When was the last time you burned a CD or DVD?

Time passes. In fact, 'Time Moves Pretty Fast' (as Ferris Beuller would have it). You don't always notice. Sometimes it takes an event, and it seems like stagnation is purged and things change very quickly all of a sudden. That is how it seems - I am not so sure if that is the case. Today - today I took a trip down memory lane. Something that was every day that is now ... the remarkable. Burning a CD (or to be pedantic a DVD+-RW).

We have no CD's or indeed DVD's these days. Every engineer has a little stock of USB sticks they wheel out when they need an image to install from or shift data by sneakernet.

I had an issue with a non LifeCycleManager (which uses the network and DHCP/FTP from BIOS) update to a Dell R510 yesterday. Burning the ISO to USB was great - it booted, started, failed - unable to mount the CD/DVD/USB ... the one it had booted from. This is not excellence. Furthermore, I quickly realised I had a 2GByte image - and CD's were only sub 700MByte - how quaint... that's like 5.25" floppies, or 3.5" ... it's just pointlessly small by current standards.

The solution is to burn it to spinny shiny media and boot from that apparently. Retro.

So... hell, what tool did I used to use? Nero? No, that was windows I am sure of it so pre 2000. Okay - what - erm erm erm - oh yes K3B. What do you mean it's not installed - this was an everyday tool once upon a time?

So yeah - here I am waiting for one of the only CD shaped disks we have these days to be overwritten at an astonishing 3x (DVD) speed of 4155KB/s (that's a whopping 4MBytes a second kid). Long enough indeed to put these thoughts down on paper/screen. Tick, tock. Never again will I curse USB2 speeds.

Goodbye, spinny optical disks - I think I mourned the loss of magneto-optical (minidisc) more than I miss your departure. Sorry mate.