I am up way later than I should be for a 6:22 AM flight out of Nashville...

I paid a Vandy student to do some computer work for me while I was out of town, the major part of which was to rescue the data from two old computers and combine it on a new 250 GB drive he was to install.

I got the computer back from him today and am completely intrigued by the contents of the old drives, which are probably in the neighborhood of 5-7 years old. I've got plenty of old music, which I have spent serious time importing much of it into my current iTunes setup to get on my iPod. But I also have plenty of MY old music, from dual or 3-track keyboard instrumental pieces to piano+vox 1-minute song ideas to full demos of songs like "Black and White" that are pretty crazy to hear after all these years. It really tells a story, but interestingly, some of it is actually good and might be usable someday in the next album I'll record.

Plenty of old assignments from college were saved, including an interesting WWII report that was the only document I bothered to open while sorting through some of the stuff earlier tonight. An old journal of mine, running through the first years of college, is on there...now THAT was interesting. All my NES and SNES emulated games are there, as well as a full version of the one and only Duke Nukem 3D too. All sorts of Vanderbilt Music Society material is there, as well as mp3s from a Pub "Battle of the Bands" event. VMS not making a compilation CD of that stuff and selling it on the Card is still a huge mistake.

It is pretty insane to look back at that stuff, have it come back so clearly to me where I was then, and then see what's happening now and what God had in store for me. I am MARRIED to my beautiful wife. I have a nice little business with the iTest, as well as a great full-time job. I actually draw a revenue stream (modest as it may be!) from JBF500 royalty payments (as well as my instrumental disc obviously). And I've got my sights set on another album sometime in the next 5 years which might actually display some talent!

Looking back then, it was such a time of uncertainty for me for so many reasons. Family reasons, personal reasons, non-existent only-in-my-head reasons ... all sorts of reasons.

Which of course lead to plenty of excuses. Yeah, lots of excuses for why some things happened and others didn't.

So where I might have had a night of horror by going back and subjecting myself to some of those memories, much like it might be for someone to look back in a high school yearbook decades later...its not really like that at all. Its a feeling of understanding how blessed I am to be here and able to do precisely what it is I want to be doing...understanding how great it is to not take life as it is now for granted, and really seeking to help other people get over the stuff I went through.

Anything I can do to instill that invincible feeling of confidence in other people, I do it. Mainly, convincing people that hey, we live in a world with 6 billion people in it ... someone will ALWAYS have something negative and nasty to say about what you're doing. Someone will always take offense when others figure out how to express themselves and gain that personal identity everyone looks for. If someone's going to disapprove of your actions NO MATTER WHAT, then why not do what you want to do in the brief life you've got?

OK, enough of this late-night rambling! Off to Beaufort tomorrow morning (actually, THIS MORNING!) to begin about a week-and-a-half of work down there, including the TCMH project review. I'll see you later...