I refuse to believe that any day that begins with finding your dice, can be a bad day. Those blurry bits of plastic saw me through a lot of hard times. Not long ago, I’d have sat right down, pulled out a clean character sheet and rolled up an adventurer. When I found these while packing this morning, my first thought was: I gotta put these in my blog!
Our gaming club at the University of New Hampshire was a pretty much one-to-one correspondence to the computer geeks. Other gamers called each other by their characters; we called each other by handles we used on the universitie’s mainframes.
I was Albatross. There was Nomad, Mediator, Kirin, Ridgerunner, Penguin (hugs future spouse), Ruler… not even sure if I knew all their real names. Didn’t matter. Even though we all saw each other in real life every day; it was by our time online that we named ourselves.
Those dice above weren’t the ones I used at UNH. Those soft-plastic ones wore out long ago (but I would never have thrown them away; I wonder where they are now? In my old TRAVELLER game box?). I used these to run my own games, over the Usenet, in the 80s.
Moving is an adventure. A really slow one. I have so much packing. I have so many CDs. My daughter keeps her CDs in a huge album, tosses the cases. I thought that was a wonderful idea, but heck, why not rip EVERY ONE OF FOUR HUNDRED CDS to Baphomet? My little pet demon computer can keep them safe, and someday feed them to my next computer, which will control my living room. Rip them, put the original CDs in giant albums in case the RIAA comes by demanding proof of ownership, and forget them.
Ripping these CDs takes from about five to fifteen minutes, depending upon the disk. The nice friendly GUI program that rips CDs plainly hates my CD drive, so I use a Perl script (RipIt) front end to cdparanoia which rips and tags the music automatically. Well, I added a bit to automatically eject the CD when it has been ripped.
The CD drive is 56x. Shouldn’t it rip a 72 minute CD in just over a minute?
But cdparanoia can read severely damaged disks. Most of the time. One Debussy disk it worked on twelve minutes before it gave up. But others that spent a little less time stuck behind bookcases came out fine.
Anyway. Some of this music I haven’t so much as thought about in years. Echolyn‘s Pink Floyd-esque sounds were nice to find once more. Music To Install Windows 98 By? Classic stuff.
