoding projects in the future.