Has anybody tracked how the expression “Oh, the
humanity!” because a cliche cry of horror and dismay? I first heard it,
so far as I can recall, maybe five years ago, and I assumed that it was a
silly riff on “Oh, the inhumanity!” If anybody has any ideas
please e-mail me, as I’ve been curious about this for some time.

But any way, I’m crying “Oh, the humanity!” because Jane’s new computer
arrived today, and naturally it runs Windows XP, and I’m the guy who gets
to set it up.

For the last six or seven years, Jane’s been using a Gateway desktop
machine. It was bought as “our” computer, and was pretty ritzy when it
was new; at that time, it had the best graphics hardware I’d ever seen.
Jane used it for personal finance and her tax accounting work; I used it
for games, digital photography, and programming projects. We both used
it for the Internet. Then I got a laptop and started doing almost
everything but Internet access from it. And then three years later I
replaced it with another laptop, which I now have, and about six months
ago I started doing all of my Internet access from it. Meanwhile, Jane’s
had this crufty old desktop Windows 98 desktop with all sorts of garbage
installed on it, and lots of stability problems.

So, in the interests of conserving space, we ordered her a laptop,
and it arrived today.

Windows XP is better than I feared, in most ways; it’s certainly more
tractable than Windows ME. And the machine’s power blows mine out of the
water; it’s pretty sweet.

But there’s a bad apple in every barrel, and the bad apple showed up when
I started trying a copy my collection of digital photos (family
snapshots, mostly) from my laptop to hers…or, more precisely, from the
backup CDs I’ve been burning to her computer. Every so often it would
find a file on the CD that it simply wasn’t willing to read. I put the
same CD in my old machine, and was able to load the erring files…but the
picture was corrupted in each case. So either the CD was bad to begin
with, or the new laptop’s CD drive was damaging it. The new laptop’s
drive is a CDRW drive, so the latter is possible, but it seems really
unlikely. So I grabbed a couple more CDs I’d burned and checked those;
they had problems too. Ouch.

I ended up copying the pictures from one laptop to the other, 100 MB at a
time, swapping my external Zip drive back and forth.

All this left me with a question: was it the old drive, the new drive, or
the cheap CDR media I’d been using? So I decided on an experiment. I
took an unused CDR from the spindle, and burned a disk full of photos
using the new laptop’s CDRW drive. Then I attempted to copy the contents
back onto the new laptop’s hard disk. It didn’t work! The disk I
had just burned was unreadable. OK, says I; I found an unused
Verbatim-brand CDR I’d gotten ages ago, and tried it again. It got
about a third of the way through the disk, and hung there. I had to
reboot the machine just to extract the bad CD. Interesting, no?

That, by the way, is my primary complaint about the new machine and OS so
far–it doesn’t cope with CD problems very well. Of course, if the CD
drive itself is faulty then it’s not entirely Windows XP’s fault if it
doesn’t behave properly.

Now, the Verbatim discs are pretty old; they are 74 minute discs while the
current standard is 80 minutes; it’s possible (though scary) that they’ve
degraded over time. Also, some peculiar things had happened with the
first disc, and I hadn’t rebooted. I decided, I could easily afford to
destroy another disc, so I rebooted and tried it again.

It recorded just fine, so far as I could tell.

I put the new disc in my old machine, and copied its contents to the hard
disk. No problems–but then, the new machine had been noticing problems
the old one didn’t. So I put the new disc back in the new machine, and
again copied its contents to the hard disk. My hope was that it would
find a bad file, and that checking that file against the copy I’d just
made onto the old machine’s hard disk would reveal that the new laptop’s
drive was eating CDs. Then I’d know where I stood.

It worked perfectly.

So now I don’t know where I stand, and it’s getting late. More tomorrow,
probably.