I attacked my collection in the order by which it sits in my CD rack (which is alphabetical). Each whole CD was CDDB'ed and ripped with EAC until my 60GB scratch drive was full of WAVs, I then distributed the encoding across my three desktop machines and my laptop using LAME with the --r3mix setting.
After I did this I then encoded all my girlfriends decent CDs. But lets not get into a discussion about the legalities of copying other peoples CD's. In the case of my girlfriends collection, almost all the CDs I copied were ones I'd bought her!