Today, I verified that my Creative CDRW8432 works fine with rewritable CDs. I burned about 500MB of mp3s on one Verbatim RW disc, erased it, and wrote a different bunch of other mp3s on it. In fact, the track I'm now listening to is The Last Night Of The World from the Miss Saigon soundtrack playing off the CD from my other/normal CD-ROM drive, so I figure it works. Incidentally, in a case of extreme paranoia, I also compared a 5.3MB mp3 file of one rendition of Axel F from Beverly Hills Cop and compared it byte for byte against the the original mp3 file on my hard disk. Perfect.
Previously, I had verified that the CD-R burning on the same drive went on reasonably well. Despite having mucked up the first couple of discs (making them unreadable), I have since ripped the tracks I like from about 50 CDs that I own, encoded to mp3 and burnt to CD-R.
The other thing that kept me occupied today was sorting out stamps. I found, to my surprise, that my mother had been collecting stamps for me in my absence. Faced with a BIG bunch of stamps to go through, I started soaking used stamps in water for the first time in several years. There are hundreds of these things. Quite a lot of which I did not have before. Going through my old stamp albums and rearranging things was a nostalgic experience. :-)
Also took the time to gather some of the stamps I have too many copies of and packaged them as gifts ... Australian stamps for my cousin in Melaka, Malaysian stamps for an old friend back in Sydney.
I'm happy today. Happy my CD-RW drive is working well, happy my stamps are mostly in order (mostly ... I discovered I missed half the stamps my mother left so I will have to come back for them) and happy that I've finally completed the forms that Liverpool Hospital sent me. I can now send them back post-haste on Monday.
I don't know if I should be looking forward to working life or not. hmm...