Late Thursday afternoon I was invited to go to the Lightning hockey game. The owner of my company had an extra ticket, and a bunch of the executives and administrative people were going too. They had tickets to the AFS club, which is this nice area of the Forum where you get in, sit in comfy leather chairs (think along the lines of airline first class) and have unlimited food and beer at your disposal – no shit. So, I went home and changed clothes, got ready, and jumped in the car to meet everyone at one of the executive vice-president’s house. I got there a few minutes after 6:00pm. People started to slowly show up there for the next 45 minutes, and when all were accounted for, we jumped into a couple of vehicles (we only had two parking passes, so we had to cram in), and headed off...
Author: Chewbode
Hot dogs!
Lights. Camera. Action?
I went to a lighting shop in town today and got four new 250 Watt, 3200K tungsten floods for Suncoast Studios. I also picked up another aluminum case and tear-apart cube packing and have built out the carrying case for all of the bulbs I have. I also tested them all to make sure that they're working fine. These bulbs are great lights, but only last 20 hours each and the color temperature starts to change after only three hours. I'm currently sitting in the studio sipping a Diet Coke blogging, taking a break from working on the Tangible Entertainment project. I think I'll have a 95% correct version by the end of the night. After I ship the low res animatic off to them and get approval, I'll render it out at full 2K film resolution. I may be doing a shoot all next week. I'm not 100% sure...
Games and Music
I went out today and picked up a copy of Resident Evil 4:Wii Edition for the Wii (duh) and Animal Crossings: Wild World for the DS. Both games were quite cheap, so I figured what the heck. Resident Evil 4 is basically the same game that Capcom released for the GameCube (which I've never owned nor played) except it's adapted to utilize the Wii Remote and Nunchuck and it has some new content. I got Animal Crossing just because I heard it was a good, mindless game and I wanted to have a persistant game on the DS that used the Wi-Fi. I also wrote a Nugget for Super Paper Mario for the Wii today. On the music front, I picked up a copy of Fergie's The Dutchess. I also grabbed the soundtrack to Tarantino's Death Proof (makes me smile just thinking of it). Both albums have been ripped to MP3...
Easy Listening
I’ve been listening to some music lately. Over a month ago I vowed to stop listening to music because it was completely consuming my creative spark. I didn’t want to just be the recipient of others’ creative endeavors, but wanted to build on my own. Everywhere music was on and I’d hear songs in my head all day long, so I went on a sabbatical and stopped listening to it completely. This whole notion helped a lot I think and over the past couple of days, I’ve started listening to some music, mostly .977, a streaming internet radio station through iTunes. I’m going to do this in extreme moderation, as there are several projects on my plate right now the really need 110% of my attention. I came home last night after working for 36 hours straight and watched the Lightning game. I then watched a little TV and then...
Long Night
Well, it’s another one of those nights where I get (read: must) stay late at the office; an all-nighter. It all started with an update to the routing of one of our client’s VPNs. That started at 11:00pm tonight and finished up around 1:30am. I could have gone home then, but I needed to stay and work out a problem with our new Windows 2003 domain. Evidently, the two domain controllers (one in Tampa and one in Canada) decided to go out of sync. Well, their AD schema did at least. So, that means that there are going to be e-mail problems soon. I have to fix it, but it appears that the hotfix I need has to be requested from Microsoft (which I’ve done). Just lovely. So, I’m keeping busy updating the DCs with Windows Updates now. I got up around 7:00am yesterday (21 hours ago) and won’t go...
Welcome Ryan!
Early this morning my good friend, Ninel, delivered her baby boy, Ryan Matthew (excellent name) at 7 lbs. 14 oz. I’m so incredibly excited for her and her husband Alex. I talked to her around 9:00am and she and Ryan are doing fine. I’m going to go see them all tomorrow at the hospital, as I wasn’t able to get away from the office today. In a recent fit of rage, I destroyed my iPaq 6315 phone. I hope to be able to get an iPhone in the next couple of months, but right now I’m using an older BlackBerry 7290. The good part of this is that I’ll free up a USB connector on both my home PC and my laptop at the office as I won’t need the cradles anymore. My editing workstation in the studio decided to start reporting bad clusters on the hard drive last night....
Keepin’ Busy
I just finished playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary. I recently decided to re-activate my GameTap account and I was surprised to see this game in there. GameTap has begun to add several great games to the service. I started playing Tomb Raider a couple of weeks ago, and decided to just go until it was done. I’ve been doing a lot of work at the office lately, as we’re in the process of getting ready to move. A lot of my time will be devoted to that. Right now I’m working on the electrical needs of the server room. I hope to have that finished today. In Suncoast Studios news, I’ve been keeping busy with Jeff’s book and have also been trying to help out Millard from time to time. I’m almost done the cover design for the book, then I have to move on to the interior illustrations. For Millard,...
SCS Update
Our transition to Tampa is now pretty much behind us. We now have about 75% of the boxes unpacked and the furniture set up for the most part. I can now begin focusing more and more on Suncoast Studios work, which has begun to pile up over the past few months. We’ve got a ton of projects going on. Currently, I’m finishing up a wedding video edit for a co-worker. I’ll be delivering that tomorrow on DVD. I then need to move on to finishing the graphics for Jeff’s book, then I can finally move back into the new television project and the rendered graphics for Millard. There’s going to be a lot of structuring/restructuring for the studio. I have to get a new business address in Tampa and as soon as that’s done, incorporate. With the documentary for Millard just about ready to get back in to action, I...
he Middle of Everywhere
Wow. I haven’t blogged in about a month and a half. That’s not good. I think the reason I haven’t been writing much in the past six months is largely due to the fact that I had to drive an hour and fifteen minutes to work every morning, then an hour and fifteen minutes back in the evening. You couple that with long hours (60-70 hour weeks), you get one tired Chewbode; one who wants nothing to do with the computer when he gets home. That’s not good either. Well, all that is about to change. This past week Shauna and I finally moved to Tampa. The apartment we got into is really nice and we’ve got a lot more room. So much more in fact, that I’ve decided that I’m re-building the studio to be more suited for a production company. I’m looking into getting a new desk that...
New Section
I’ve added a new section to the Digital Archive called Movies. This is the new framework that will house both my DVD collection (pending) and film reviews, which I have decided to start doing as of yesterday. Currently, there are three movies up there that I’ve seen lately: Man of the Year, Jackass Two, and The Pursuit of Happyness. The only one I’ve actually reviewed though is Man of the Year. The reason I decided to start writing movie reviews was, firstly, so that I could remember the films I’ve seen. There’s nothing more annoying to me as buying or renting a movie that I’ve already seen a long time ago and hated. I also began reviewing for those of you who want to see what a movie is about and what my thoughts are on it (not that I’m a film critic, per se, but sometimes I might have...
