Learning to Fly: A Lesson in Parenting

I'm learning to fly,
but I ain't got wings
- Tom Petty

Yesterday we took the training wheels off Christopher's bike. 

He wobbled at first. We ran alongside, helping steady the bike and shouting encouragement.

Then suddenly he grasped the magic that lets a rider cancel gravity for a time and skim along, suspended over the pavement on two spinning wheels.

"Let go! Let go!" he yelled his face full of pride and joy, "I can do it!"

We let go.

And down the road he flew.

Max-ing out the Hard Drive

Hard drive space has been disappearing fast on our main home PC as we've been adding pics from the digital camera, movies from the DV camcorder and time-shifted TV video from the Leadtek Winfast card.  So when I saw our local CompUSA had a good deal on a Maxtor 250GB drive, I decided it was time to add a little breathing room and at the same time replace my old primary drive on the PC.

Physically installing the new hard drive wasn't a problem, but it took the included MaxBlast partition copying utility *forever* to copy all data off the old drive and onto the new one (I know, time to get a decent drive imaging program).  I also had to update my copy of atapi.sys so Windows XP could properly support such a large hard drive. None of it was hard, but it was all time-consuming and required a surprising amount of research to make sure I did the right things in the right order (for example a quick browse of the Maxtor documentation and Web produced conflicting directions on registry patches, bios updates, etc. that turned out not to apply to my setup).

Two days later and it's all working.  However, I agree with Steve at furrygoat.com that most non-technical people would probably find this process pretty daunting.  The SATA interface available for newer drives helps by eliminating some of the cabling and jumper issues, but seems to me that basic software tools for managing partitions should be part of Windows' disk management. Fdisk and xcopy are simply not enough these days to handle basic tasks like replacing a drive.

Building a Better Reading List - Part 2

Well, I ended up building an application in Access that let me include all the features I want for a book list.  It turned out to be trivial to include an option that let me search Amazon.com for book details like ISBN number right from within the Access form.  I also added an options to produce three version of the list (by title, by author and by category) and to automatically post them in batch via FTP (and/or drag and drop them from a local directory to the web site).  While not dynamic and not web-based, this quick-and-dirty solution works well for me.  I also decided to host all cover pictures from my site, which I think will make for faster viewing than relaying requests for pictures to Amazon.com.