Sunday, August 20, 2006

How hard can it be?

Yesterday I tried to write a CD on the family PC. I've been taking digital photos almost exclusively for the past couple of years, and we went through the accumulation and decided to get a few printed off properly. Simple - just burn them to a CD and take it to the nearest supermarket.

So the family PC has a writable CD drive, and a popular user-friendly operating system that's supposed to make this a breeze. So it should be a doddle, right? Wrong! I go to my photos and click where it says "Copy all items to CD", and failed completely to produce a CD with any pictures on. Several coasters, for sure, but no viable CDs. (My understanding of the way this is supposed to work is that it just copies the files to a holding cell, and when you open a writable CD it's supposed to ask you if you want to burn the CD. Nope, just trashed the CD every time.)

The PC has a number of utilities, that either came preinstalled, or as part of some other package, that allow you to write to a CD. None of those did the job either (I know the thing works, because I've written backups or VideoCDs, but I wanted something terribly simple. No dice.)

Unwilling to waste any more time, I simply copied the files to a real computer running Solaris. A couple of simple commands later and I had burnt a CD, first time, no problem.

Oh, and the pictures came out great.

Friday, August 18, 2006

Back in Circulation

I haven't disappeared. I haven't given up. I'm still alive.

The last month has been pretty hectic for me. It being summer and the kids having time off school, we took some holiday.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, I've changed jobs. I'm now working for Proquest Information and Learning, looking after their Sun Solaris servers. Half the first month was spent on holiday (arranged long before, and Proquest were happy with that - they were keen for me to make a start as soon as possible rather than wait until after my vacation). So far, I've been enjoying myself enormously. It's a big challenge and an environment rather different to what I've been used to, but I'm starting to get my teeth into it. The lifestyle is much better, and I've been cycling to work quite a lot (although, if you read the holiday story, it's not as if I have much choice at the moment).