How? http://www.childhungerendshere.com/Html/Index.html

ConAgra has taken made this cause a personal fight. Sadly, most of you have not bothered.

If you have an office job, you know what that means when it comes to lunch. Most days you cannot go out, so you are either bringing a sandwich or frozen dinner from home and eating at your desk. Sometimes you get that “yummy” alternative known as leftovers. We all know that the frozen dinner option tends to be “whatever was on sale this week” whether you like it or not.

Do you know how I know most of you can’t be bothered? Hundreds of thousands of these meals get sold in your state every week, including my state of Illinois. This has been going on for quite some time yet when I went to the site to key in some numbers, roughly 175,000 codes had been entered for Illinois. That means most of you are eating these products and tossing the codes away. It takes less than a minute to visit the site and enter the code. If you are at work, you don’t even pay for the Internet connection.

That my friends is simply un-American.

These days I don’t even bother buying other frozen or canned “fall-back lunches” that don’t have the code on them. I haven’t changed my lifestyle any. You’ll find that you don’t either. The only real difference is now the first site I visit at lunch is the site to enter my code. Why isn’t that your first site?

This post is part of a Virtual Book Tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Jo will be giving away a $50 Amazon GC to one randomly drawn commenter during the tour. Click the banner for the rest of her stops.

SCREENWRITING TECHNIQUES

for

NON-SCREENWRITING WRITERS

- Jo Sparkes

Screenwriting – be it short video scripts, television ads, or feature films – is my favorite type of writing. It’s writing with handcuffs – telling a story within very confined limits. For me it’s like solving a puzzle.

Those techniques spill over into other writing projects.

For example, the ‘one page a minute’ rule states that a page of a script equals a minute of film. If you consider your favorite two hour movie, imagine writing the entire story in less than 120 pages. With today’s scripts getting shorter, that two hour movie is down to 102 pages.

That’s characters defined, all dialogue, all action, the dramatic conclusion – everything — in 102 pages.

Screenwriting teaches brevity.

Naturally, a screenplay is only what an audience will see and hear. In a book you can wander through the character’s mind, understand his feelings, remember the past. Mourn for someone, wish for something.

A character can do all those things in a script as well. But the writer has to be clever in doing so, and concise in how it’s done. The hero can stroke a photograph of a smiling young girl, or pass a funeral urn on a mantle. He might watch two boys in a park arguing – and the audience glimpses a feeling.

It doesn’t tell you exactly what’s going on in his head – but then, aren’t you more intrigued? Don’t you want to know what’s going on? Exposition should be treated like a heavy spice. Sprinkle it carefully over the entire soup – don’t shove it down the throat at first bite.

A great film must engage the audience in the opening scene. It’s an amusement park ride, with emotion being the roller coaster cart. You want everyone on board, strapped in their seats. You can’t spend three chapters just setting up your story.

Dialogue is crucial. Every word counts.

Script dialogue is more like real speech, in that people don’t actually speak in full, grammatically correct sentences. And in real speech people ramble, take their time getting to the point. If they even have a point.

You don’t do that in film, because something is always happening. It may not be in the dialogue, but something is happening. Two people may converse calmly over dinner, but the camera reveals each aiming a gun beneath the table.

The key to dialogue is understanding that it is a strong part of character. Word choice, tone, meaning all define who uttered them. If the character stubs a toe, what does she say? Does her jaw squench shut, forcing her to keep it inside? Does a young priest drop the F word, and then hastily look  to see if anyone heard?

How much does the choice of curse words tell you about the character?

In film, characters change. Actually, it makes perfect sense for any good story. After all, if the journey was strong enough, important enough, shattering enough, frighting, thrilling, soul-searching enough, it MUST effect the person involved. If not, why should it effect anyone else?

And yes, there are exceptions to this rule. A person may fear to change, may refuse to change. But the audience must still recognize the choice. They must be effected. Think of Frodo and the hobbits returning to the Shire at the end of The Lord of the Rings. They’re safe, home and happy – yet there is that pause in the pub, where they realize they are not the same. They have been greatly changed by the experience. In Frodo, it’s a great weariness, a loss of innocence. In Sam it’s the courage to finally ask Rosie to dance.

Any event worth writing about has to have some effect on the reader.

