Today is a memorable day, not because of any sales or "Black Friday" craziness, but because I finally used up the entire spindle of CD-Rs I'd bought back when I upgraded my CD burner to one that'd burn 80 minutes of music. Why'd it take so long? I had a bunch of old 74-minute blanks that my parents gave me to use first, so I used those when I had an album/bootleg that would fit. Time to start on the next spindle...

One of the problems of high-speed internet access is that I end up downloading way more music than I can organize and burn at one time. I guess that's part of the whole obsessive collector thing... whenever I do burn a disc I try to compile everything that'll fit from a band I like - rarities, b-sides, all that stuff.

Speaking of collecting stuff... There's a lot of stuff that should be for sale, but isn't. I'd love to have a leather/fake snakeskin wallet that reproduces the album art from Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies. There's hundreds of awesome album covers that ought to be on shirts, but aren't. Since I pretty much fit the stereotype of the collector geek, you can imagine my disappointment that the few shirts I do find tend to end at size Large. If I was rich, I'd start a company that would reprint classic/vintage album art shirts in the full range of sizes...

procrastinate? maybe later...

Another day spent attempting to reorganize stuff... rediscovered my stash of spare CD cases plus some discs I forgot about from when I first had access to a CD burner.

I've been putting all my burnt stuff in those slim CD cases and labelling the edges with an embossing tape machine. Now I see why nobody really uses these anymore - it's extremely difficult to get all the letters to line up, and I keep overprinting them when the tape doesn't advance like it's supposed to. Judging from a high school-era Swans compilation I'd made for myself, I used to be much better at this, since I did the tracklist entirely in embossing tape. I'm not calling it "Dymo tape" since that company no longer seems to make it... and I'm one of those anal people that gets annoyed when brand names are used generically, like saying "Kleenex" or "Band-Aid" when you ask for a tissue or bandage.

damn, November already?

Another awesome Goodwill score: found a signed copy of Elmore Leonard's Riding The Rap! It's a large print edition, dedicated to the Maximillian hotel, which according to Google is either in Prague, Czech Republic or Malcesine, Italy. Perhaps there's another hotel with the same name in the United States somewhere... The full inscription reads "To the Maximillian, a fine hotel, with thanks for a most enjoyable stay. - Elmore Leonard, 4-02"

At any rate, I think that's more interesting than a book that's simply signed to a random person that showed up at a book signing. "Dutch" himself either left this book there or presented it to the manager or someone who worked at the hotel, and in the years since it migrated to the shelf in the Midwest where I picked it up! I wasn't even looking for signed books, I just grabbed it because it was a hardback and one I hadn't read yet, and didn't notice the signature until I got home...

Speaking of books, I mentioned PaperbackSwap and SwapACD in one of the earlier posts on here... I can now say that I received several items successfully from these sites and can fully recommend them both. If anyone reading this decides to join, there's a "referred by:" field when you sign up for your account. Type in "obscure-reference" with a hyphen between the words, and I'll probably get some sort of credit for referring you! What you should know before you join any of these sites is that you need to post 10 books/CDs/DVDs (depending on which site you join) to get your first credit. Also, you have to pay for the shipping to mail any of the items on your shelf that other members request. When you request items, though, you don't have to pay shipping. Like anything else, you should read all the terms of use before you agree to sign up...