don't leave your CD-Rs on the windowsill!

[baratron]

On Saturday night, I was trying to run off a CD for jaxom, but my CD burner was not co-operating. The first CD I ran off was mostly ok, but the sound on the last few tracks was a bit choppy. It was annoying to listen to, so I did another one - but that one was worse. So I did another one - and that was even worse! There wasn't anything physically wrong with the discs that I could see, and I'd already used about 20 CDs from the stack of 100 without any problems. We had no idea what was going wrong - dirt in the CD burner maybe? So we cleaned out the CD burner, and ran off another disc at a lower write speed - and it was still choppy. Gah.

Eventually, Richard came up with a hypothesis that the discs had been damaged because they were sitting on the windowsill, and CD-Rs don't like bright light or heat. We used a CD from the bottom of the pile, and that one recorded with no problems.

So now I have a stack of 70-odd CD-Rs, some of which will record perfectly and some of which won't, and I have no idea how far down the stack I need to go to get undamaged discs. How utterly frustrating. And entirely unconnected to this, the linux kernel on Richard's machine keeps telling him his printer port is on fire. I'm serious - it keeps giving the error message "lp0 on fire". I boggle.

Comments

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

quite an old kernel then; more recent ones have the more useful message "invalid error status on lp0 (on fire, eh?)"