Finished audiobook

The Forever War (Joe Haldeman) - unabridged, listened while working on the basement (my MP3 player has patching compound on it...)

Pretty good. Seemed predictable to me (I knew the substance of the ending at about 5-10% of the way through the book) but I think that may be because it has been a foundation for books that came after it (I'm guessing). Predictable doesn't necessarily mean bad, and doesn't, in this case. And there were some interesting faux-scientific developments.

Hardware issue

When the music stopped I wound up with the eMachines chassis, with a new mainboard, at my desk, running XP. That chassis had the Lite-On DVD-RW drive that came with it. I didn't worry about it too much, I figured that they've pretty much figured out DVD recorders by now.

Wrong. 3 coasters out of 5 burned discs.

So I pulled the TSSTcorp (Samsung) drive from the Compaq; it's burned hundreds of discs with zero coasters.

If I had to buy a new burner right now, it'd be Samsung. NEC is also a good burner, but the Samsung will read really f'd up discs that the NEC I had won't. Of course, NEC is shipping newer models, so I can't say for sure that's still true.