MPC gives me two ideas

Been perusing the latest issue of Maximum PC, and it's given me two distinctly different ideas. The first thought I had was that since the cover story was all about PC health, and diagnosis why not take all of these little programs they tell yoiu to load onto a floppy, and burn them to a bootable CD. There a few programs that have extra stuff that has to be loaded onto the HDD before running the floppy routine (I assume because it's too big to fit on a floppy) So why not toss everything onto a disc? My only problem is that I really don't know how to make a bootable CD. I've got nero, and bootable CD is an option. Do you just hit bootable CD, and add whatever other crap you want onto it, and it'll boot the DoS kernel that winders is based on?

Ok, thought #2, and I find this one much more interesting. I saw that review for the Devastator arcade controller in the back, and I loved it! The only drawbacks I saw were that it costs $450!! (big drawback) and that it only had a four button layout. As luck would have it my MCM catalog came in yesterday, and it carries joysticks, with switches, for $11.22 each, button assemblies for 40¢, and switches for the buttons for about $1.50. Seems to me one could build himself the same damned thing for about $50. My thought for doing this though has to be worked out. Either I was thinking I could find a keyboard splitter, and hook a second board up, and run wires off of it, or I could do some surgery on the keyboard I use by running a 25 or so port off of it connecting up to the joysticks. Now, I'd prefer to do the two keyboard thing, but I'm not sure if the keyboard splitter even exists (I can't find one anywhere).

Anyone have any thoughts on either of those two plans?