Screenwriting certainly is a different animal – and relatively new to the old art of writing. But if you want a faster pace, a quicker punchline, or just some new trade tools to ply, give it a look.

About the Author:

A well-known Century City Producer once said that Jo Sparkes “writes some of the best dialogue I’ve read.” Not only are those words a compliment to Jo’s skills as a writer,but a true reflection of her commitment to her work.

She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Washington College, a small liberal arts college famous for its creative writing program. Years later, Jo renounced life in the corporate world to pursue her passion for writing.

Taking every class she could find, she had the good fortune to study with Robert Powell; a student of renowned writers and teachers Lew Hunter, and Richard Walter, head and heart of UCLA’s Screenwriting Program.

The culmination of those years was the short-film “The Image”, which she wrote and produced single-handedly. And in so doing, she became fascinated with the dynamics of collaboration on a project.

Since then, Jo hasn’t looked back.  Her body of work includes scripts for children’s live-action and animated television programs, a direct to video children’s DVD, television commercials and corporate videos. She’s been a feature writer on ReZoom.com and a contributing writer for the Arizona Sports Fans Network– where she was called their most popular writer, known for her humorous articles, player interviews and game coverage. Jo was unofficially the first to interview Emmitt Smith when he arrived in Arizona to play for the Cardinals.

She has adjunct taught at the Film School at Scottsdale Community College, has teamed with a producer on a low budget thriller, and a director on a new dramedy.  She went in front of the camera for a video, “Stepping Above Criticism”, capturing a popular talk with her students.

Her new book, FEEDBACK  HOW TO GIVE IT  HOW TO GET IT, shares her lessons learned with writers, and indeed everyone dealing with life’s criticism.

When not diligently perfecting her craft, Jo can be found exploring her new home of Portland, Oregon, along with her husband Ian and their dog Oscar.

Find the author online at:

http://www.feedbackthebook.com

http://josparkes.com/

 

Feedback … a kinder word for criticism, is an organic component to life.

When a toddler learns to walk, he falls. He screams, cries – and persists. What would happen to the human race if he gave up after a few bumps?

Before we could read self-help books, before we could understand a language and sit in a classroom, we learned by trial and error. “Feedback” is the natural teaching process. It’s how the creator set it up. It’s how the world actually works.

Here, at last, is a simple process for getting the most from all the feedback the world offers us.

This post is part of a Virtual Book Tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Please click the banner to see the other stops on this tour. The author will be giving away at least one (possibly more) hand-knitted by her replicas of the symbol of the IIC (an important institution in the book) to randomly drawn commenters during the tour.

Why All Writers are Secretly (or not so much) Schizophrenics

It’s only fair that you know, dear readers, but all writers have an ugly little secret. They’re trying to hide it, with varying levels of success, but, as you suspected, writers are all, in fact, closet schizophrenics.

Let’s look at the definition of schizophrenia, from that renowned, “infallible” bastion of knowledge, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia):

A person diagnosed with schizophrenia may experience hallucinations (most reported are hearing voices), delusions (often bizarre or persecutory in nature), and disorganized thinking and speech. The latter may range from loss of train of thought, to sentences only loosely connected in meaning, to incoherence known as word salad in severe cases. Social withdrawal, sloppiness of dress and hygiene, and loss of motivation and judgment are all common in schizophrenia. There is often an observable pattern of emotional difficulty, for example lack of responsiveness. Impairment in social cognition is associated with schizophrenia, as are symptoms of paranoia; social isolation commonly occurs.

Now we’ll take these one at a time:

A person diagnosed with schizophrenia may experience hallucinations (most reported are hearing voices)

Ask any (honest) author. They hear them. The author will write down what the voices are saying to give them some legitimacy, but regardless of the more respectable labels they might try to give them, hearing voices is a classic sign of mental disorder.

delusions (often bizarre or persecutory in nature)

Of grandeur. Of what is and isn’t possible. Of what really happened. Yep. Delusions. Of “I” and “me” being persecuted, and persecuting in such delicious, horrible ways… (this touches on psychopathic behavior, but that’s another day’s lesson.)

disorganized thinking and speech. The latter may range from loss of train of thought, to sentences only loosely connected in meaning, to incoherence known as word salad in severe cases.

If you’ve ever read a writer’s first draft, you know all about this.

