Everything Right Is Wrong Again

I've been ripping my CD collection, gradually, onto my hard drive. I usually just stick one in to rip just before I go upstairs. Over the last couple of days, though, I'd keep coming back downstairs to find the computer locked up or BSODing. When I tried it again, I confirmed my suspicion: disk problems. Hard disk, that is.

A few months ago when I screwed up my file allocation table and such, it was because I ran a scandisk because of disk access problems. Because of the partitioning of the disk since then, it's probably just now reaching those bad sectors again. Which means it's probably time to run a scandisk. I was hoping that the reformat would've marked the bad sectors, but apparently not. I've had plenty of experience in the past with bad sectors that only manifest when you actually try to write to them, and disk scans miss them entirely unless there's a file on top of them.

I've learned my lesson, though. The problems last time were mostly due to my not realizing that the overlay code I was using would result in spurious "Multiple copies of FAT detected" errors. Since it's now partitioned instead, the problem should not remanifest. But now I'm paranoid, so I'm backing up the whole thing. Which may take a while. I haven't decided whether I'll actually copy the ripped MP3 files onto CD or not; in some ways, the backup for those is the CDs themselves, but ripping them takes a long time, and an MP3 CD can hold more than a music CD. We'll see how many I have left over, I guess.

Baby, The Stars Shine Bright

After running across a reference to it on Wikipedia, I've started playing Noctis. It sounds like the kind of game I'd really like--you explore the galaxy, discovering new stars and planets, and naming them. No hostile aliens, no dangers to speak of. Quite frankly, I like naming things more than I like fighting. On the other hand, the interface(which is first-person, designed to resemble the inside of the space suit with a heads-up display)took a bit of getting used to, though I think I've figured it out now. And I managed to find an unnamed Earthlike planet, too.

You can share your database with a community of other players, though you can't have duplicate names. There's thousands of stars, at least, in the database, so it doesn't look like there'll be too much competition. It's a DOS program, still, but apparently there is a newer version in the works.

One arbitrary restriction on naming is that you're not allowed to name stars and planets over stars and planets in our galaxy. Because you don't play a human character, and you're not in our galaxy. However, there's no restriction on naming stars and planets after, say, countries on Earth, or characters from Tolkien, despite the unlikelihood of Tolkien making it to another galaxy, even in translation. But whatever. (Maybe it would be okay to have a planet named Rigel orbiting the star Jupiter?)

Still, I am, of course, at no loss for names. The Earthlike planet I found is actually Maricela, a moon of the gas giant Luba orbiting the star Palomar.

Oh, and you can actually land on the planets. Many of them are dead boring, of course, but some of them have quartz surfaces which are quite pretty--probably generated fractally and tiled in triangles. When I landed on the Earthlike one, it was raining(with lightning, though no thunder because there's no sound in the game), and there were definitely trees. Apparently there's animal life somewhere around, too. Should be fun.