I sadly report it took me until noon to recover from work y’day. I was expecting to be wiry and tough until 70-something, but no such luck. I barely made it in to the shop and had to drag my behind around at that. Here’s the precious good news. I’ve been testing an anti-virus product called “Advanced Care” which seems to pick up where Symtantec and SpyBot leave off.By that, I’m saying I’ve run Advanced Care on a fresh system install, and it easily picks up items that were all too clearly left by the other scans. A good example is the “CD reporting service”, which records the serial number of every external CD player you connect to your computer, and feeds this number back to MicroSoft. It is just like MicroSoft to call that a service. Bet you didn’t even know they were doing it. Where some say “so what”, I say you better watch out. Why is MicroSoft concerned enough about that event to spy on you?
Another hour went into the type of FireHow posts drawing the most attention, particularly in the computer section. So much for the assumption that people using computers eventually learn a thing or two. Some of the most primitive topics are making money. I joined in, posting such gems as how to change a folder icon and delete a file without sending it to the Recycle Bin. Once more, my posts contain full descriptions and pictures that others seem unable to compete with. I’ve never gotten such mileage of screen captures (Alt-PrintScreen).
Seriously, I had to return home early [today] and prepare some bland food. After the catering y’day I was happy to eat bread, cheese and macaroni. There seems to be a spice limit I cannot go beyond. The weather isn’t helping and I’ve sent Wallace notice about the early arrival of the hot season. This year will be a scorcher.
Oh yes, I promised you a solution to the misaligned optical disk problem. Golly, shouldn’t I be more careful promising such things? Since I’m not a tech, and all. Well, I got brains, so I used ‘em. Here’s the plan and the solution. If the recording laser is off-center, it would explain why the copy process jams at 36% or 56%. The laser is reading that far into the track before it skips a groove. I can see it in my mind’s eye.
Therefore, the five tunes on that CD must be cut in one long track, known as the “track at once” option (which I never use). This is the method used on commercial CDs, in which the menu is a list of 1 KB addresses that tells the laser where to start reading for any chosen tune. That means the laser must start reading at the beginning each time, a nice thing to know. This is also what prevents most people from being able to make a copy of the CD, instead, all they get is a copy of the menu called “Track 01, Track 02” etc.
Thus, if I can get at those five tunes in the big track, and extract them to five single tracks, I can copy those as a regular data CD. The process of getting at the individual music files is known as “ripping”. It now computes (to me anyway) why they use such an evil-sounding term. It is a laborious process, but when I left the shop at 6:00 PM, I had successfully ripped the first tune and was 7% into the second. Once I have them ripped, and surely I shall, it will be child’s play to remaster a new optical copy.
QED.
