Bad tech week

It looks like our CD burner has given up the ghost. I’d made a CD for Scott and Ange with some Alex photos and pictures from Ange’s 30th birthday party, but Scott told me last week that they couldn’t read it. I tried it in my computer, and it’s unreadable there, too. I tried burning some more discs today, and they’ve all come out as coasters. The shiny undersides of the discs are being discoloured, so the burner is writing something to them, but clearly not in a language that other CD-ROM drives can understand.

Sigh. I suppose this means I get to petition Abi for a new CD burner, or a DVD-writer. Under normal circumstances I’d be going “yay!” but right now it’s just annoying. I don’t want to buy anything new. I just want to the stuff I already have to work properly.

I’m having a bad tech week, you see. I spent a large chunk of Sunday evening (and night) getting our new broadband gateway/router to work, when it should have been a fairly simple plug and play operation. Until now, our network contained two client computers connected to a file/gateway server, using wireless network cards and WinProxy for sharing and filtering our internet connection. We have now decommissioned the server, and have put the Belkin router in its place. The plan had been to use the wireless connections to link us all together, but unfortunately our wireless cards are way old (we bought them in 1999, before 802.11b got fashionable), and thoroughly incompatible with everything except themselves. So for the moment my computer is hooked up to the router with ethernet, and Abi’s laptop is daisy-chained to mine with the wireless cards. I’ve got my machine set up for internet connection sharing, so I’m acting as a pass-through between Abi and the router. Bizarre, but it works.

(To be fair to the Belkin, the gateway/router is a lovely piece of kit. If it hadn’t been for the compatibility problems it would have been a breeze to set up. Belkin have paid a lot of attention to the user interface of the setup and configuration program, and it’s very tidy and easy to understand.)

And finally there’s this piece of lab equipment that my parents use, which isn’t working properly, and I’ve been trying to figure out. I’ve been learning all kinds of things about COM ports and serial connections. But am I any closer to actually making the apparatus run smoothly? Er, no.

(And don’t even talk to me about the day job.)

Like I said, bad tech week. Fortunately I have Thursday and Friday off, and I’m going to visit soon-to-be-daddy Dave and my Grandma in Aberdeen. The thought of not seeing a computer for a couple of days is very relaxing. 🙂