Sometimes, I think about the money I spend vs. money that is demanded by direct and indirect business ties that I have or may have. I don't know why, but sometimes, there are companies that want money from me. Beats me why. There are some I can understand, like MBNA, the one that offered me that Apple Loan. But there's a few others ... maybe it's identity theft. It's been a big deal as of late. You seen stuff on TV about a guy walking in the street picking up stuff from someone's trash can while talking about how identity thieves work, at the same time, he advertises a paper shredder. Who knows. I'll probably check that out but usually, I shred stuff up that has my address and important numbers before they go in the Pitt County Landfill.

Although, there are times that I forget I'm in debt and when I think of an art project that looks like a cool thing to pursue in and/or that has to be done for a grade, I keep forgetting about this thing called a "budget."

I figured that after my wood project is done, I'll stick to digital stuff until I get myself financially stabilized. At least for that one, I don't have to spend so much, if not any money, to do non-game Photoshop work. Usually time's worth. The previous Photoshop-related work that I have done were skins for Unreal Tournament 2003 (and 2004, seeing that there's a backwards compatibility for most skin content for both games, even though I don't own UT2004). I thought about doing some CD covers or other designs... Something small before I try something larger. Right now, I have to finish colouring that picture of Arya. I plan on making that into some kind of desktop wallpaper. I'll also rebuild my art portfolio. It might be a good idea if a company wants to look at the work I have done before they say, "Damn! This shit's phat! You're hired!" or "Shit! That's whack! I ain't hirin' you!"

On a related gaming note, I don't plan on buying any more games, in general, until I get myself a dual processor G5 (or G6 or G7, whichever is newer at the time of purchase) or build a decent gaming rig, which won't be until a bunch of years. When that happens, Doom]|[ would be playable on a computer that could be considered "grandma's box."

Usually, I have a tendency to skip generations when it comes to buying computer hardware. For instance, when I was on a PC, I jumped from a 3dfx Voodoo 2 to a Voodoo 5 in one box (for those who remember the Voodoo 5, that thing is very long!); then when 3dfx went out of business I got a nVidia GeForce 2 MX then went to GeForce 4 Ti 4600 (just as long as the Voodoo 5); and in another computer that had an ATI Radeon 7500, that was upgraded to a Radeon 9700 PRO (a lot shorter than the GF4 Ti 4600 and the Voodoo5, but packs more power!). Although that's just graphics cards. On the CPU end, I jumped from an AMD K6-2 400 Mhz to an AthlonXP 2100 ... a big step there, but I had to replace the motherboard and everything else to take advantage of the processor. Right now, I have a G4 iBook ... the way how I see my upgrading trends, I'll wait until the G5 is a thing of the past and get the G6 when that hits the shelves ... but I'll get a desktop machine instead of a laptop. I'm happy with this iBook right now, although, I miss playing some high-end games but it's not the end of the world, so I'm not worried about it. I guess gaming will have to wait until my life is a little bit more stable.

At the moment, the bank says my financial outcome for the future is "uncertain." I guess the spending pattern of a college student is well ... just weird. Well, this college student anyway. But if I look up to the internet and expand my art services to the people of the web, I might generate more revenue instead of sticking around town.

Maybe I should go back to skinning but I don't know yet ... I kind of lost interest in playing UT2003 since no one in the campus LAN plays UT2003 (well, they didn't at the time I owned it)... that, and I don't think MacSoft hasn't ported UnrealEd to a Mac yet. I don't have the Mac version of UT2003 and haven't purchased UT2004 so I can't say for certain. If not, they should; it would open up more developers that do their art work on a Mac. Otherwise, I would have to stick to doing command-line compiling. That ain't hard to do; I've compiled UT1 skins the same way on a PC. I think it's something like "ucc make" in the command-line terminal after making the appropriate edits to the System.ini file as well as making the appropriate .uc scripting files. (or "./ucc-bin make" on Linux but I haven't tested that since, for me, Linux is like the wiener of a dude in a porn video ... I find it very hard to use but if I had the free time in the world, I'll probably give Linux another run-down.)

After all this talk about trying to get money, it makes me wonder why some college students resort to downloading music off Kazaa and them places. I guess it's economical in a way ... well, until you get a friendly love letter from the RIAA asking for a hefty sum of money. I guess that's where programs like PeerGuardian come in but if the RIAA has ways around PeeGuardian, then it doesn't do any good ... if that's the case, then it's an endless war between the PG developers and RIAA, or at least until someone gives up ... or maybe the RIAA will send people to raid the homes of programmers that made PeerGuardian. After all those lawsuits and stuff, I'm sure they got some money out of that to hire a hitman or some secret agent or something. Or then again, they'd probably blow it all off on more lawsuits and stuff, hoping they would get more. Beats me how the law system works. In the end, I'm interested in how much the artist gets out of all of this. With the sudden increase of CD prices, it makes me wonder.

Tomorrow, there's going to be a discussion in one of the meeting halls in Mendenhall about downloading music, according to this email I received today:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Downloading Music and Movies from the
Internet (Peer-to-Peer File Sharing)

Napster opened Pandora's Box when it first introduced free file sharing. The resulting ripple effect from the entertainment industry has wreaked havoc on college campuses across the country. Students question "What's the big deal?" while university administrators are forced to deal with the
ramifications of illegal file sharing activities. Plan to join this lively discussion on the realities of file sharing.

Panelists:
David Harrison, Associate Vice President for Legal Affairs, UNC Office of the President
Mary Lou Antieau, Office of Student Conflict Resolution
Jack McCoy, ITCS Security
Elliott Frank, School of Music
Ben Wyche, SGA

Tuesday March 30, 2004
7:00 - 8:00 pm
221 Mendenhall Student Center