First day of the second semester tomorrow, and I will be hitting the ground running. I’m in the lab again, doing three things at once: writing up a brief one-page thesis proposal, preparing a first-semester portfolio for the midyear review on Tuesday, and finishing up the authoring of last semester’s interactive design class multimedia presentation.

That last one has been a major trial. The workstations in the MA Digital Lab at MICA all use Director 8, but the class’ files were copied to my workstation in 8.5.1 format, and the Director 8.5.1 installer is no longer available from Macromedia’s trial download section because they’ve removed it in favor of Director MX. Unfortunately, the MX version only works in OS X, but the workstations all use OS 9.

Next possibility: copy the class’ documents to my iBook so I can work on it there, where I’ve already installed the Director MX Trial app. Sure. It should be a snap to copy 2.7 GB of Director files and extra media onto 4 discs, if only the single CD-burner in the lab had not whacked out and coaster-ized* the two CD-RW’s I had left.

And I forgot my Firewire cable at home, so remote Target Disk Mode is not an option.

I’m now feeling rather cross.

* coaster-ized: An error in burning the CD partway through the writing process leaves you with an invalid CD-R/W which cannot be burned or erased anymore, and can now only be used as a coaster. And not even a good coaster, with that hole in the middle.