Social withdrawal, sloppiness of dress and hygiene, and loss of motivation and judgment are all common in schizophrenia

We’re talking no shower and rationed pee breaks for days on end when facing a deadline or caught up in an epiphany. Friends, loved ones, spouses and children all cease to exist. There will be no clean dishes in the house.

There is often an observable pattern of emotional difficulty, for example lack of responsiveness. Impairment in social cognition is associated with schizophrenia, as are symptoms of paranoia; social isolation commonly occurs.

This is most commonly observed in the writer who is going through the querying stage of novel writing, or who is submitting short stories to magazines and contests. The unpredictable mood swings and agitated impatience are classic indicators of this phase.

To start healing you have to admit you have a problem. I’m standing up today to say “I’m Leah, and I’m a writer. And I know that I’m abso-fricking-lutely nuts.”

Let the healing begin.

How about you? Do you know a writer (or are you one) who shows any of these or other disturbing symptoms?

About the Author:

Leah Petersen lives in North Carolina. She does the day-job, wife, and mother thing, much like everyone else. She prides herself on being able to hold a book with her feet so she can knit while reading. She’s still working on knitting while writing.

FIGHTING GRAVITY is her first novel.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeahPetersen

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/LeahPetersenAuthor

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/leahpetersen

Google+: http://profiles.google.com/leahpetersen

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/lpetersenauthor/

When Jacob Dawes is Selected for the Imperial Intellectual Complex as a child, he’s catapulted from the poverty-stricken slums of his birth into a world where his status as an unclass is something no one can forget, or forgive. His growing scientific renown draws the attention of the emperor, a young man Jacob’s own age, and they find themselves drawn to each other in an unlikely, and ill-advised relationship. Jacob may have won the emperor’s heart, but it’s no protection when he’s accused of treason. And fighting his own execution would mean betraying the man he loves.

I have blogged about this for sites which paid me before, but, many of you simply haven’t caught on. Today I was poking around in the new qt-dev forums and found the following:

http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/15771/

Yes, that’s correct, Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) is hiring Qt developers in Germany to work on both their BlackBerry platform and on QNX. Qt now officially rules the smart phone world. Development for Andriod and Apple platforms already exists and Qt consultants who have worked on any smart phone platform are billing out at around $140/hr because they are scarce. High wages will cause people to purchase books, learn the skills and start making a better living.

Be honest. If you are a new developer just coming out of school, are you willing to work for $10/day? That’s the wage class all new Windows developers are competing with. It doesn’t matter that the code turned out by the $10/day workers is just as buggy (is it possible to be buggier?) than Microsoft code, publicly traded corporations have now demanded all U.S. workers accept $10/day as a wage or see their IT jobs sent to third world countries no matter what the national security implications are. (Read “Infinite Exposure” for information there.)

It doesn’t matter that it is illegal to post job openings with wage offerings below what you can legally pay an H1-B worker, companies are doing it with abandonment. They are also using vendor management systems which allow them to block any submissions above that wage rate then using the lack of applicants as a justification for bringing in visa workers. All of it is completely illegal, but as long as the Department of Labor continues behaving like a group of relatives of elected officials and large campaign contributors, nothing will be done about it.

So, that leaves IT students looking for markets which actually pay. Microsoft ain’t that market. Today, Qt is that market. It is being used at companies ranging from John Deere (NYSE:DE) to Research in Motion. It is being used by trading systems companies and Open Source maintainers. Qt skills allow you as a developer to work for any company on most platforms. There is even an unofficial port of Qt for OpenVMS. (I have not heard of a port for IBM mainframes so that may be the next big software name to spiral downward.

One entry on my “to-do” list for this weekend was to resurrect a pair of older machines so they could both be running BOINC. I have been running BOINC on my main machine off and on for years. The off happened because BOINC kept not working for OpenSuSE. The on happened when I regrettably tried yet another broken Ubuntu release.

Setting up the first machine was simple enough. It was an incredibly old Dell which had an existing Windows XP license on it. While I’m not a fan of Windows, I simply cleaned the other things off the box and downloaded BOINC for Windows. After a few minutes of configuration and attaching to projects it was on its way.

