january 26, 2025

i've been burning my own cds and dvds for a little while, just for fun

all the dvds are of longer youtube videos i like, i am entertained by owning such things physically, and it's fun making little custom menus for them

i rarely ever actually use them, though...i guess that's the downside of porting them to this format - it'll always be more convenient to just watch them on youtube.

i have been getting use out of the cds i've made though.

it was pretty infrequent for a while, the cd player i was using was very old and sick so it would constantly freeze the playback to think for a long time before continuing.

i wasn't entirely sure if the issue was with the cd player or the cds themselves, but then i finally dug up a different old player we had and that one works perfectly

so i can actually listen to them now

my biggest problem now is that i just don't have that many cds yet

downloading and preparing all the files can be tedious, and i tend to just...forget what albums i even like

so i don't know what to do next, and when i do i am often too exhausted to bother

so whenever i turn the player on i end up just playing the same few over and over

the main way i listen to music currently is just clicking between individual songs on the youtube recommendations bar in an adhd-fueled haze

i would like to move away from this eventually.

i've been collecting books for a while, specifically really outdated ones about computers, software, etc.

books that don't serve their intended purpose to anyone anymore because the software and systems they're covering stopped being used by much of anyone before i was even born

they're dirt cheap and always lining the shelves of thrift stores because no one wants them

before i started collecting these i would sometimes go onto the internet archive and look up software manuals and textbooks and similar things

i was mainly drawn in by entertaining infographics, a lot of times you will find images and captions that look very silly out of context

sometimes though the writing in them can be genuinely interesting or entertaining

it helps that i am very easily entertained, i think. very simple statements can make me smile if they are just worded in a way that i find funny

sometimes its a lot more than that though

there's one book i have that talks about objective-C, a language i didn't know existed prior to owning the book, that opens with a page talking about the origins of the image used on the cover of the book, an illustration of a man wearing a traditional croatian costume, and goes on to talk about traditional croatian fashion and why they chose the image. immediately after it goes back to talking about objective-C.

it is a genuinely fascinating experience opening these books

they're like little treasure chests that everyone overlooks

you never know what you're gonna get

this morning i picked a book from 1997 up off my shelf about setting up windows NT server 4.0, a subject that sounds very dry, but it was written in a very casual tone that made it engaging to read even if it holds no Functional relevance to me

on one page it was explaining noteworthy new features of NT 4.0 to keep track of, and then veered off in an unexpected direction with a quote that blindsided me:

"One of the best things about Microsoft people is the cute way that they are running scared all the time. They're the 800-pound gorilla of the of the entire industry right now, and they're convinced that if they stop running flat-out, they'll be besieged by a screaming horde of rabid monkeys.

And they're right."

like...dude, you don't get this shit anywhere else.

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