It's always magical to see a system you only recently discussed with a developer come to life before you eyes.  I love going back to a client and seeing the created system surpass what was envisioned.  It's very gratifying to see people pleased at what they see and get hooked on that feeling so much that they ask for more, meaning I get to experience the event with the client for yet another session.

It leaves me to wonder if I'm missing something, though.  My drive to improve and surpass my current ability is directly linked to my inability to acknowledge the true value of my current talent.  Because of this (and perhaps being a perfectionist/idealist), other people place more value upon what I have done than I.  It's good to keep moving forward, but I guess in my quest towards being a more capable me than the me of yesterday I have lost sight of just how far I've come.

To illustrate this fact of just how far I have come, I present to you my first web site.  This is no joke: I still have it--two versions of it, in fact.  As far as I can tell, the earliest web pages were completed on October 11, 1996.  Therefore, in order to have created the first logo, I must have begun creating the site much earlier.  In short, the site bites big time, but it was a first attempt...  You may view the first page, created in MS Publisher (I think it's the first), and the second page, created in MS Word 97.  See: anyone can do it!  However, it's been eight years to get me this far (and I've really only improved during the past three to five years).  By the way; don't bother with the links because they won't take you anywhere and I haven't read that email address in more than five years.

Still, just compare the logos between the current and previous sites; you can see the difference.  My new logo was done four years ago, so there's still a good skill gap between what I can do now and what I could do then.  The new logo was first drawn as an outline, scanned, and put into MS Image Composer.  I practically colored each wing feather pixel by pixel and applied a spray can effect to the rest of the body and finally overlaid a fire image on it (I don't think it was the fire image in the old site; I'm not certain where I found it, but the effect isn't that obvious).  The current logo is sufficient for my needs, is professional, and will remain with the site for years to come.  I certainly won't bother to put any time into improving it as that can be spent elsewhere, like creating the admin interface to the FinGame (which brings a nice round-about closure to this post, too).