I spent three to five hours surfing the Web and trying things to get Puppy Linux to work. It seems that much older releases of Puppy Linux actually came with a BOINC Pet but 3.5.x does not. Packages which are built specifically for Puppy have PET or one other extension which escapes me, but for a hard disk installation you really want to find Pet. Anything packaged in a PET works great with the installer. If you are used to the clean and easy process SuSE has with dependencies, then you are used to this. Sadly, not everything listed in the Puppy repositories is a PET. They had an Opera package which was not and it had dependency issues after install.

I poked around for a long time trying to solve the various issues. The reason it is difficult for me to tell you how long is due to the tangent this search lead me on. It seems that everyone is looking for an extremely lightweight Linux distro which runs BOINC on older machines. Puppy is definitely light weight. They even bundle some very old and weak default packages to keep the CD less than full. The browser on the CD is Sea Monkey instead of the newer Mozilla Firefox. The word processor is Abi Word instead of the heavier LibreOffice. The Grub is a very old blue text interface version rather than the newer grubs bundled with other Linux distros.

Many of the newer packages are available in the repositories. After you install Puppy you can easily install these newer products if you need them. Puppy (and most likely many of the other lesser known Linux distros) seems to really be missing the boat or more accurately, the niche. There are many arguments about the percentage of people who simply run Puppy from the CD and store whatever document they need on a thumb drive. There are still more percentages offered up as to the number of people who put a complete Puppy install on a thumb drive to take with them (not a bad idea now that most hotels have business centers with computers).

One thing nobody offers percentages for, yet I found large numbers of queries (with much larger read counts) about is the best “lite” Linux to run BOINC. People have stock piles of perfectly working older computers they never traded off. More importantly, people now think it is cool to be part of the solution to cancer or clean water or climate prediction or any of the hundreds of other projects using BOINC directly or indirectly as part of IBM World Community Grid. BOINC isn’t just for SETI anymore. You don’t have to be a Star Trek fan to want to be a part of it.

There are three main hurdles stopping BOINC from getting trillions of computing cycles per day.

1. A “lite” and fast 32-bit Linux bundled with BOINC on an installable CD (or downloadable ISO) for aged hardware.
2. A “lite” and fast 64-bit Alpha Linux CD bundled with BOINC client for use on DEC Alpha machines
3. A 64-bit BOINC client for OpenVMS Alpha machines.

The powers that be at Puppy, perhaps in partnership with On-Disk, should take it upon themselves to create the 32-bit BOINC Linux CD. Puppy could then focus on cleaning up their installation process so a user didn’t have to know how to manually partition their disk.

Alpha machines are another story. There are tens of thousands of them out there in hobbyist hands. Sometimes we power them off for months at a time because we are done with the VMS work we are doing. In the world before BOINC, DEC Alpha machines running the SETI client in background at priority zero smoked entire teams of PC users with throughput. Gentoo still has an Alpha port, but no word on BOINC client. A VMS based BOINC client appears to be a Unicorn due to some horrible things done in both the Linux/Gnu build environments and the actual C source code for BOINC.

Eventually I installed OpenSuSE 12.1 on the second machine and pulled down a lot of updates to get it running BOINC.  There are now two more machines working to cure cancer, improve water quality, and analyze climate change, but, a third kick-ass machine could be outrunning them all.

Years ago, long before I was born, the bulk of this country had some direct tie to agriculture. Even during the horrible days when “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was a reality long before it became a song, people grew many of their own vegetables, raised chickens, and bartered with local farmers for other goods. When older farmers wanted to cash in and they didn’t have children to take over the land, they would enter 50/50 rental agreements with one or more of their neighbors so they knew the land would be well tended.

Around 40 years ago, that changed in a big way. People with the most worthless degree in the world, an MBA, started getting involved with agriculture. Trust funds, hedge funds, and life insurance companies actually passed the tipping point before I was old enough to drive. Back when Mutual of Omaha was putting “Wild Kingdom” on the air, they were documented to be the largest single owner of farmland in the United States.

With the MBAs came worthless management tactics, the most common of which was killing off your future to get a pay day now. We call it the Visa/MasterCard mentality. They went to the zero risk model of charging cash rent and not caring about how the land was tended as long as they got paid $300-$400 per acre each year. The fact that even the best farm land couldn’t survive even five years of that kind of strip mining didn’t matter to them, they were only worried about the numbers for this quarter.

