I’m a dinosaur who still uses optical media. Y’all just watch. CDs are gonna make a comeback in the next 15 years.

Telling myself that helps me sleep at night.

This is the DVD I burned with my roommate’s laptop in late 2012. The hard drive in my laptop crapped out. The local repair shop couldn’t recover my data, and the sticker with the key had been worn away too badly to read. A Windows 7 license in the day was really expensive, and I never heard of buying retail keys. I definitely didn’t know enough about piracy to find a cracked ISO. At this point, I’d heard of Linux, but knew basically nothing about it. I just assumed it was for wizards with beards two meters long who stay at the tops of their towers reading ancient tomes and channeling the spirits of lost zeroes and ones.

So I bought a disk for my laptop (fun fact - that thing lives in my super slim PS3 now) and dove headfirst into Ubuntu just because at the time, it was said to be the friendliest distro for newcomers. The thought of using bash scared me at the time. Great times. But in my mind, the best way to learn sometimes is to have no alternatives.