I picked up my books for class today. It cost almost $200 for 3 books. That's because one of the books was $103, my Contemporary American Society book. The worst part is I know I probably won't get a whole lot of use out of them, just like every other book I've purchased for school. First there's my all informative "Computer Concepts" book which assumed you don't know what a keyboard is, I'm glad this one doesn't have a price printed on it or I might go insane. After that came my "Multimedia Concepts" book, which informed me that you can use a computer to animate things, yup, they are using computers for ANIMATION now.. can you believe it? This was made by the same people as the "Computer Concepts" book (Thomson Learning) and likewise has no price. The next step up would have to be my "Digital Media Tools" which basically explains one program for each chapter, meaning there is no space to learn anything useful about the program. They barely got into tweening in flash, I think I opened it once. This set me back about $50. My photography book cost $65, I used it every once and awhile.... probably worth having, but still a rip off at $65. My HTML & Dreamweaver Peachpit Press books ($21.99 & $24.99 respectively) were hardly used. I didn't open the dreamweaver one since I'm still afraid of WYSIWYG editors, and the HTML one was kind of useful. I think I learned what a block level element is from it. It also has a nice ASCII character set and CSS reference, but those are so much easier to use online anyway (for free...). I'm not going to bother calculating my English books which I didn't use much or me Economics book which was ridiculously expensive (to prevent vomiting). Today I purchased a digital photography/video book for a class that starts next week Tuesday, it seems decent and was $30. I also purchased a book by Robin Williams (no affiliation with the comedian Robin Williams). This book was $30 and seems kind of worthless. It's about design though, which I need to work on.. so maybe it'll help. It did say in the first chapter it wouldn't confuse us with terms we don't know like "XML, PHP, ASP, and cascading style sheets", so that kind of worried me. I also purchased a Flash MX 2004 "Hands on Training" book for $32, it starts with the drawing tools and ends with an intro to actionscript I think... too bad I need it for in class exercises. Well, that's my school book rant. I know I'm forgetting some books though.

things you should do:

• Watch Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Learn Flash
• Get a sticker
• listen to Unwound: Leaves Turn Inside You
• Comment my page more
• Beat "Bopaca's" High Score
• Play a good adventure game
• stop reading this

I FINALLY made a new style, woo hoo! I wasn't really expecting to do it, but then I just started to and... well here it is. It isn't completely done yet, but it's done enough for me to test online. Soon when you pick a style it will stay that way until you choose a new one, even after leaving the site (unless you delete your cookies). If you click the styles link and then choose the new style (dujodu green) you can view the page in an all new exciting way! Two websites for the price of one! or not. I was planning on doing this from the start of the site, but got lazy. Now that I've seen that is only takes a couple days, if that, I'll probably make more! Hopefully the next one will be drastically different, unfortunately I'm drawn to the muted color schemes.

Eventually I'm going to get an .rss feed going, even though I barely know what they do and NO one cares enough about this site to subscribe to it's .rss feed. Oh well.

School has started. I can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing as far as site productivity goes. I suppose I'll be making crap more often, but I don't know if it will all be site worthy. The only class I haven't had so far is Digital Still & Video Photography, which I think will be a fun but challenging class. My Contemporary American Society class is going to be... interesting. The teacher is a little off the wall, but he believes in peak oil. The Web Interface Design class will hopefully make me a little better at designing sites. I'm sick of making the sub-par designing on everything I do. It doesn't look like I'm going to learn all that much in my Flash class, but I'm going to try to focus more on things like animation and practical things (as opposed to useless actionscript stuff, even though that's more fun). My intro to 2d/3d animation class seems like it's going to be ok, I've been meaning to work with After Effects but never seem to have the motivation to do it. After Effects is mainly what we are doing, so I was kind of disappointed that we weren't going to do a lot in 3D studio max.. since I've also been meaning to learn that for awhile too.

I had a USB pen drive for a few hours. It didn't work so I sent it back to newegg.com, don't get me wrong though, it's not newegg's fault. In fact I would recommend that you all visit newegg right now and bookmark it for when you have to purchase a new computer or get an upgrade. Hopefully I'll get a new one soon (and hopefully it will work).