I have tried out iTunes & Napster over the last couple days. Each service lets you pay $0.99 for a song or $10 for an entire album. Once you have paid, you download your tracks. You can then burn the songs to a CD if you like. Considering how much flack the RIAA has given to those who download illegaly, this isn’t such a bad system. Besides, when is the last time you bought a CD where you liked every song on it? Most of the time, I concentrate on two, maybe three tracks. Instead of paying $3 for a single at Wal-Mart, now I can download the sucker at my lesuire for about a buck.

I like Napster better because you don’t have to put in your credit card info until you actually make a purchase. iTunes requires you to give credit card information up front before you can even get an account through them. I felt that this was too invasive. The interface for Napster is pretty quick and its easy to find groups, albums, or individual tracks. And the speed and quality of purchased tracks really is better than the illegal downloads we all know and love.

I ran across a box of old floppy disks last night and inside I found a piece of my history that I’d soon like to forget. I found two floppies that contained my earliest web pages. Apparently, giving someone a little knowledge of HTML is a very dangerous thing to do. I knew nothing of good, clean design. These sites are hideous. People were nice to me about them and would say stuff like, “Wow! That looks really good.” I can’t believe they were so nice. Anyway I decided to upload these old pages to show the world how far I have come artistically. Remember, these are to be viewed for nostalgia only.

• First webpage ever – I put this up sometime around March 1998, shortly after I got the Internet. Notice the star background. This was all the rage back in the day.
• Leslie County High School in 1998- This was my attempt at the LCHS homepage. I took it over in August of 1998. Notice the wierd buttons that change colors. I think that is JavaScript gone bad.
• Leslie County High School in 1999-2000 – I revised the LCHS homepage over the summer of ’99 and this was the result. The eagle background is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. I was so proud of it. Therm was involved with much of this. I should smack him for allowing me to create such a monstrosity. He and I spent most of the snow days during that time period concocting this.
• Trav’s HTML Workshop of early 2000 – This is a “tutorial” I wrote for an HTML/Frontpage workshop I did. After looking at this, I wonder why the poor teachers didn’t run from the room. Now I understand why I never recieved the $50 I was supposed to get for “teaching.”
• Leslie County Bass Anglers – I did this in February of 2000 for a local fishing league. This page is passable, if not the most plain thing I ever did. Apparently, I had started reading some design manuals or something.

I hate this ZIP drive. I bought it in early 1998 just after I got my first computer. (I sold my trampoline for $250 in order to afford it.) Back then, 100 Megabytes on one disk was an amazing feat. To give you some perspective, my entire hard disk at the time was only 500 Megabytes. To top it off, the ZIP drive was fast, at least in comparison to the old floppy drive. All of my Internet downloads were saved to the ZIP drive so as to save my precious hard disk space.

Fast forward about 6 years. 100MB is negligible compared to my massive 220,000 Megabytes of hard disk space. And I have been able to write an entire CD, all 700MB worth, in about 5 minutes for a long time now. Yesterday, I was saving 89MB of Photoshop documents. It took about 9 minutes! Why can’t the art lab have CD-RW drives? ZIP drives are a thing of the past! They served us very well, but the time has come to move on.

I got back from my excursion to Chicago on Sunday night. I didn’t want to come back. Because of a time shortage, let me just say now that Chicago is a great city. I had so much fun! When I get caught up and things calm down a little, I’ll post the pics I took and give you a rundown of all the neat things I did and saw.

Have you ever noticed that no two people pack the same way? I have a chaotic style: I meander around the room doing a visual scan and grabbig stuff I need to take with me and throw it in the suitcase shortly after I grasp it. Surprisingly, I usually don’t forget anything important. Mom, on the other hand, lays everything out before it gets near a suitcase. After she has scanned her laid out little pile to ensure that everything is there, she proceeds to place everything one item at a time into the container she has alloted for a certain purpose. Her method is obviously neater but it bugs me because packing is not a serious ordeal. To her, it’s like some quest for nirvana. For me, it is a prelude to the trip, which is the whole reason you pack to begin with.

Unlike Mom, I don’t operate under the illusion that clothes can be packed to avoid wrinkles. You can minimize wrinkling, but total avoidance is impossible. I don’t know why Mom gets so freaked out if she has to use an iron in the motel. It’s no big deal. As a matter of fact, it really doesn’t matter if your clothes are a little wrinkled. After about 20 minutes of body heat, they tend to unwrinkle anyway. Ce la vive!