Friday, October 26, 2007

Water, Water, Everywhere

Mother Nature must have read that article on drought conditions across America on Yahoo!News tonight, because it's REALLY coming down out there, and has been since about 1:30PM. Actually, no matter how dry it's gotten here, it's never been as bad as down in the Carolinas and Georgia, where they have major water restrictions. We've had several big storms and thunderstorms in the last few months.

It was an ultimately frustrating day. I went to Staples to buy CDs and inquire about jobs, and it turns out they just hired several people and don't need more. I'll apply to other stores, but the Audubon one is the closest and I was really hoping to find something nearby. Yet another dead end.

I bought CD-RWs to copy everything onto...and it turns out you can't edit on THEM either. Sigh. Until I can figure out something better, everything I need to edit is on the hard drive. I'm just afraid of losing work that dates back to college.

On the other hand, I dropped by FYE quick again before I hit Staples. Not only did they have It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown this time, but it turned out to be on sale for about $8.50, much to my surprise and delight, since this wasn't mentioned anywhere on the case or the shelves. As I told the girl behind the counter, Great Pumpkin is the closest I get to celebrating Halloween, since I hate horror movies. The Great Pumpkin DVD also comes with the rarely-seen Peanuts Election Day special You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown, a fun spoof of 70s-era politics and school elections.

3 comments:

Linda said...

Emma, does your laptop have a USB port? If so, buy a thumb drive, you can store on it AND edit the documents. It's just like another hard drive and equivalent of a large floppy drive.

Emma said...

Yes, it does. It's just a matter of being able to afford any more equipment after blowing 35 bucks on CDs it turns out I don't need. :p

Linda said...

Good grief, girl, where are you buying CD-ROMs? They had a pack of 100 in the Office Depot sale flyer yesterday for only $18.

Anyway, that stuff you are storing on CD-ROM? Do you want to actually EDIT it while it's ON the CD or are you just storing it in case the computer dies? You can't edit it on the CD, but if you're just storing it, no sweat. Say you have a story you abandoned for a while and is on the CD. Now you want to work on it. Copy it back to the hard drive. Go into "My Computer" and find the file you just copied back on your hard drive. Highlight it, then right click. All the way at the bottom of the dropdown menu it says "properties." Click on that. A menu comes up. All the way at the bottom of that menu should be two boxes. Since you had the file on CD-ROM the "read only" box will probably be checked. Uncheck it and click okay (or "apply" first, if that's an option, and then "okay").

Voila. Now you can edit the file.

If you have CD-RWs instead of CD-Rs, you SHOULD be able to go the file on the CD instead of on the hard disk, do the same thing and edit the file. But it's more stable editing on the hard drive.