Ah, vegetation day. I try to make that Saturday, but I was too busy yesterday. And now on Sunday I sit around and do as little as possible. That’s a shame because I have a ton of stuff I need to get done. Oh well.
Right now, as I did rather recently, I am playing a game of Age of Empires. I started this by reading (my text-to-speech program doing the reading for me, actually) about the Roman Civil wars back in the day.
That day would be the Late Roman Republic period. So of course, I’m “Rome” in this day’s game of A.O.E.
S.P.Q.R.
That doesn’t mean “So Please Quit Reading”, so by all means, keep reading.
When I started the game, I did what I always do and put the CD into my CD/DVD drive. And goddamnitall, I need to buy a new one! I had been backing up some of my DVDs a while ago, and noticed that some of them wouldn’t work in that drive. I attributed that to those DVDs. Well, now I know it’s the fucking drive.
I’ve had very bad luck with DVD drives. I should actually replace the one in this computer too because it doesn’t work properly either. I never use it, so I haven’t yet done that. I think I will buy two good drives and be done with it.
So, I’m only playing A.O.E. right now through an accident of the way I bought my last printer. I used to have this nice all-in-one printer/scanner. It was great. Great that is until the printer stopped working right. Everything it printed got this horrible crease from the rollers down one side of each page.
Since printers are cheaper to replace than to fix, I gave that away. I got it back recently, but that’s another story.
One of the features that printer had was a little “disc cartridge” that could be loaded into the printing area to allow me to print right onto the disc surface. I went out and bought over a hundred of those “printable” CDs and DVDs and thought the days of having to write neatly on backup DVDs were over.
I printed exactly 2 discs with that device before the thing fucking broke on me. And they weren’t even my discs, they were for a friend.
ARGH!!!
That’s the “ARGH!!!” of anger and exasperation, not the celebratory Pirate call.
So when I shopped for a new printer, I was sure to get one that could print on CDs and DVDs.
The one I got, also a combo scanner/printer, does not. I could have sworn it did, but the “Print directly to CDs and DVDs” description on the website had the “LightScribe” logo next to it. I didn’t know it at the time, but etching a monochrome pattern on a disc and printing a proper ink label on a printable disc are different things.
So my new printer has a built-in CD/DVD drive. Yay. I thought I’d never use the fucking thing. I don’t keep photos on discs, and I don’t use that LightScribe method to label discs.
As it turns out, with my primary CD/DVD drive dying on me just now, my printer is what allows me to view and play CDs and DVDs on my computer. Well, gosh. I think I might attempt to back up those remaining DVDs now!
After Rome conquers the known world, that is.