Bought first DL-DVD Burner on Tuesday & it arrived.

The European Space Agency had success with Huygens which is a space probe that on Saturn’s Moon, Titan. The Huygens space craft is equipped with a microphone. Hagans sends its signal to the Saturn’s satellite, Cassaini, which spends a signal to Earth’s satellite. This is officially the ESA’s 3rd spacecraft, yet its biggest project. The Huygens space craft can photograph 20 meters of Titan’s terrain. Titan is the only moon with an atmosphere. The Huygens space craft will be the only time in our lifetime that scientists will get to see Titan up close. It may unravel secrets of the Milky Way Galaxy. Saturn is a really cold planet so the climate is -200 degrees Celsius. Saturn was only discovered 4 centuries ago by Galileo Galilei (a famous astronomer). ESA launched the Mars Express to Mars, and the Smart1 to orbit the moon which are their previous successes. Huygens will transmit data to Saturn’s first modern satellite, Cassini. Huygens-Cassini Spacecraft was the 3rd heaviest spacecraft (attached to a rocket) in history. During the Cassini journey, Cassini used it’s largest of 3 antennas to shield its instruments from the Sun’s gamma and ultra violet rays. ESA scientists will soon know if life existed on Titan…if ever. Titan has a thick atmosphere is rich in organic compounds. If life did exist on Titan, that means aliens lived on Titan in this solar system 100 million years ago.

Today, I’ve just ordered a state-of-the-art speed dual-layer DVD burner that’s twice as fast as the installed DVD burner now. For CDR burning it’s 48X burning speed. DVDR+ is 16X, DVDR- is 16x. The dual-layer speed is 4X. Well, dual layer DL-DVDR+ are 150% more expensive than DVDRs now. I have over 120 DVDRs to burn on because I got a 50 pack of them on Christmas day. It normally took me 4 minutes to burn a CDR, and 1 hr 15 minutes to burn a DVD. That time will soon be halved thanks reduced prices on new hardware.

When I looked on Tigerdirect.com, I saw that USB thumb drives have gone way down in price! The truth is I’ve never bought one for 10 months and already TD sells 1 GB thumb sticks for $80. Maybe I should wait 6 months a get a great deal on a 512 MB USB thumb stick? Yes, this is really great, but I chose to buy a DVD burner over a 1 GB USB thumb stick. A DVD stores 4.487 GB of data compared to 1.018 GB on flash memory. Flash memory is used in many digital cameras, it’s unmatched for lithium battery powered devices.

I’ve been being lazy for a long time – 5 days there about. It looks like I won’t have to worry about that Technical Writing class since I’m acing it! Tomorrow, I’ll drive to school, and work out issues in the book.

I found a unity that can rip PS2 music or video off the disc. This is possible since PS2 file systems can be seen via PC DVD-ROM. Cube Media Player 2 can do this by scanning the DVD and allow you to listen to it. If you have DivX or Xvid installed than there’s an efficient way to compress the video the user ripped for storage on CD or DVD. Cube Media Player Homepage . I haven’t got mine to work yet for whatever reason.

I have some fantastic news (can you sense the sarcasm?)! My custom (Athlon XP 2600) PC’s 120 GB Serial ATA HD went compooie. Before I had some bugs in the OS, and as a result the BIOS beeped at me during usage (which means the motherboard is giving CPU errors on my BIOS) so I try to boot Knoppix 3.6 LiveCD, and was able to burn some remaining Xvid movies from the hard drive onto CD-ROM. This event happened on February 01, 2004 before I installed the DVD +/- RW from my Dell PC into this computer’s IDE bay. Now, I have reason to believe when I deleted the partition, therefore, the bios won’t detect it. Luckily, I have a secondary 40GB Serial-ATA hard drive to work with until I can do a low-level format to reconstruct the master boot record thus readying the hard drive for OS re-installation.

I am happy that Iraqis got to elect a president for their country. There was some corruption in Saddam Hussein’s Dictatorship; now all they have to do is create a constriction and stable Democratic government that won’t be corrupted. Saddam was good at asking for money he never returned. We’ve fought a war for about 2 years there, and unlike most wars we’ve lost fewer American lives than any war except for Operation Desert Storm in 1991 which wasn’t really a War as it was clearing our way through the desert clearing the way to Baghdad. Now, Iraq can start importing oil to us which is what the USA is looking for, because OPEC is not happy with George W. Bush’s decision to reduce oil prices for all Americans. The point of selling oil is to make a profit which OPEC wants more of. It’s already $2 a gallon of gas here in Wisconsin.

This is Ian signing off.