I was cleaning out my office closet earlier this week (getting rid of some of my old college textbooks, many of which are now woefully outdated) when I came across a few interesting tidbits from yesteryear. As of late, I’ve been digitizing cassettes recorded between 1985 and 1998, and have thus had plenty of nostalgia from my junior high and high school years. But nostalgia from my college years isn’t something I’ve really sought after yet, although it was an incredibly fun time in my life (certainly the most fun I ever had at a school). Nonetheless, some fell into my lap.

I am not your typical college kid. No; in 1998, I shunned the usual universities and frat houses and instead went to Full Sail Real World Education in Orlando, where I underwent a 15-month accelerated degree program in Digital Media. During that time, I lived alone in a vintage 1960s apartment and spent most of my spare time watching Star Trek, writing email to Apple, modifying the Wolfenstein 3D source code and driving my new Trans Am to Race Rock on I-Drive for some nachos. It was the ultimate Bachelor NerdPad, and it was good.

This week, while going through my old college textbooks on topics like 3D modeling, Macromedia Director and SMPTE time code, I found a few loose papers and things shoved into the various pockets of my homebrew Full Sail binders. (We didn’t have actual textbooks per se; instead, each course manual was photocopied for each student and placed in a three-ring binder.) I kept a couple of complete textbooks, but also saved all of those loose sheets and other remnants for later reflection. The latter pile gave me a brief but amusing look back at those heady days, which I arranged in roughly chronological order and thought I might share here, for no particular reason.

EXPECT TO BE IMPRESSED!!!

Those are the exact words (caps, exclamation marks and all) at the top of the sheet of info I found about the apartment complex where I lived, Semoran North. Featuring an “energy efficient design” (or whatever passed for that in 1964), a “fully equipped huge kitchen” (which came complete with an abandoned Pyrex measuring cup which I still use to this day) and “exceedingly large floor plans” (they weren’t kidding, either), Semoran North was basically paradise with chocolate brown carpeting. For $590 a month, I had access to 1200 square feet of space filled with geek equipment. It was pretty damn fine.

The only problem with Semoran North was the air conditioner — it was probably as old as the building, and even running 24/7 with the thermostat set at 60 degrees, it barely kept the place habitable. Believe me, I made Florida Power & Light very happy. Finally, after 15 months of torture, the A/C unit on the roof of the building burst into flames the week before we were set to move out. Maintenance decided not to fix it until we were gone, bless their hearts. Oh, and they kept my entire security deposit, too — I never even put a nail in the wall. Oh well.

I also ran across three photo prints I’d taken of my Trans Am, parked in the lot of the Public Storage complex right across the street from my apartment. Although I had a reserved car port at the apartment, I put the T/A into storage when I flew to Australia to meet with Apple for a couple weeks in December of ‘98. The car was still pristine at the time — no love bug battle scars on the front end, and the 3-inch, one-on-the-left factory exhaust tip still present and accounted for. Now that the car’s gone, seeing those pictures from its better days brought a tear to my eye.

You Are About to Witness History in the Making

Wouldn’t you know it, even amongst my college paraphernalia, some high school vintage stuff had to sneak in. I discovered a piece of lined paper torn from a notebook, upon which were penciled two things: Apple’s phone number in Australia, and a short script to the opening credits of a radio show I recorded on September 4th, 1994, in the backyard of my Michigan home. “Welcome to the ethereal plane. Welcome to the endless void. Welcome to DC,” reads the closing line of the script. Oy.

Ah, here’s my SMPTV lab schedule from November ‘98. SMPTV stood for “Sound for Motion Pictures and Television.” Every class at Full Sail was similarly named, and always referred to only by its acronym. During my orientation, the guy showing me around remarked, “Welcome to acronym hell.” He wasn’t far off. Let’s see, oh yes, this was a good one. Sunday, 11/22/98, I had a lab on Basic Tape Machines (24 and 2-track) at one o’clock in the morning. Wanna take a guess how Full Sail was able to deliver a two-year degree program in 15 months? Yep: round-the-clock schedules. One of my classmates took to calling these midnight labs “Full Jail: Real World Incarceration.”

This particular red-eye lab was the infamous occasion on which I spliced out part of a song on a 2-track reel-to-reel tape so seamlessly — using nothing but a razor blade and a grease pencil — that no one in the class could identify where I made the edit. But then, I’ve been splicing cassette tapes with scissors and Post-It notes since I was a kid, so I had the advantage of experience. Now I just use Cool Edit. My, aren’t we spoiled in these modern times? WHY, I REMEMBER WHEN WE HAD TO SPLICE MAGNETIC TAPE WITH RAZOR BLADES! Sorry, old man circuits disengaged.

