My freshman year at RIT, I lived in the dorms. Dan, a kid from down the hall who I was friendly with, was a tech head. He and his roommate (whose name I'm ashamed to admit I've forgotten) were both Computer Science majors. They both knew their shit, but their room was a testament to their nerdiness: They built huge speaker cabinets the size of ovens out of plywood, cheap carpet, and giant speaker cones. They had working and non-working computers and components set up against one wall, and the room was just frightening. There were couches and such facing their personal computers, which were situated on either side of the door to the room, and other guys on the floor would sit in these 'bleachers,' to watch them play Warcraft or Quake against each other. Sometimes it was cool. Sometimes it was excruciatingly boring.

Welcome to Rochester.

Dan quietly turned his computer into a server on the dorm network, and had a huge warez site running discreetly. At one point, we were thought it might be funny to create 'Frag,' which would function as the opposite of Microsoft's 'Defrag' program, which restores order to hard drives by optimizing the placement of data on them. The idea of making your hard drive more cluttered and less efficient seemed funny (and quite in keeping with the general functionality of Microsoft applications). I went about creating the splash screen/installation screen for the program, and what you see above is a slightly modified version of that graphic.

The 'screen shot' itself was drawn by hand in Neopaint, and all text and anti-aliasing was also done by hand. The thing I'm proudest of is the Nazi-styled "Microsoften" logo of a stylized eagle clutching a Windows symbol. The original image was 640x480, but the image was originally only 16 colors. The background gradient and such looked good at the time, but after 3 and a half years, I didn't think it had aged well, so I redid it in Photoshop.

Dan never had a chance to code the program, which I suppose is just as well.