Josh tames a PC (for a while, at least)

On Monday I grappled with a PC and came away from the battle victorious.

The problem computer belonged to Rusty. Our goal was to get digital photos he had on his home computer onto my computer. The easiest way to do that, I thought, would be to hook up a CD burner to his computer and burn a CD.

But in a typical illustration of why PCs are inferior to Macs, his home computer had trouble understanding “plug-n-play.” Rusty had trouble getting the drivers for the CD burner installed by himself, so in the morning Yoli and I went over to give it a try.

I installed the drivers successfully (after far too much work) but still the computer wouldn’t recognize the drive. I finally realized the problem was that I had to make sure the CD burner was turned on before the computer was turned on. It shouldn’t have had to be like that since the burner was USB, but it was the only way we could make the computer see the drive.

Anyway, after all that, we realized we had forgotten to bring a blank CD. So I wrote up instructions for Rusty so he could bring a blank CD and try to burn it when he came home for lunch.

After that we went to El Jordán for an hour or two. Yoli worked on their newsletter and I worked on their second brochure. We had lunch with Corina, Kitty, Kelly, and two moms with their kids. Yoli knew one of the moms. It was a great lunch (except for the onions in the pasta) but soon we had to get back to the seminary so we could go to work.

Work was progressing well, and today Rusty was able to spend more time with us, providing us with information we needed for the site. I may be able to complete the entire site before I leave, after all. We’ll see.

Rusty brought a CD-RW he thought he had burned, but he wasn’t sure. He thought it hadn’t taken long enough. we popped the CD into 3 different computers and it was clear that it hadn’t been burned. So, we decided to go back to Rusty’s immediately, and try to burn it on a CD-R.

Rusty’s wife and kids were surprised to see us (me for the second time) back. Well, I got to work on the PC and after about 15 minutes realized the CD burning software was not working right. Thankfully the CD burner driver included one other way for burning CD-RWs. I tried it, and it worked. Praise God. I’m very thankful for my Mac, which only requires me to plug in the drive, drag onto the CD icon the files I want to burn, and click “burn.”

After work, I was in a hurry to get back to the kitchen and make some dinner because we had worked a little late and the prayer meeting was going to start in about an hour. But a student flagged me down and asked for help with a computer. I was surprised. It was the first time a student has asked me for help with anything. He introduced me to a girl who could speak some English. She said she was having a problem with disks, but she was new to computers. I’m not convinced there was a problem, actually. Yoli arrived and the more she tried to explain the problem, the less we understood. When it became clear nothing was going to get fixed immeditely, I asked her to come see us in the office tomorrow, and she agreed to do so.

Dinner was quick but nice, and Yoli and I had nice discussion. After that, she left, and I went to the prayer meeting. Arnold Wry shared about the life of Joseph, and then there were a number of praise reports and prayer requests. Rusty pointed out to everyone that I would be leaving soon, so if anyone wanted to invite me to eat, they’d better do it soon. That surprised me! But Yoli has been somewhat disappointed that more people haven’t asked us out. I think it’s worked out okay, though. Tuesday night we’ll be going out with Dora and her boyfriend, who went with us to Samaipata on Sunday.

I got 3/4 of my laundry done. The rest had to wait until Tuesday morning. Other than that, all is well. The weather today was great because of rain and cloud cover throughout the day. Thank you God!