Next from my stack o’ stuff comes an introduction to Sound Design for Multimedia — in other words, computer software — and how it’s used. This is the kind of material that dates itself the instant it rolls off the Xerox machine. You’ll like this bit here, about the recommended computer system specs we should target for multimedia delivery:

Mmmm, that looks like my Doom rig from 1993. I think we’re good.

A Day in the Life

One of the most fun things I discovered amongst my heap of college tidbits was a Learning & Memory Skills exercise from my BLBS class. Now, you’ll have to forgive my aging memory here, because I can’t quite remember what BLBS stood for — I’ve been exposed too many acronyms over time, I suppose. Suffice it to say, it was part of the overall Business of Living (BOL) program, which was basically busywork which qualified Full Sail to offer a fully accredited degree program.

In this particular exercise, we were told to keep a detailed schedule of everything we did, in 15-minute intervals, for an entire 24-hour period. I chose Wednesday, October 7th, 1999, and judging from the results, my life was pretty comfortable back then. Scanning this sheet would be a bit superfluous (not to mention the white paper on this dark website would murder your retinas), so here’s a transcription:

You could put this day in an infinite loop, and it would seamlessly sync right up.

The Co-Opting of Perigee, and Other Stories

Ah, here are some designs I created for one of my classes in Photoshoppery and Illustratory. First are a couple of logo designs we were told to make for a ’50s-style diner called “Joe Sputnik.” The first looks like an LP with rocketships spinning around it. The second appears to be a stylized hamburger with a rocketship orbiting it. All in glorious two-dimensional vector.

Now here is a color printout of the Perigee 3.0 logo, wherein I dropped the classic red flag behind the sphere and logotype and instead created the illusion of an elliptical orbit with the company name. I believe I aped this for my design class. Hey, no one had to know that I initially conceived it three years prior, right?

Next up, we have a study guide for…um…looks like VR, our Virtual Reality class. This was pretty trippy stuff but some of the most fun I had during my entire time at school. See if you know the answers to any of these questions:

• What are the display devices in an augmented reality known as?
• What is the simulation event loop?
• What is Haptic perception?
• How much texture memory does the SGI Onyx have?
• What are the six factors controlling the visual sense of presence and their key elements?

Don’t worry, I couldn’t remember most of them either. Fortunately I wrote the most of the answers down right here on the study guide. Aren’t I a good little soldier. You memorize enough of this stuff, and eventually you start making remarks like “If you were to 3D-model Bert’s head from Sesame Street, you’d use a Lambert shader.” I swear I am not making that up.

Hardcore Nerds Use Betamax

Not everything I found in this stack o’ stuff was related to college work. For instance, take this torn sheet of notebook paper detailing exactly how I was going to hook up all of my A/V equipment to my new 32″ TV. I remember my dad and I working on this at the dining room table of my apartment, while my mom basically removed herself from the equation (knowing that the combined talents of an electrical engineer and an A/V madman could only equal a very long and boring discussion during which no detail would be left unturned).

As I glanced over this old diagram, which I remembered drawing up like it had been yesterday, I had to laugh at the inclusion of the Betamax. Oh yeah, man — you gotta be able to watch Howard the Duck and those old copied episodes of Star Trek: TOS, y’know!

I also ran across a fax I’d received from the immigration attorney I hired to help ensure Apple’s legal entry here into the United States. The initial fax is basically an overview of rates and charges I was presented with when I first enlisted the attorney’s service, and is dated 2/5/99. That was about a month after I got back from meeting Apple in Australia, where we decided in no uncertain terms that we wanted to live together. There was no real fanfare about the decision — I remember us simply knowing that it was the right move, and that’d we’d do whatever it took, no matter what obstacles stood in our way. It was Apple herself who made that trip to Oz the best time I’ve ever had, and I could think of nothing better than joining her on her own trip through life. And now, here we are, as happy as the first day we met!

In Conclusion

Thanks for joining us on this long and drawn-out look back at the last vestiges of the 20th century, as seen through the eyes of the almighty me. Join us in ten years, when I look back at my previous job in a maze of cubicles and drone on about how awful the Intel 865G integrated graphics array really was for Photoshopping. You young whippersnappers you!