This weekend was a fun one. On Saturday, I went shopping for a DVD+R/RW and had Indian Fud for lunch. That evening, I went to a birthday party for a co-worker (though I didn’t know it was a birthday party) where they had t-bone steaks for everyone. Good eats! Sunday was church at the UU where dad sometimes preaches (and he preached about Progressive Churches) and then home for Diablo! judiang, indefatigable42 and I played for a couple of hours, but then 42 had to get ready for a party that night. Then Judi and I played for many more hours and audioboy was able to join us by the end of the evening. It was great doing the marathon and we’re hoping to get another one together when we can get even more people involved.

So, back to the DVD+R/RW… I first went to a “mom & pop” computer store (or maybe “local geek-owned” is a better description) and they had some Lite-On DVD+R/RW drives for $75. I then went to Best Buy to see what they had available and noticed that Double Layer drives are now available. Hmmm, I pondered… If I do get one, I should shoot for a more adaptable model. CompUSA was also nearby, so I popped in there and was astonished to see their prices were less than Best Buy’s! That was a shocker to me. I ended up getting a Memorex DVD+/-R/RW drive which comes with Nero’s software and is Double Layer compatible. Go me!

After watching my poor old Ghoul Lashed tapes, I felt I should rescue them by converting to DVD, and now I’ve got the technology to do so. Well, sort of. I have the capability – TV capture card & DVD recorder… But things aren’t working quite right yet. My poor capture card hasn’t been able to capture video in awhile (but I haven’t really needed it to). And after I installed the DVD+R drive, I discovered that my ASPI wasn’t set right. Heck, I’ve no idea what ASPI is! But Nero complained about it and things weren’t working right. I was able to make back-up DVDs, at least, so my goal is to reinstall Winders (yes, I’m still using Win98SE) and see if I can get the video capture and DVD recording to work. If I can’t get that to work, yes, I’ll break down and install WinXP Pro instead. *sigh*

In case things don’t work right in my upgrade, I do have something to cheer me up. My DVDs which I ordered from amazon.co arrived today – woohoo! More Black Books! Spaced! Porridge! Sylv in Still Game! Yay!