The Gaming Outpost

It’s been a crazy week, to the point that I cannot even remember all the things that have conspired to delay my work here, let alone sort them into days.

I lost a good part of Friday to driving, picking up a son’s girlfriend who is staying the weekend and going back on Monday. I had managed to catch up the e-mail before I left, but by the time I returned it was too late to consider seriously doing doing much more.

Thursday night I was hoping to play catch-up after the Collision rehearsal, but our chief computer technician decided that this was his best opportunity to try to figure out what was wrong with the CD-RW on the computer, which effort left me without access to the computer until late Friday afternoon, in an already tightly-sandwiched situation.

I cannot even recall which day was largely lost to the medical attention of the child in our care. He needs a particular medication once a day in order to function appropriately in school, and to get it he must be seen by a doctor (actually, it was a nurse practitioner) every other month or they can’t write the prescription. Between waiting at the doctor’s office to be seen briefly and waiting for the pharmacy to fill the prescription, I lost a good part of whatever day that was. I did manage to get some Romans editing done in the cracks.

I also managed to do some serious backing up of files. This involved acquiring a small flashdrive–the new computer does support such technology, where the old one always had problems–and using it to carry files physically to another computer with a CD burner. This effort included burning copies of what is now the complete set of Collision practice recordings, so that each member of the band can hear what each song is intended to sound like, once these are fully distributed. Audio files being relatively large, this required several transfers; I believe those are now fully preserved, and I can set aside that particular project for the present.

The CD burner was restored to operation by late Friday. It seems that the IDE support on the new motherboard has a flaw, and it is thus good that we got the IDE card–each IDE cable from the motherboard supports a primary but not a secondary drive, so despite having purchased an IDE card we can only run four drives on it. At the moment, that means the new hard drive with the new operating system, the two old hard drives with all the data, and the CD-RW; the DVD drive was chosen as the superfluous one. However, the old primary drive is small, and I am seriously considering transfering everything from it to one of the other two drives and removing it for use elsewhere. There is not much advantage to having a DVD reader on my computer, but there is the fact that my wife’s computer has a DVD burner, and she could save files to DVD in such a fashion that I would need a DVD reader to access them. It is also the case that it’s much quicker to copy a CD if you have two drives than if you have to move all the data to the computer and back again–although for that, I can remember running copy programs on my Commodore 64 where one had to swap the original and copy disks back and forth several times to move all that information from one to the other. I got a bit more backup work done yesterday, although I’m not entirely certain what still needs to be saved.

By last night, I was exhausted; I think I have caught up on the lost sleep, but still have much to do. Here’s to the doing of it all.

–M. J. Young