I've been wanting to see the Lips for a while. I missed out when they played the Albert Hall earlier in the year, but I made sure I got tickets for this one. We started the evening with dinner at a small Japanese rstaurant off Leicester Square, followed by too much icecream at Hagen Daas.

I've only been to the Apollo once before when we saw Björk 3 years ago. It's a proper old-fashioned rock venue. An old theatre that's looking a bit tatty with a grand foyer. We were up on the circle, but not too far back.

Support was from Midlake, who I'd not heard of. They were okay, but, as usual, the support band sound was lacking. I'd probably enjoy them more on CD. They remind me a lot of Grandaddy. I actually have a free copy of one Midlake track that was being handed out as we went in.

The Flaming Lips were another matter altogether. They started with giant balloons and massive confetti cannons. I thought the aliens and santas were a bit pointless, but dressing the crew as superheroes was neat. They played a lot of the new album plus some Yoshimi, Soft Bulletin and a couple of old tracks. There was lots of audience participation, culminating in a Bohemian Rhapsody karaoke in one of the encores (better than it sounds).

By some coincidence the gig was also attended by the Israeli instructor on a programming course I am taking at work.

This review is adapted from the one I posted earlier to Last.fm.

I'm currently listening to Radiohead's National Anthem to restore my faith in music after seeing this.

I've been giving some thought lately to reorganising my digital music collection. I have loads of CDs, but do most of my listening on the PC. Over many years I've converted my collection to MP3 and, more recently, Ogg Vorbis. Some of it was done in 128kb/s CBR MP3 and sounds a bit flat these days, especially on my Grado headphones. I've thought of re-ripping it all to Ogg, but there may be a better alternative. Now that I have a much bigger hard drive I could to it in a lossless form, probably FLAC, so that there is no loss of quality. Then I just need to find a way to convert it to a more compact form for portable use. I could try writing something that would automatically transcode any new music. I just want to avoid ever having to rip it again. I shall have to look into keeping a backup copy in case of catastrophic disk failure.

Last night I was at a birthday party for someone I drum with. She lives in Ridge, which is a small village a stone's throw from South Mimms. She works there at a research centre for Cancer Research. I had an interesting chat with one of her colleagues about the usefulness of protein folding.