I do the same kind of thing, and apparently, many others here do too!
Frankly, I'm not surprised. This is not an illness, it's a common trait of polymaths and intelligent people to be curious about everything, even things that appear to be irrelevant to their daily life.
There's a great story about how Bill Gates asked his secretary to buy random magazines and journals, and he'd flip through one every day. Print-era Reddit, as it were. He read one about sowing machines and realised the software for the newfangled computer-controlled ones was terrible, and for many years basically all sowing machines ended up with Windows as their OS!
Another similar story is how Apple devices have nice typography because Steve Jobs randomly took a calligraphy class.
I shock people at work semi regularly by pulling random little things out of the back of my brain where I filed them away "just in case". Sometimes, the "in case" turns up!
Something I've noticed about IT these days is that it's becoming less about having some sort of raw talent, and more about simply knowing what tools, SDKs, and APIs are out there, written by other people with talent. In the past, you had to be wizard, now you just have to know about wizards.
Frankly, I'm not surprised. This is not an illness, it's a common trait of polymaths and intelligent people to be curious about everything, even things that appear to be irrelevant to their daily life.
There's a great story about how Bill Gates asked his secretary to buy random magazines and journals, and he'd flip through one every day. Print-era Reddit, as it were. He read one about sowing machines and realised the software for the newfangled computer-controlled ones was terrible, and for many years basically all sowing machines ended up with Windows as their OS!
Another similar story is how Apple devices have nice typography because Steve Jobs randomly took a calligraphy class.
I shock people at work semi regularly by pulling random little things out of the back of my brain where I filed them away "just in case". Sometimes, the "in case" turns up!
Something I've noticed about IT these days is that it's becoming less about having some sort of raw talent, and more about simply knowing what tools, SDKs, and APIs are out there, written by other people with talent. In the past, you had to be wizard, now you just have to know about wizards.