12-27-02 @ 12:22 pm EST

Well...after much crying and frustration (don't ask), I think we MAY have figured out how to best use the CD writer...I wanted to use CD-RW disks, but from what I've learned, these writers are incredibly buggy and lousy with CD-RW's. I thought that meant I was screwed but it LOOKS as if you can rewrite to CD-R's also, you just can't erase anything to regain that space. If you delete something from a CD-R, then that space the files occupied is lost forever.

It SEEMS to work all right if you KNOW exactly what you want to save to the disk, though, and leave it there for archiving. Like images. And I think you can overwrite an image if the new version has the same name.

I think.

And it looks like you can save to them in more than one session...that was what I thought you couldn't do. All the literature we have says you can't do that, that you need CD-RW's to do that. Stupid crap. It could at least be correct. Anyway I renamed a lot of my files to make them more consistent--fullsize pictures will begin with the letters "bg" for "big"--and saved over 600 images to one CD. It's about 70mb, and there's ALMOST 600mb left. O_O Holy crap.

Just as I was typing this entry, my STUPID LAME-ASS ISP kicked me off and refused to let me on again. Then again, it could have been the phone company's fault, for every time I tried to dial out with the modem, I'd get some stupid voice telling me to deposit money to continue the call, or to hang up if I was using a rotary phone! Why don't they FIX our stupid connection already? But anyway...while I was steaming offline I started moving all my sunset photos from the Polaroid program to My Documents, as a means of sorting them somehow (so I don't have to look through all the other pics of flowers and Pepper and Katchoo and Meatball and such). I want to try to get my sunsets in order because there are so many, but to do that I have to compare them all to my little sunset pics...and they are all over the hard drive (the big ones). And I don't know their names (they're all dates). *sigh* So if I move them to My Documents, and from there copy them into a folder, maybe...then I can work on getting rid of my sunsets. I have yet to DELETE anything, because I want to make sure this works first...nobody has answered my query yet...I'm so lousy with technology, and so paranoid that I'll mess it up AFTER I've deleted everything.

I hope it all works out, then I can both archive my photos and free up some hard drive space. 70mb so far to one disk...sheesh. That's just insane.

I thought I had more to say but I think I forgot it when I was offline and steaming. So I guess I'll go now. :/