Awake

A CD-R = (Apparently) Complicated Device - Revealed

I'll be adding this to my morning commute reading list: CD-Recordable FAQ.

At the women's missions brunch on Saturday, my eggs and ham went cold as I was summoned to rectify a situation in which the keynote speaker's PowerPoint presentation, recorded on a CD, was unreadable by the DVD-Rom drive of a Windows 98 Compaq laptop. I was to go to a "nearby" Kinko's and have a new CD burned that would be readable by the laptop. No problem. Glad to do it. Ten blocks later, I arrived at what I realized mid-journey to be the 2nd nearest Kinko's. A manageable situation quickly became desperate when I attempted with puzzling futility to turn on the laptop. The good man behind the Kinko's counter did eventually get it powered up by removing the battery. After rebooting his machine (irony not willing to be left out), another CD was made, this time as an non-rewritable disc. The new CD was successfully read by, what I now considered to be a very "special" laptop. I just pray that this is not the machine I am to take with me to India. (Prayer notwithstanding, actually I think I would refuse to take this machine with me, if given the option.)

Now, of course, I am commissioned to develop a set of guidelines for how to burn a CD that will be readable by the Missions department's laptop so that my errand on Saturday will never again be a necessary one.

Thus, the CD-Recordable FAQ which, among many things, contains an especially useful gem given that I am on a Mac G4 at home and need to know how to make PC-compatible CD-Rs.