I talked to a young contractor here at work who wore one of those silicone rings. He and his wife are really into lifting weights & working out. He said it's a trendy thing within his social group of hard-core exercise people to get those rings. He said it's primarily for the practical reason of not having to worry about getting your finger caught when, say, doing pullups, but there's also the financial/social agreement not to expect "2 months salary" for a ring. It's interesting because I agree about wedding ring expense being such a pointless waste of money, but in my social circle I'm shouting against the wind; if I just started wearing one, my wife would be angry/offended, I would get endless weird looks, all that. I would love it if they would come around to this way of thinking but it'll never happen. However, if their entire subculture/clique has all agreed that this is acceptable for them, then it's one more forced-purchase they can cast off, which is wonderful. (I've tried to do a similar thing for birthdays and Christmas gifts--I always suggest that we get gifts for kids, but do away with gift exchanges between adults, who so clearly don't really care about it, but the powerful of the social tradition is just too strong to break away from; nobody has the courage to break from it.)

Get a copy of ProcessExplorer from sysinternals.com. It's free: Process Explorer - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs[^] This program is extremely handy--it will show you every file that is being created/read/etc, along with what registry keys are being read/added/etc. The log files get huge fast, but for a tricky job like this it will be worth its weight in gold. It's helped me track down really weird/obscure stuff like this.

I think HTML and Javascript are your best bet, for a number of reasons: 1) You visually see changes on a website that you're building, as opposed to just printing "hello world" messages to a shell. 2) Your work is publicly available via the web (assuming you put it on a real website), so it's easy to ask for help/feedback from friends even if they're far away. 3) It's easy/cheap to get started. You can buy your own web domain for $20/year, and a basic hosted website for $6/month or so. 4) You only need a text editor like Notepad to start writing code; you don't need to worry about compiling it. 5) It gives you a good sense of how the web stuff works, how the browser talks to the server. 6) The skills are in high demand right now. I wouldn't get into any back-end languages like PHP or Python at this point. Learn how to manipulate the HTML using Javascript, and you'll learn a lot.