A few days ago, I was checking up on prices for an optical drive, to replace a cdrom that had stopped working. Within about 10 minutes, I’d put in an order and queued the bank transfer for the payment. The drive was waiting for me at the house last night when I got home from the gym. Saturday to Tuesday is not a bad turn-around time for an online order. However, I had to force myself to ignore it for some time, so that I’d continue packing instead of fiddling with toys. This morning, I woke up early so I could fiddle.

The DVD drive is an Asus DRW-1608P, which offers a nice array of reading/writing options for a low-ish price tag. I’m a bit disappointed that my boxed version didn’t come with the audio cable (by accident?), and there was a lack of indication of the Master/Slave/Cable Select jumper order. Aside from that, it spins quite quietly, which I think is a huge bonus. I’ve yet to play a DVD on it, so I’m unsure if my mix of Region 1 and Region 4 DVDs are going to be the worlds biggest pain in the ass. One only hopes.

I have a couple goals in mind with this thing. As a reader, I want to re-encode a lot of the CDs that I have bought since moving to New Zealand. I have the opportunity to try storing music as flac files, and recoding them when the songs are copied onto the iPod. As a writer, it’ll be nice to have a bit of back-up capability. Having lost the hard drive on my laptop, I lost some valuable files. I hope that I don’t have that happen again, now that I’m using a digital camera for most things.

Following up on whether or not to enable comments, I think it will be worth to have, but my initial testing didn’t work out properly. The layout of the form caused at least one of the variables to be incorrectly filled when it was returned:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<item>
<title>Comments?</title>
<ipaddress>66.119.199.39</ipaddress>
<author>Greg</author>
<link>a href=http://www.sapheron.org/http://www.sapheron.org//a</link>
<email>greg@sapheron.org</email>
<source></source>
<pubDate>1157623883.21</pubDate>
<description>The form is ugly, and I'm sure that the final display will be no better, but this should give me an idea of whether this works or not.</description>
</item>

I also noticed that the comments directory was put into the cgi directory where pyblosxom is actually called from. I wasn’t expecting that, and need to track down why it wasn’t being put alongside the data directory that is used for the entries. Once I get that in place, some level of security will probably have to be put in place.

With my impending shift of houses, I’m expecting that this will be put off until I get settled into the new house. Any complaints about the delay will have to wait until then.