watching grass grow

i generally like the few chinese music CDs i own. my "most wanted 2001" double album from sony music took badly to living in my CD wallet in the car some years back, they've never quite looked or played the same. hoping it was just a dirty surface, i decided to try resurrect them by giving the surfaces a bit of a clean/wash. inspired by a spot of googling for tips (and getting some conflicting advice!), i employed a tag-team combination of listerine mouth wash and soap resulting in two shiny and fairly promising looking discs. disc #1 passed a play test perfectly, so i was expecting similar results for disc #2. unfortunately looks were deceiving and this disc was causing all sorts of problems for the two drives i tested it on. another wash followed, with similar results. even EAC is struggling - would you classify 4.4% of one track (about 12 seconds of audio) read in 90-odd minutes a bit of a snail's pace? now i'm beginning to suspect that the damage goes deeper, and i may never be able to listen to these songs again. shucks...

so i actually spent a good part of my evening listeing to the best of electric light orchestra, while reading through the instruction manual for my new tough solar pathfinder watch by casio, which arrived in the mail today. it's been some two years since i first considered getting a tough solar watch, and thanks to ebay, this journey is over :) it's not actually a g-shock, which i think i would have ideally liked, but then again i don't exactly expose my watches to the sort of treatment that necessitates g-shock protection. i loved the solar power and the idea of the full auto light feature, but can see how the novelty (and perhaps usefulness?) of it can wear off very quickly :p the other features such as tidal graph, moon phase and bearing function (which i'll have to try out one day), which interesting, will probably see very little productive use also... anyways, i am satisfied with the purchase (only ~60% of what my original g-shock cost). only thing is, why can't the light stay on for more than ~1second? surely it couldn't have been that difficult to have the light stay on as long as you kept the light button depressed?? i think that would have been more useful than knowing tide times...