Television, computers, data, and monitor challenges
When we left in 2007, Chelsea and I cleaned off our hard drives (mostly) and put the data on two 40GB external drives (they weren’t big enough). We came back in 2008 for a few months and started using our computers again, rather than use my laptop. In the wildness of those days – packing frantically and getting ready to leave again, we left some data on each of our hard drives, mostly music and photos.
In our absence Alex’s computer died so he started using Chelsea’s. Then hers died so he used mine, but mine died immediately. He was forced to head back to Computers Direct and get his cleaned up.
When we returned for this break, Chelsea’s and my two computers were dead, and both our monitors were gone – Alex had gone through his monitor and one of ours, and had appropriated the last remaining monitor for his own use. To make matters worse, his computer died within weeks of our return.
It took awhile, but we finally got the computers straightened out. My motherboard had died, so Computers Direct put my hard drive into Chelsea’s computer and cleaned up her hard drive, giving us a two-for-one situation. Alex got his computer cleaned up as well, but a few months later.
Sounds complicated? That isn’t the half of it. Alex ended up with a great deal of his movies and music on three separate hard drives on two separate computers, and we were dying to get access to our music and photos on the “hybrid” computer (ours) he used until his was cleaned up. Arrgghh….
Meanwhile our DVD player died (it lived a noble life), so we started using Alex’s PlayStation 3 as a DVD player. (I now know how to use game controllers!) Losing the DVD player finally got us motivated to get Chelsea’s laptop set up to use as a DVD player, too – we are now set with the right cords, so we can use almost any television we come across on our trip as a screen to watch movies from our laptop.
Then came the recent arrival of Alex’s new 32” Toshiba high definition flat screen television he won as reward for three months of top sales at the Ale House. Pretty impressive reward, huh? He can’t figure out what to do with it in his room, so Chelsea and I are utterly enjoying the new TV till Alex gets organized and moves it.
But back to the data. Unwilling to keep up with this data merry-go-round, Chelsea and I bought a 640 GB Toshiba external portable drive (incredible price at Costco); and convinced Alex to buy an HP 1 terabyte external drive. By this point Alex didn’t need much convincing.
One final thing remained to be solved – a monitor for us. I gave Alex a choice – use the new television as a monitor, or give me the money to get a monitor from Craigslist. He chose to replace ours, and in less than three hours we had found a 20” flat screen Acer monitor on Craigslist, borrowed Tyler’s car, and made the thirty-four-mile round trip to get it.
It’s been quite a process moving everything to the right locations, but we are nearly finished with that step. We are overjoyed to have all our old photos and music; now I have the unenviable task of sorting and organizing thousands of photos and songs.
After using a fourteen inch laptop for the last three years, it’s absolute heaven to have a huge monitor, a super fast PC, and fast access DSL.
Music
Back in my early days of using MP3 players, I bought a Sony Walkman 40GB player. I loved the player, so I enthusiastically “ripped” all my CDs into the Sony SonicStage program. Much to my dismay and outrage a few years ago, I realized that I can now no longer play any of that music in any other player.
Chelsea loves her music, but in the big rush to get out the door in 2007, she left some of her music behind. We did have some on my computer, unfortunately locked behind the Sony DRM. It’s been a mess for years.
We finally gave up on letting our upset get the best of us. Chelsea unpacked our music CDs and spent an eternity ripping each one of our albums over again, being careful to put them into the standard MP3 format. Some of our most-loved CDs, like the ones Alex made us years ago, have been lost – they are only available on my Sony program.
The project was really a time sink, but it’s finally done. Now we are left with trying to organize the music into mine-yours-ours categories and get it in all the right folders on our new Toshiba external drive.
Music is a great comfort to us on the road, so it feels well worth the awful amount of time we’ve had to spend getting this straightened out. I’m still sighing deeply, though, at the thought of having to tackle the remaining step of organizing all of it.