"Daisy, Daisy..."

"2001: A Space Odyssey"

For some absurd reason that song went through my head as I was dismantling my old computer last night and tonight, salvaging the wireless router, the 180 GB hard drive and controller card, and the 52x42x52 CD burner. Nothing else in there is younger than about 6 years old, which is a dinosaur in computer years. (I also kept thinking of the song "Seasons in the Sun" about the guy who's dying - "Goodbye my friends, it's hard to die..." - which doesn't say much for my state of mind.) But I was also able to save a spare hard drive formatted with Win98 (a minor 1.7 GB) that I can use in case of emergency.

The CD burner gave me a little problem until I figured out that the jumpers on the old drive were set to Master instead of Slave, so once I fixed that I've now got a D and E drive. The Dell case is quite a bit smaller than the old Gateway case, so the hard drive is set vertically at the front of the computer and attached with only a single-connection ribbon cable. I'll have to install mounting brackets and a new dual-connection ribbon (or whatever it's called) and then I'll be ready. With the 180 GB "old" drive and the 40 GB new one, that's nearly a quarter of a terabyte. Which is pretty fuckin' amazing, as not so long ago I was shocked when hard drives got to be bigger than 1 Gig.

Spent a couple hours last night trying to reconfigure my wireless router, gave up and called D-Link's tech support. It took a while, but the guy was awesome and we got it straightened out. Yay wireless! Spent another couple hours downloading new software and installing it and the old stuff. Yay broadband!

My desktop has been rechristened "LSH-HQ", same as the old one. After all, when the Legion HQ was destroyed (first by the Fatal Five, then by Omega and Wildfire) they didn't call it "Legion HQ II" or something. My laptop is "Computo" and the network is "Sleepnet". Yay 30th Century Legion of Super-Heroes! (Such a geek.)

Last weekend I bought Dazzle's Fusion hardware/software thingy for capturing video and creating DVDs. My main project with that will be converting some home movies (1940's to 1970's) that had been transferred from film to video in 1989, from tape to DVD. When my sister and I had the tape made for my parents anniversary, we sat down with a tape recorder and watched it all while recording the comments ("That's my grandfather, he died before you were born..."). That'll be the soundtrack. I have exactly zero experience editing and playing with video, this'll be a fun project. It's one of the reasons I got a 180 GB drive in the first place, because I know video takes up a huge amount of room on the hard drive.