IzItCoolOrWhat?

I thoroughly enjoyed the 2-hour "Gadgets and Gizmos plus Websites" program held at Freeman Branch. In fact, it was one of the most interesting programs I've attended during the 14 years I've worked here. I even wish it had been twice as long.
In particular, the explanations of various gadgets that I'd heard of, but never really seen good definitions in my wanderings.

When it comes to collecting music I'm fairly "old-school," in that I have record albums, audiocassettes AND compact discs. I like burning my own music CD and movie DVDs, but I have separate stand-alone CD and DVD recording machines at home for that. I've been saving digital photos to CDs at home on the computer, but haven't been downloading music or videos. It's always seemed simpler to record from original sources rather than from on-line.
Maybe I'm just remembering years ago when music and videos played on computers generally suffered stop-and-starts, gaps, jumps and shutdowns during playback. [wait a minute, my work computer still suffers these problems sometimes]!

I am intrigued by the MP3 disc recording capacity of 200 songs. But when I'm burning my own compact discs part of the fun is anguishing over what songs I want and in what order. And I know how long that takes. I can't imagine how long it would to assemble and cut an MP3 disc or the amount of nursemaiding involved.
But I'd love to be able to archive such a large collection, if I could also copy from it and make backup copies. I wouldn't want to spend an enormous amount of time burning the perfect collection and than have it magnetically erased or damaged when I dropped it. [Especially since I know the agony that comes of a chewed audiotape, a scratched record album and a cracked CD].

I look forward to playing with photos and specialty web sites! I'm hoping that the Cnet game download site and the "old school gaming" site will provide some fun at home, and that the CD and DVD covers site will come in handy. I know that YouTube can be an enormous amount of fun, but I won't be doing any investigating of it at work since the site is blocked on my computer.
Ah, well.