I am still fighting with the new computer, but making progress. Here are some of the things I need to do, in no particular order:

• On the old computer, someone had told me how to set up my MicroSoft Excel in my Office 2000 so that all those Multiverser scores with “@” in the middle would not be converted to e-mail addresses. I had to reinstall the Office programs entirely, and am still reconfiguring everything, but that little annoyance needs my attention once again.
• The music program is ticking off the number of days for my free trial. It seems that when I copied the registration code onto the disk, I dropped a character, and so I’m going to have to figure out how to get the right code for it. The company has been helpful in the past when I had problems with the program, and they still send me their advertising, so if I don’t actually have the number somewhere else they’ll probably give me the missing digit. I just have to find time to ask.
• The biggest problem, really, is that the CDRW is not recognizing blank CDs. Of course, I don’t know for certain whether it is recognizing any CDs, because I ran the installs off the new functional DVD drive (which does not write). Thus I’m going to have to find a CD to use to test the other functions of the drive, and I just have not had time to do that. It is entirely possible that the problem is in the software–the computer won’t recognize my old CD burner program, so I’m working a problem in two variables, whether the CDRW works and whether the CD software works with it.
• I started setting up the FTP client and realized that I did not know any of the FTP information. I expect that the user name and password are the same ones I’ve got for the hosting service e-mail program, which does work, and that I can get the rest from the hosting company’s web site, but that’s going to take some digging.
• I also need to get my POP and SMTP information from my ISP; that is the only mailbox not yet working, thanks to some debugging of the others.
• There are probably still scores of programs on my computer I can’t access but simply have not yet tried; either I haven’t had occasion to attempt to use them, or I forgot I couldn’t. However, I’m getting there slowly.

Of course, today involved taking my mother-in-law shopping; I also took her out to dinner. It was her birthday last week, but on her birthday she refused to get dressed to go out to dinner, and over the weekend things were just too hectic for anyone down here to go up there, so it got pushed into today and fell back to me. I enjoyed it, at least for the food. She’s not a big eater, and will be feasting on her leftovers from the diner for a few days, I expect.

I’ve also made some progress on recording another song for the Collision practice CD. Of course, at the moment I can neither burn them to the CD nor upload them to the website, so my progress is sort of contained to my own benefit–but hopefully those problems will be solved, and we’ll be back in business.

–M. J. Young