Tim's Greatest Hits, Volume 1

Happy Birthday, Tim.

I'm done.

The artwork is done, the booklets made, discs printed. All that's left to do is burn 'em and send 'em out.

This has been quite an experience for me. At first, I just wanted to get a compilation of songs and have a professional graphic artist do the artwork. It looked like a lot of work, and I didn't know if I had the time or energy to do it. But as I read the stories that everyone shared and I knew that I couldn't have someone who didn't know Tim do the artwork. It was too important.

A lot of effort went into this project. Lisa was a huge help. She came up with a lot of the design, and she gave good advice on composition and concept. And she did a lot of the grunt work, like scanning pictures, ripping music, and folding the back tray inserts. I don't think we would have gotten this far if it wasn't for her.

My responsibility was to get the pictures we borrowed organized in the booklet in a reasonable pattern, and to get the quotes to fit without obscuring the pictures. Not too much when you think about it. But you'd be surprised how long it takes to do this. All of this was done with a relatively old version of Photoshop (v5.5): the cropping, application of lighting effects and colors. This is one piece of software you can't do without. But even with this valuable tool, it still took forever. And I didn't get heavily into the artwork until last week, just days from Tim's birthday. I had to get the art to the CD printer and to the laser printer for the booklets. So this meant staying up until after 3am, and one early morning until 7am.

That said, I can't tell you how rewarding it was to do this. Tim was my closest friend, and he was the most beloved person I've known. You could tell just from the stories of his relatives and friends. And to a smaller degree, the inspiration behind this project -- sharing memories -- touched everyone who heard about it. We have to thank our printers who got behind us and gave us good deals because they believed it was a worthy project.

And I can't finish this off without talking about the music. Man, that was quite a list to go through. There were a lot of suggestions there. A lot of it I liked, and lot of it I didn't. If you know me somewhat, you know which ones I'm talking about. But I wouldn't have put any other songs on the CDs. These songs are so important to those who suggested them. They're important to me now. I miss Tim, and I cherish my memories of him. I can't tell you how much it means to me for us to share our respective memories of him with each other. There's good stuff in there.