Category: Tech

Ok, I am sure there is a way to do this, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how. I have a cd that is one big mix, even though it is several tracks. How do I rip the songs off the cd as one big track so there are no pauses between the “songs”? I tried ripping them as several tracks and then re-burning without pauses, but Nero gives me an error saying I have to have 2-3 seconds between each track. This blows. It wouldn’t be so bad if Windows XP saw each track number so I could put them in order, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t. It assigned track numbers to some of the tracks, but not all of them. The only other thing I can think of is creating a playlist in Winamp and manually putting the tracks in order so at least I can listen to them on my computer in the order that makes sense and keeps the one long continuous beat going strong.

I’m in a mood right now. It’s an accumulation of a bunch of little things that separately are no big deal but together make me want to sever friendships and beat the shit out of stupid people.

Yep, that’s how I’m feeling.

The good news is that yesterday I ordered a nifty 80gb 7200 rpm Western Digital hard drive with an 8mb cache and it’s due to be delivered tomorrow. Got a good deal on it too – only $60. New computer equipment always cheers me up.

Don’t ever let someone tell you that all hard drives are the same because they’re full of shit. Some drives are sub-par, such as Maxtor, which I now officially hate (and understand why they are so much cheaper than the other brands). I will never ever ever buy another one. First I had one that was less than a year old suddenly die on me. The data on it was unrecoverable. And now my current one is dragging ass.

Of course, there’s no doubt that Windows has a play in that. A wise friend once said you should reinstall your operating system every six months to keep everything operating at top performance. Joe installed 512 mb of DDR RAM in my machine today, yet my computer was still puttering along. After fighting with Win XP to get the drive back into DMA mode (for whatever reason it reverted to PIO mode), it’s a bit faster, but still not good enough. When my home machine is slower than my work one, we have a problem. So please excuse me while I shop online for a new hard drive and processor…

The laser printer I ordered on Sunday was delivered today. I was completely surprised at how fast it got here considering I opted for free (i.e. slow) shipping. Joe put the toner in and hooked it up to my computer. I installed the driver software and in five minutes we had crystal clear printouts. Sweet! Now I can print to my heart’s delight. And since each toner cartridge prints 3,000 sheets, I imagine we won’t have to buy replacement toner for at least a year. I had been thinking about getting a laser printer for the past two months and I’m glad I finally bit the bullet.

Our deskjet printer pissed me off for the last time today. All I wanted to do was print one frickin page and it was acting like it was out of ink when there is a brand new cartridge in there. So I went to buy.com and ordered a laser printer instead. Now I can print in peace.