After graduation, I basically continued to produce and experiment, although it was pretty aimless. I was still using my pirated copy of Macromedia Directory and Discreet Plasma, messing around with interactive 3D. I got a job testing video games which was horrible and killed my love for videogames for several months and left me with a cyst that I still have to this day on my right thumb. I did a poorly attended and executed art show with a few friends in Brooklyn.
While job hunting, I stumbled across an professorship opening at the University of Washington in a brand new program. Intrigued, I found the program's website and excitedly read up about a new PhD program. I immediately contacted the program for more information and met with the program directors while back in Seattle for my mother's birthday.
I felt the meetings went pretty badly, as I constantly stumbled when asked basic questions and felt like my portfolio was pretty lousy. I decided at that point to go ahead and apply with the assumption that while I wouldn't get in, I would at least have a good reason to work hard for the next few months on that portfolio and project proposal.
It was at that point I finally snapped. I bitterly hated working with Shockwave. It's a crutch, a horrible horrible crutch to be leaning so hard. It teaches bad programming habits. It's 3d performance is 10 years behind the time. I will admit It's not bad for prototyping or for kiosk design and I still pull it out occasionally for those purposes. Still, for what many people try to use it for, it's the visual art equivalent of using a set of dried up dirty felt tipped markers to paint.
I do occasionally see cool stuff done with Shockwave, like this piece, which I thought was so cool I fired off an e-mail to the author saying just that, but that sort of inspiration comes very rarely.
At this point, I truly felt that it was time for me to move on. I moved away from pre packaged closed development environments and my flagrant use of pirated software.
As an aside, people who pirate software aren't "sticking it to the man," or truly trying to advocate the mass availability of tools to the masses, or fighting against the inflated cost of software these days. You're not doing anything noble. You're being cheap. It's okay if you're being cheap. I don't do it any more, but I don't bother extending my ethics onto others, because I understand and know why one has to be cheap.
That being said, there's some amazing open source software out there. I have some linked on my webpage. I personally code everything in C++ nowadays.