A little practical humor today. Everyone that has burned CD-R discs has had a few that did not burn right, rendering them useless for use on your computer. Courtesy of Andy McFadden http://www.fadden.com here are some ideas what to do with them.

What can I do with CD-R discs that failed during writing?

They aren’t useless. Here are a few ideas:

• Fill in the center hole to avoid leaks, and use them as drink coasters.
• Create a hanging ornament (suitable for holiday decorations) or wind chime. The latter isn’t all that interesting – they just sort of “clack” a little – unless you use the discs to catch the wind and something else to make the chimes.
• Use them as mini-frisbees in an office with cubes. Since they’re rather solid and may hurt when they hit, you should await a formal declaration of intra-office war before opening up with these.
• Have CD bowling tournaments where you see how far you can roll one down a narrow hallway. You’d be surprised at how hard it can be unless you get the wrist motion just right.
• Put them under a table or chair whose legs don’t quite sit right.
• Run them through one of those industrial-strength paper shredders (the kind with the rapidly spinning wheels) to get shiny green or gold confetti.
• Make really, really big earrings.
• Try to convince people at the beach that it’s a shell from a new species of abalone.
• Hook them into your bicycle spokes as reflectors.
• Use them as wheels on a toy car. (If you have a buggy CD-R burner, you’re probably stocked for a toy 18-wheeler.)
• Build a suit of “CD-R chain mail” for laser-tag games.
• Use them as art-deco floor or ceiling tiles.
• Hang them from the rear view mirror in your car.
• Cut it into a jigsaw puzzle with a small wire saw.
• Try out the “helpful CD repair” suggestions that periodically crop on the newsgroup. Like the ones that suggest using acetone and sandpaper to refinish a scratched CD-R.
• Hang them in your car windows. Some people believe that CDs will defeat speed guns and automated speed traps that use flash photography.
• Add them to your aquarium.
• Use them as dart boards or BB-gun targets. If you “miss” the hole in the middle, the error is immediately obvious.
• String several together as a toy, weaving the string in and out through the center holes. Alternate green and gold for visually pleasing results.
• Make a boomerang ( http://www.chez.com/amiel/boom/cd.html ).
• Buy a cheap clock mechanism from a hobby/electronics store, and turn it into a novelty clock.
• Hang them in fruit trees to scare birds away.
• Use them as backing for round knobs on cabinet doors, to keep the wood clean.
• Practice applying CD labels. Test brands of labels you haven’t tried before. Leave them in the sun and see if they peel.
• Use them as reflectors in a solar collector.

Thank you Andy for your kind permission to re-publish this list.