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!

I started reading a book today called Steve Jobs & the NExT Big Thing. The book chronicles Steve Jobs’ vain attempt to break away from his beloved Apple Computer to found NExT Computer. For those who may not know, Steve Jobs has had a very motley career in business. He co-founded Apple Computer in the late 70s with his college friend Steve Wozniak. Apple shortly became the fastest growing US company in history. Jobs’ moody and unpredictable nature lead to his ousting from Apple in 1986. Jobs decided he would go off and found NExT, a company with the goal of making a computer that everyone would want. (While at Apple, his goal was exactly the same.) NExT was given venture capital in excess of $250 million, despite the fact that it never achieved quarterly profit in a single quarter. Jobs came away smelling like a rose because he had bought Pixar, the company that hit the big time with 1995’s hit Toy Story. After the success of Toy Story, Jobs ended up making more money than he ever. In 1997, Jobs returned as the prodigal son to floundering Apple, where he has been the CEO ever since. (Apple has made quite the turnaround under his authority.)

I have read many accounts of Jobs but the NExT chapter of his life was usually just skimmed over. NeXT used its nearly endless capital to create some of the most innovative software to date. All modern OSs share loads of features that were available on NeXTSTEP (NeXT’s OS) over 15 years ago. The book should give me an idea why NeXT never actually got it together. (NeXT’s computers were highly overpriced, but a competent business team should have been able to make it work somehow.)

Being at a university, you expect that curiousity is something to be desired by everyone–including students and faculty. For the most part, I have found it true. However, in several of my computer classes, I have been chastized for deliberately trying to break a program or get the operating system to crash while I was writing programs. “Why would you want to do that, Trav?” you may ask. The answer is simple: If I know the exact thing that will cause an OS to die, I can take special precautions to safeguard against that cause and make sure my programs never destroy the machine of an end-user.

Yesterday in my database class, we were doing some simple queries that I learned how to do two years ago. Since I already knew how to do it, I was able to finish the exercises in about 2 minutes. When I got done, I started poking around in the help file for the database and finding “keywords,” which are things that cause something to happen in the database. When I would find one, I would type it in and see what happens. The professor suddenly appears over my shoulder. He surveyed my screen and saw that I was messing with parameters and such. Then he starts telling me all this other stuff I can do. He actually shows me how to change stuff that can kill the database if I don’t use it correctly, which is to imply that he trusts me enough to know I’ll keep the values within the boundries! Talk about fostering curiousity!

The one constant throughout the many years of my life has been the Charlie Brown specials. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was on last night. I hadn’t seen it in about 5 or 6 years. I guess the urgency to watch wears off as you get older. While I sat there watching, I felt very calm and happy inside. In all fairness, yesterday I managed to whack all my immediate due dates square in the head. But I don’t think I would have been as happy without Snoopy and gang.

I have always felt like Charlie Brown in many ways. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to kick the football (both figuratively and litterally). Also like Chuck, women remain a mystery to me. If only I were bald…

The passing of Charles Shultz in 2000 was very depressing to me because I admired his little cartoon about a group of kids and a wierd beagle so much. The concept was so simple, yet the daily trials of young life that he was able to capture are timeless. Shultz really loved his work, so I guess it was fitting that he died the day the last Peanuts was published. I can honestly say that I do not want to die slumped over my keyboard. I guess you can say that’s the difference between liking what you do and loving it.

I have never liked daylight savings time. It is neat that it intended to give us more sunlight, but my circadian rythm has never gotten along with shifting the time off by an hour. I am the sort of person who looks at a clock whether I have something urgent to do or not. I almost always wake up two times a night and look at the clock. Since my life, right down to the sleeping habits, are so attatched to the notion of time and a clock, daylight savings time can be considered some sort of cruel torture. Most people can adjust in about three days. Not me. I’ll be out of sorts for three weeks. Ten days until Chicago!

I had such a horrible day yesterday. Five and a half straight hours of class followed by two mind-numbing meetings. I decided I needed a little bitter delight, so I popped in “Office Space,” my favorite movie. I realize it isn’t the type of movie that you would normally choose as your favorite, but I’ll probably be entering some buearacratic corporate system that is so accurately depicted. I think last night was the most pleasant screening I have enjoyed in quite some time. I slowly felt my aggrevation melt away, and even though I can quote the movie nearly verbatim, I laughed with great force. By the time the movie was over, I was relaxed and semi-happy. As Peter says, “Human beings weren’t meant to sit in little cubicles and stare at computer screens all day long.” As long as I don’t forget that, everything will be OK.

Geez it’s been a long day. I’m very tired. I have a lot to do before going to Chicago: three tests to take and an art project to finish. Oh well. I don’t have enough dress pants to take with me. Maybe I can get Mom to spring for a new pair of khakis. I miss the money I got from tutoring, but there is no way I could have worked this semester while maintaining this pace. Seems like I never get caught up. Ce la vie!

I got to see my cat when I went home a couple weeks ago. She has grown so much and can now inflict serious damage with one quick bite. Mean little beast. As long as you feed her, she won’t attack. If boredom sets in, though, it’s all she wrote. I miss my cat. I think playing with her would help me wind down from this super-long day.

I redesigned the site once again. I know, I know. You’re probably thinking “Gee Trav, got too much time on your hands?” Well, the answer is a resounding, “No!” There are two reasons why I’m always monkeying with my site: I love web design and designing a new page is just good practice. Because I took the time to set the site up to be as dynamic as possible (ala using a database to generate pages), I can plop down a new user interface frontend in about 2 hours, which was the case today. I added weather and the external links panel on the right. Anyway, look for other little tidbits in the coming weeks.