All of the other areas of agriculture started getting these same worthless tactics applied as the pressure to please Wall Street this quarter became far more important than being alive next quarter. It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this that the family farm is being forced into extinction by people who will gladly sell you eggs with diseases and tainted meat rather than disappoint Wall Street.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38741401/ns/health-food_safety/t/recall-expands-more-half-billion-eggs/#.T1J7uSubnjY

http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=0+1275+2009&aid=3058

What will surprise you is that the lifestyle of the Mitt Romney’s of the world is why we have the farm safety net insurance. If anything dimples the crop even a little bit, Mitt Romney, his hedge fund, trust funds companies he may hold interest in, insurance companies he may own stock in along with the shares of John Deere, DOW, Bayer, and countless other corporations with ag divisions won’t make their numbers next year. Why? Because all of the farmers who were paying $300-$400/acre just for the right to farm on top of all the exorbitant prices John Deere charges for equipment, Pioneer charges for seed, DOW charges for chemicals, etc.

You see Mr. Romney, your baker friend who can bet $10,000 on a whim with you doesn’t have 3/4 of the world reaching their hand into his pocket like the American farmer. Instead, both you and your baker friend are reaching your hand into the same pocket everybody else is so you had best watch what you say about taking away this insurance lest you end up actually having to work for a living.

“Let them eat cake!” didn’t prove to be a good policy for the last ruling class associated with the statement.

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Today, when my car battery is starting to fail, I can use a booster pack, bump my ride to a start, drive to the local auto parts store and, if I bought the right kind of ride, swap out the battery without having to disassemble the entire passenger side wheel well and drive assembly to put in a fresh five or seven year battery. At the time I buy the battery, there is a core charge which I get back when I return my dead battery for recycling.

I’ve seen the pictures of those Lithium (or other high end material) batteries for hybrid and electric cars. Swapping those things out is not a shade tree mechanic job. I also haven’t read much about recycling programs for them. Since most Lithium based watch and hearing aid batteries end up in a land fill instead of a recycling program, I’m kind of worried about where the batteries these supposedly “eco-friendly” cars will end up. I mean, I walk into any OfficeMax (NYSE:OMX) and there is generally a big display near the front about dropping off laptop/cell phone/other batteries for recycling, but I don’t see that when I walk into AutoZone (NYSE:AZO). That fear seems to be backed up by consumer guide articles like this:

http://consumerguideauto.howstuffworks.com/hybrid-batteries-none-the-worse-for-wear-cga.htm

I’m a firm believer that at least one vehicle I own should get at least 40 MPG, I just don’t want to create a bigger ecological problem. I mean, I firmly believe that once we get “big oil” out of the picture, Detroit will start cranking out rides that burn pure ethynol and Volvo (OTC:VOLVY) will be allowed to sell Bi-Fuel cars here. Before long we will all be back to driving SUVs that we really love because America can grow more grain than anyone and has more methane (both below ground and generated by feed lots) than any other country, but, that’s a blog for a different time.

Here’s the list my research turned up. If it isn’t all inclusive then the manufacturer should do a better job getting their MPG listed on the Web.

Note: Nearly every manufacturer boosted their miles by using either super low rolling resistance tires or under carriage panels to seal up the car, some used both. Speaking as someone who changes their own oil, those panels tend to make oil changes a real PITA and you will probably pay a higher price at the oil change place if they have to remove one just go get to the filter.

Note 2: “Special low rolling resistance tires” are expensive. When you wheel into Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) and have them put on the cheapest tires they have, you are going to cut your mileage in half. Here is a nice test someone did with a Toyota Prius and various LRR (Low Rolling Resistance) replacement tires. Even among LRR tires there was nearly a 4MPG difference. So, imagine just how bad your mileage is going to suffer when you slap on those $39 specials instead of the $190 Michelin LRR tires.

Here’s the list of what I found. No, 39MPG did not qualify as 40. If you didn’t make it to 40MPG, you didn’t get on the list.

http://beta.fool.com/seasonedgeek/2012/01/17/2012-year-netflix-became-memory/915/

The financial analysts and Wall Street darling chasers beat upon me for that post. Why they had charts and graphs using the numbers sere sizzled up by the finest former Enron accountants proving this new business model was a license to print money. Yesterday, the first of several shoes dropped.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2012/02/21/comcast-launches-streaming-service-netflix-shares-fall/

Netflix will be in or near bankruptcy by the end of the year. They simply cannot get back into the video by mail business in any significant manner after honking off over 600,000 customers who all went out and told their friends. For better or worse, Block Buster will own the video by mail market segment going forward.

