Crazy Buffet

Shauna and I went out today and made our way over to Crazy Buffet, which is a really great oriental buffet not far from our place. I ate a ton of food, as did Shauna, and she’s declared that that place is the best buffet she’s ever been to. I think I’ll have to agree. I had some seaweed along with other oriental buffet stapes pepper steak, steamed vegetables, and teriyaki chicken.

Since CompUSA is going out of business in the next couple of days, we headed over there and I picked up a Netgear FS116 16-port network switch. This is mainly in preparation for building the render farm. I still have three more ports open on my Netgear FVS318 firewall, so I won’t use this switch immediately, but I want to start building the farm anyway. I’m in the process of hunting down old PCs and either taking them in working order or getting them as-is to see if I can spend minimal money of fixing them. Of course the faster the CPU on these machines, the better, but for now more processors is better, regardless of performance.

I’ve been having some really strange 3D graphics problems on my PC recently. I think it stems from recent video drivers I’ve installed, but I can’t rule out yet that my nVidia 7950 GT card is going bad. I’m getting multi-colored banding errors in textures in games and from time to time the 3D polygons in games go haywire and have large points streaking off them into infinity. Unfortunately, the cheap way of fixing this is to re-format my PC, which I hate to do, but it’ll give me a chance to install a new hard drive I recently bought too. I think I’ll definitely re-format tonight, which means I may not be back online for a couple of days. Hopefully, I can get the majority of the software reinstalled by January 1. That’d be a great way to start 2008.

Sick Thought of the Day: Gargling afterbirth with toenail clippings.

Year In Review

As 2007 comes to an end, I have to say that I’m both happy and disappointed with my progress in life. Good things have happened to me and my family. Not many “bad” things happened, but ultimately my frustration comes from my lack of making good headway both personally and for Suncoast Studios.

I started the year by getting a new job, one in which my professional limits could stretch and be utilized properly in an environment that needed them. I’ve worked pretty damned hard this year, putting in a ton of hours, but I can say that there’s been a lot of great benefit from it. I’ve put together a great staff and overcome some difficult tribulations. I think I’ve offered a very good service overall. Of this, I’m proud.

On the home front I think things could have gone better – it’s been tough. Financially, Shauna and I have had some troubles and are now just getting on an even footing. Things are looking like they’ll return to normal in 2008 and I hope we’ll be able to honestly start getting ahead on some credit card debt.

I can say that I’m most disappointed in my progress (or lack thereof) with Suncoast Studios this past year. Some sporadic work resulted in getting Jeff’s book finished in late November. This was after a lot of work, but there was also a lot of inefficient time spent on this project. I should have just spend whatever time I could, night after night, to get it done, but instead let it slide in favor of doing day job work. I need to find a better balance on these projects. The only other thing that I really accomplished this year was rendering the 35mm 4K animation for Tangible Entertainment. This was supposed to only take three weeks, and ended up taking about eight. Most of that was completely under estimating the time-frame to get it done, but I also realized I had no real work flow for rendering things like this. No work flow = almost no efficiency, which I hate. I need to get back to setting goals, creating task lists, and sticking to a strict calendar agenda. Planning is everything. I am failing to plan, which is a plan to fail. Procrastination needs to be kicked to the curb too. This is sounding more and more like a New Year’s resolution.

Well, I think I have all that out of my system.

Sick Thought of the Day: Masturbate the corn-cheese out.