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

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.

of bread and jam

There are people for whom eating is just something they do because it's necessary for survival. I feel sorry for them. For me, eating is a whole-body sensual experience - taste, smell, texture, memory... all of my senses come into my enjoyment of food. I know that something's very wrong when I can't face eating, and when everything I eat tastes the same. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with people who don't enjoy food, but I don't understand it.

How this is relevant is that I have spent two days craving bread and jam. Not just any bread and jam, either - but a freshly-baked white-bread bloomer with poppy seeds on top, and strawberry jam with real fruit but also loads of sugar. Just reading that description makes my mouth water. I actually don't like most bread at all - if it comes pre-sliced, in a pre-printed wrapper, with a "best before date" more than a day in advance, you can guarantee I won't like it. Oh, I might eat it toasted, but it's not real bread. Real bread comes from a bakery, not a factory.
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I still haven't written my BiCon review, or put down some of the thoughts I've been carrying around with me for a while, but I'll get round to it eventually. Sometimes I find myself with feelings or memories so strong that I just have to put them down or burst, and this food porn was one of them.

Scatty.

Having written two long livejournal entries and a lengthy reply to something in BC's journal, I'm now scatty as hell. It's as if I only have a certain number of hours of concentration in my head, and I've exceeded them. So my mind's jumping from subject to subject, and I can't do anything that involves concentrating. Ugh.

As linked to by other ljers, A Flock of Lawn Flamingos is a very funny story. Unfortunately, it seems to be fiction rather than fact. Ah well.