Here is what comes next. Two more streaming video competitors will enter the market before year end. Both will already have their own video on demand business, they simply need to change from per movie to monthly billing, not a big deal. One will be incredibly smart. They will partner with Subway and sell “Five Dollar Month-long” cards at the counter. They will also sell subscriptions via the Internet, but, picking up your $5 Month-long while picking up your $5 foot-long will simply be too catchy for most Americans to avoid.

The reality is that licensed financial analysts are the worst people in the world to get investing advice from. These people look only at the numbers fry cooked for Wall Street consumption. Nearly every one of them said Subway would go out of business with the $5 foot-long. Subway is now the largest fast food chain in America by store count and the $5 foot-long is more deeply engrained in societal memory than the Big Mac.

Oh, the second company? They will come to market late and try to compete completely on price. I expect they will go the Magic Jack route of $20/year, but, like Magic Jack, it will be a low end service.

Every one of these all-you-can-eat streaming video places will be forced to lose money. Hollywood film investors will not keep eating the lost rental revenues. Expect a significant shift in how DVDs roll out. The on-line services charging per movie fees will continue to get movies first because Hollywood gets a cut of each rental. Video by mail will get them soon after. DVDs will go on sale at least a month before the all-you-can-eat-flat-monthly-fee services get them. This change will be gradual, but it will happen.

All of the cable and satellite providers have some kind of $5-N per movie rental business. Adding in a group of channels for flat monthly fee subscribers isn’t difficult and the movies won’t cost them much, if anything more. The high end service already paid the fees due Hollywood. The flat fee services will only compete with the “premium” movie channels. Those channels have all gotten out of the Hollywood movie business to one degree or another. HBO, STARS, ShowTime, etc. They all have their own original content shows and make their own movies which they feed back into the video rental business.

Netflix will be gone soon, but they will have changed the pricing and number of movie services provided by those who actually own the bandwidth. Block Buster will continue to grow its video by mail business while shrinking its brick & mortar presence until it hits a happy balance. It will also get a little coin by providing content to Dish or as a thank you from Dish due to the bargaining power Block Buster provides.

Today’s product engineers are really a clueless lot.  None of them take into account existing practices and infrastructures when designing a new toy.  Yes, it is all well and good to make a USB flash drive key ring, but if you want your new media to sell in large quantities it needs to find a niche in the backup market.  Engineers of yesteryear knew these things.

First we had the 5 ¼ inch floppy which replaced the unwieldy 8 inch floppy.  Rather than replace it, most engineers found ways to double its capacity until it reached 1.2Meg.

IBM fought an up-hill battle when they introduced 720K 3.5 inch floppies.  We already had 1.2Meg floppy drives in our machines combined with a stack of disks and multi-drawer floppy organizers capable of holding a hundred or more floppies per drawer.  Yes the 3.5 inch had a hard case and could fit in most suit shirt pockets, but they didn’t hold as much.  Then IBM pushed the storage capacity to 1.44Meg.  The storage increase combined with the introduction of laptops pushed the 3.5 inch floppy into the world.  Floppy organizers and carrying cases appeared for the new media size.

Most people were neither patient enough nor rich enough to use tape as their primary backup.  The tape drives which could be purchased for under $400 were ice-melting-in-winter slow and typically only held 120Meg.  Later they boosted capacity to a claimed 250Meg, but, that was only if things being backed up weren’t already compressed.

The 5 ¼ floppy people were a bit pissed with all of this.  They went off and talked to the people who were designing the CD-ROM and guess what?  The media for the CD-ROM just happened to be designed so people could re-use all of those 5 ¼ media organizers and transport cases.  Early versions were read only, but provided software vendors with a method of shipping a single media unit instead of boxes of floppies.

Notebook users still wanted a convenient method of backing things up.  Low and behold the LS-120 appeared on the market and just happened to be the exact same size as the original 3.5 inch floppy.  In fact, you could read and write those 3.5 inch floppies in the same drive so it became the defacto standard drive in laptops.  Later models could store 240Meg on a single disk.  All of the same 3.5 inch floppy containers worked for these new disks so adoption was quick.

