I worked from home today, so I was able to get a few personal things done while working for the office. I've been able to build some vector assets for the project. I bounced a test video off of Carl to make sure he understood a weird asymmetry I found in a log. He gave it his blessing. I'm now in the process of creating a much better high-resolution version of the 3D assets. I ordered a couple of $5 pizzas from Pizza Hut. I shouldn't have. Buyer's remorse. I will do much better tomorrow.
Author: Chewbode
Hot dogs!
We’re Live!
The new site is live! I've decided on a WordPress platform moving forward, as I've completely burned out on using DotNetNuke. The site is also hosted internally on the Suncoast Studios server farm - no more crappy hosted solutions. The last couple of items were shored up, including dropping the Google Analytics code into the site, and also setting up and applying a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate. What's this site doing back online? Didn't Chewbode abandon it? Yes. And no. I recently realized that I tried too hard to make the site flexible in the past. That hurt the creativity. Bouncing around from platform to platform, using hosted services that lost my data - it was a nightmare. For some time now I've known that there were fragments of old blog posts scattered throughout the file server and in archives online. I really just wanted to get everything in one place....
Imports Complete
Offline Archive 2 and all of the readable entries from Archive.org have been imported. Some things to note: The old versions of the Museum and photo galleries won't be rebuilt. Google Analytics is currently not installed but needs to be. Since April 23, 2016, I've been building this site on a development platform on my internal server. After Google Analytics is properly set up, I'll roll out WordPress to the production site and secure it with an SSL certificate.
Offline Archive 1 Imported
Offline Archive 1: I had an old file on the file server with posts from Apr 2004 through Dec 2005, and from Oct 2010 through Jan 2011. All of these have no been imported into this site. Some pictures are missing, and I've done a little bit of cleanup on some typos and formatting. Offline Archive 2: I have another offline archive file that looks to be from Apr 2011 through Mar 2012 that I'm going to be importing now. Lastly, I've seen that there's a bunch of blog entries that are available on Archive.org from a previous incarnation of this site. These entries span from Dec 2005 through Nov 2008. That'll be the final archive I import (hopefully today).
Backlog
Yesterday, Cari and I spent some time running some errands and doing some chores in the early part of the day. Around 2:30pm, we went over to the TGI Friday's for lunch. The rest of the day, we drove north through East Lake, then Trinity, across to Odessa, and down the Veteran's to back home. Along the way we stopped at a Lowe's and saw some great things for the house. We ended the trip by grabbing some Cold Stone ice cream. Today, I'm going through a bunch of old, archived chewbode.com blog posts and am spending the effort to import them into this site - the entries from April 2004 onward.
A New Era
Yesterday I received an email that all of the paperwork for the new house is finally complete. The process started in earnest on January 28, but it took some time to jump through all of the hoops. I have a meeting coming up soon where I'll sit with construction team and go over the timeline. The expected completion date is early August. We're pretty excited. Even though it's only been three months since I first started the process going, I've been planning out a new studio infrastructure for about a year. I've racked all of the equipment, ordered new network switches, and have been building a new server environment. Part of this has been virtualizing and normalizing all of the computers, which has been a challenge. The last piece of that will be completed this coming week, when I receive a new 5TB hard drive for one of the hypervisors. Once...
Things To Do, Star Wars To Talk About
We spent the day at the Renaissance Festival yesterday. Unfortunately, got a nasty headache halfway through the day. Once I got home, I popped two aspirin and took a two hour nap and luckily got rid of it. So, now it's Sunday morning and I have a slew of things to do today: Catalog some comics, clean the fish tank, get a haircut, wash the car, do some grocery shopping, bake some cookies for Cari, help Cari with some paperwork, work on this site, and get back to working on the Nexus project. I sit here, though, typing away with my full cup of coffee next to me - the one that says "to boldly go" in Latin. So, since I'm procrastinating a little, let's talk about something I like... With Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens coming up later this year, Marvel started releasing new comics and the...
Firewall Update
A couple of days ago I implemented a new firewall that seems to be working out quite well. By "new", I mean "new to me". It's actually an old WatchGuard Firebox X700 that I cracked open and upgraded some of the hardware, then wiped the factory OS and replaced it with pfSense. So far, I couldn't be happier. It allows me some expandability and gives me some great tools I've always wanted on the network. As for this site, I'm going to be investigating new blogging plug-ins, as the default Journal system just isn't cutting it for me. I mean, it works, but it's lacking a lot of features.
The Beginning… Again
This is it. I've finally gotten around to putting this site online again after it being dark for three years. There's an offline archive of old blog entries, pictures, and custom data I'm going to try to get back up here over time. I don't want the rebuild of the site to be work, so it's going back together slowly. Until then, I'll be blogging here whenever it occurs to me to do so. You can follow me on Twitter as well. Either way, feel free to contact me with suggestions for the site.
Multi-Tank
I recently lost all the fish in my 37 gallon tank and it lay dormant for a couple of months. Then, after being tired of seeing all that equipment sit unused, I spent some money and rebuilt the aquascape entirely, using sand instead of small gravel. And by adding a large piece of real driftwood, smooth stones, and large sandstone pieces as structures instead of a fake coral "hotel" for the fish, there has been a new sense of quality. Lastly, I added new plants to keep everything fresh and add some color. For about a month I only had a black and a white snail keeping everything clean while I tried to figure out my strategy of buying fish. After a little toil, I decided to buy a brand new 10 gallon tank as a "staging" area for all new fish. Here's the logic: Five to seven fish at...
