Friday 14 March 2003

Pic of the day: Welcome the new family member, er, computer peripheral. (In the background ... well, this journal is called the Chaos Node for a reason. You'll be happy to know that there is no food in there, though.)

LiteOn day

Paydays are fun. Bought a new CD burner.

Actually, the fun value is not very high on my side, but I guess for the casual observer it may have some entertainment value. Anyway, today is totally diary day, no deep thoughts about life, love, and great cosmic truths.

***

It all started a month ago, when I bought my first CD burner. As I've said before, I download a large number of "anime", Japanese cartoons. (And no, despite me being a single male, the ones I download are not the hentai ones. Humor or romance, occasionally children's cartoons.) (Oh, and only those that are not for sale on CD-ROM with English text. I don't want to cut into these guys' sales. There' still a lot.) Even a 55 GB hard disk can only take so much, so eventually I decided to swap them out to CD-ROM. You can play them directly from CD-ROM, and hard disks work faster if they are not full. I was not prepared for just how many CDs it would take ... these movies are high-quality, so each episode can be 150-250MB. Typically I need one CD for every 3-4 episodes. But lately, I have needed far more. Because the Plextor destroyed the disks.

Anyway, I wrote almost a whole journal entry on February 16 about the troubles with the Plextor CD burner, or rather its adverse effects on the rest of the machine. Little did I know that this was just the beginning. After I got it up and running, it burned six CDs before it trashed the seventh. From there on, it went steadily downhill, destroying more and more disks for each it managed to write properly. Yesterday, it trashed 6 blank disks and wrote none. So today I took it back to the shop.

The service people on Telehuset were quite friendly, and estimated that they would get a machine back for me in two weeks time. Probably. So I smiled politely, then went over to the competitor and bought a LiteOn. Also an external writer with USB connection, it is less stylish but easier to operate, with a top that flips up rather than a tray. It is also cheaper. It also seems to work.

Well, of course it doesn't work perfectly. As the thirteenth commandment says: "Thou Shalt Not Have It Too Easy." (OK, I just made that up, but you know what I mean.) The program Nero Burning ROM refused to acknowledge the new writer. Luckily I did not need Nero. I don't even like it. It did give slightly instructive error messages as to where in the process things failed, I admit, but I much prefer to not have the errors in the first place. I also hate the name of the program. So I ditched it, and just used Windows XP. I right clicked the files and chose "Send to E:" (which in my case was the burner). Then once I had as many files as I could get in under 650 MB, I chose "Write these files to CD-ROM" and gave a more sensible name. Now it worked. Well, except one file that I had tried to move around. Evidently trying to change the order of the files after you've sent them to the queue is a Bad Thing. Oh well.

I still don't know whether the PlexWriter was a Monday machine or whether they generally make shoddy goods. I am not in any hurry to find out. But if anyone asked me today, I would tell them not to take the risk. Get the cheap LiteOn instead.

***

Since the day is ruined anyway, I may as well whine about the dentist. Two days ago I was to the dentist because the only synthetic tooth I had broke off during Christmas dinner. I had expected the whole thing to be mainly cosmetic, but he spent an hour or so working on the neighboring teeth and the stub that was left of the broken one. At least I did not need a new root canal filling, but it still hurt. In fact, it still hurts. It was no problem before, but now it hurts every time I eat or drink something cold. (And it's a bit sore else too, but then again it was just two days ago.)

I'm not generally the type of person who pays people to cause me pain, so episodes like this stick out like a sore, um, tooth. Hopefully it can still take a turn for good.

Also, there is a lengthy article in Scientific American about how healthy alcohol is in moderate quantities. It's pure medicine. (Of course, many people have values of "moderate" that grow over time.) This seems like a good time to test it ... except I am already half asleep. Good night world.