The CD crowd came out with both CD-R for the regular end user and CD-RW for those wanting to be just a bit kinder to the environment.  Yes, CD-R media sells in spindles of a hundred for $5 if you shop around, but landfills are only so deep.  Neither of these media really solved the “working backup” problem.  They were supposed to solve the long term backup problem until studies showed the media only retained its data for about five years unless you purchased the very expensive “archival quality” version of the disks.  Still, very few items last the 7-12 years which could be required either in court or by the IRS.

Rotating project backup really doesn’t have a better solution than the LS-120 today.  Yes, many people are just alternating between two USB hard drive enclosures and holding their breath, but, that’s not good.  Hard drives made today are not of the same quality they were during the peak of SCSI server drives.  Back then a 5 year MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) could be trusted.  Today you find out IDE and SATA drives achieve their 5 year MTBF by putting in fine print the drive is to remain in power saver mode 70-80% of the time.  SAN administrators have to continually point this out to MBAs when explaining the cost of a 1TB SCSI based SAN vs. the sub $100 1TB SATA drive.

Many people work as writers, business analysts, technical architects, etc.  We all have one thing in common.  The bulk of what we create for each project can easily fit inside a 120Meg boundary.  Usually we can backup multiple projects onto these media and keep a rotating set of backup media on our desk with special copies stored at a friend’s house or some other off-site location.  The media is both cheap and durable.  It is fast enough for backup purposes and supported by most Linux and Windows versions.  To top it all off, most of us have something which looks quite nice to store the media in.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/92222446/tambour-teak-storage-box?ref=sr_gallery_2&sref=&ga_search_submit=&ga_search_query=roll+top+disk&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_ship_to=US&ga_search_type=all&ga_facet=

Until somebody comes up with something nice that will let you keep a rotating set of backups organized for the other forms of media trying to fill this niche, the LS-120 will continue to have an active market.

This one needed to have a DOS boot partition as well as OpenSuSE because I might get back into doing some Zinc work later this year.  I dutifly obtained MS-DOS 7.10 GNU licensed DOS and FreeDOS 1.1.  After installing MS-DOS, then FreeDOS, I was horribly upset with FreeDOS.  It had way more problems than the previous version AND most of the boot software now displayed MS-DOS 7.1 logos.  The same appeared to be true with both the DRDOS enhancement project and NXDOS.

Of course, I made the grand assumption that my FAT-32 DRIVE_D partition would be accessible by either DOS.  Ever since I started using OS/2 over a decade ago I had the habit of keeping either a FAT-16 or FAT-32 DRIVE_D partition so I could exchange files with any other OS on my machine.  There was a time when I had (and needed) more than three operating systems on the machine due to the work I was doing at the time.  The FAT logical drive in an extended partition allowed me to quickly exchange data.  This was long before we had thumb drives.  You should also know that USB devices and DOS don’t have the magic they do with GUI systems.

Insult was added to injury when I booted MS-DOS 7.1.  (FreeDOS once again had issues booting under Grub.)  The “extended partition” created by the OpenSuSE installer has a type of 69 which is completely unrecognized by MS-DOS.  This lead me to delete the FreeDOS partition and manually move the DRIVE_D logical drive to a physical primary partition.  Of course I also decided to expand two other logical drives to utilize the space once consumed by DRIVE_D.  I used the Gnome Partition tool on Parted Magic 6.7 CD.  I knew I should have just backed things up, deleted, then restored, but, I was getting ready to leave so opted to let this run all night, which is exactly how long it took.

I was the good little soldier.  I booted recovery and dumped the information to manually edit fstab.

linux-pus9:/home/roland # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00028bf5

Partition table entries are not in disk order

I also completely ignored the last line in green.  Very carefully I changed all of the FSTAB entries to match this output.  When I rebooted my home was gone.  It was there under a different “home” location, just not the one the boot pointed to.

Much frustration and head scratching occurred, then I noticed this:

Yast expert partitioner

The output from fdisk has the partitions in the wrong order.  My books partition was being mounted as /home, and several other things were hosed.  Another careful edit session followed by a reboot made things all better.