HELLO!(WELCOME !!) I AM JEFFREY FADEN (NOT HIS DAD) AND I AM POSTING IN MY HJOURNAL ONLINE!!! I WROET ANOTHDER COlLEgE ESSAy AND I THINK IT IS TOTAlLY RAD! (IT was NOT WRITTEN BY MY DAD!!!) TAKE A LOOK ALl YOU COOL HAXOr PEOPLE!!!

Forty bucks an hour! I proudly headed home to tell Dad that the zillions of hours I'd spent refining my web design had finally paid off. Even more than the Best in County award I received for my website and the First Place blue ribbon for my comic strip at the Marin County fair. A local octogenarian had hired me to animate a video he was producing. It was a simple idea: Rupert, a worm-like line inches forward and retreats, tracing out a map of the world coordinated with a musical score.

Figuring I could knock it out in a couple of weeks, I started working at Mr. Parker's house and then continued to work on the project at home. My new employer bought me the coolest drawing pad and I was anxious to get to work. Although the video was only supposed to be five minutes long, I had to generate about 7000 frames. After a couple of weeks, I attempted to show Mr. Parker my progress and discovered that the Flash program I was using on my Windows PC did not work on his Macintosh. What a bummer! At that point sweet Mr. Parker morphed into a grouch and accused me of making this a lifetime project. Hey, it was my lifetime and I didn't want to spend it on a retractable worm.

Luckily there was a Kinko's down the street, and I spent a day there using a Macintosh to redo the animation. I went back to Kinko's the next day and found that my file had disappeared without a trace. I wanted to disappear, too, but I decided to stick it out. Moving into Kinko's, I spent day after day there, bringing my food in from the KFC next door. Over time the Flash file grew too big, even for all the systems at Kinko's and I had to beg a friend of my Dad's, who had a graphic design studio, to borrow his �big Mac� to complete the project.

Over the next weeks I made several trips to Mr. Parker's house to show him what I thought was my final version, only to be sent back for additional changes. Feelings were hurt and eventually I stopped charging him for my time and worked for free. The video production person wanted me to make the worm-line thicker and the musician wanted changes to the tempo. My Dad told me that I should have done the animation programatically instead of by hand, but it was too late for that. This project kept coming back like an Austin Powers sequel.

Months later I received a package in the mail: the Rupert video. It was terrific and my name was right there in the credits, �Animated by Jeffrey Faden.� After surviving Rupert, I'm more careful now about undertaking projects and making commitments. But, I think there will always be a conflict between completing a job on time and doing the best job I can.