February 2, 2002

Have you ever really looked at the tray in your CD-ROM drive when it is open and there is not a disk in it? Look at the middle of it. Do you see a puka about 3 inches in diameter? I never really gave it much thought either until about a month ago when I was at a new clients house and was asked to assist with a screen saver they had gotten from someone else. The screen saver collection was on this really cute 3 inch diameter CD. This was the first time I had ever seen one of these small disks.

I was just about ready to say "we can't use this CD", when I happened to think about the puka in the middle of the CD drawer, so I opened up the drawer, and viola, it sat just perfectly in the puka and also worked fine. A couple of weeks ago I was at the local Sears store and saw a five pack of 3 inch CD-R disks. I was tempted to get some, thinking it would be a cutesy thing to give customers graphics files, etc. on a little disk, but I decided to wait until I got home and checked the Internet. You actually can find some CD-R disks and labels but you also need to check out the compatibility of your recorder with writing the disks. All CD-ROM drives and re-writables will read the disks, but only a select very few will write to them so unless you happen to have one of the recorders which works with them, you won't have any need to purchase them. One of the latest uses for these disks is in digital cameras and camcorders which save the graphics images on a CD.

I know this isn't the longest discussion forum we've had but thought you might be interested in this topic. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to pass them along to me by clicking .