I happened to stumble across my old Tumblr page today. Apparently, I created it around the time I went to L.A. in May 2010 for a short, 4-day trip. I was seriously considering moving out there, and Zeke (Eman) had set me up with a interview at the Ski Channel. The interview didn't go so well, but I had an opportunity to see what L.A. was like and it was a large basis of why I went back out there again in December 2010. Anyway, I pulled all of those Tumblr posts into this blog and deleted the Tumblr account. If you go back to around May 2010, you'll see the posts.
Author: Chewbode
Hot dogs!
Network Re-engineering Complete
Soon after I got this site back up, I decided to re-engineer the internals of the network at the studio. This, ultimately, took this site down again (along with others). The biggest change was the refactoring of the hypervisors' datastores. I have two hypervisors running VMware ESXi. Each hypervisor had a series of internal hard drives that stored all of the data (datastores). When I first implemented the hypervisors, I thought I was clever by having these disks internal, as I was using the OSes of the VMs to mirror across multiple physical disks for redundancy, as well as JBOD the disks for greater storage. The problem was that this wasn't conducive to having the hypervisors redundant, only the hard disks. The only way to fix that was to get a NAS or SAN that supported iSCSI. So, l got an enclosure, populated it, and began the process of building...
Fireworks and Firewalls
Happy Fourth of July, all! Cari and I have spent Saturday running errands, and yesterday was a lazy, movie day. Today is shaping up to be a mixture of the two. I think we're going to go check out the fireworks tonight after I make a huge batch of nachos. Mmm... Why no posts for a while? A little history: There were a bunch of WatchGuard Firebox X700s sitting around, unused for years at my old job. I got a hold of one and upgraded the RAM and CPU, put quieter fans in it, and loaded pfSense on it. It ran great. But, the Ethernet interfaces were all 100MBps, and as I programmed the device more and more for the new house, I realized that moving data from one network segment to another was painfully slow with those interfaces and I began hunting for a new system with gigabit Ethernet. I...
Some New Sticks
Was driving home yesterday through the remnants of Tropical Storm Colin, and there was a crash on the interstate. Waze literally routed me right past the new house, so I slipped into the development and checked the status of the house. Now, there's been a ton of heavy rain the last several days, so I'm sure that's why not much has been accomplished. I didn't get out of the car. From the street with the window rolled down, it seems like some internal first story walls have been roughed in. Also, the studs for the stairs are up. [caption id="attachment_557" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Some studs going in, the staircase is roughed in, and the straps are in for the 2nd floor joists.[/caption]
The Great Walls
We stopped by the house this past Saturday, and the first story exterior walls are up. Check it out: [caption id="attachment_547" align="aligncenter" width="640"] From the front yard, looking at the garage.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_548" align="aligncenter" width="640"] From the front yard, looking at the front porch and entry way.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_549" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Cari and Vira in the "living room".[/caption] [caption id="attachment_550" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Looking toward the master bedroom. Nice view out the window![/caption] [caption id="attachment_551" align="aligncenter" width="640"] From the backyard, looking in through the master bedroom window.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_552" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Looking into the garage from the connected hallway.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_553" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Looking into the garage from the living room.[/caption]
A Little House Update
I met with the construction foreman for the house last Thursday (May 12) and we went over the drawings. We found several things that needed to be corrected, but nothing was too terrible. Tonight, on the way home from work, I decided to swing by and see if any progress had been made and it looks like they delivered some concrete and re-bar for the foundation. The in-slab plumbing looks complete, but I don't see any electrical done yet, so I think that'll need to be done before they pour. We also decided on the exterior colors. We're going with color scheme #3 (Poco w/Slate). Here's a rendering of our actual model with the colors (or, as close as I could guest-imate): It started raining a lot today, and it looks to be this way for a few more days, so I'll probably not check back in on the house until...
Quick Cap Recap
Sunday we went and saw Captain America: Civil War at the AMC West Shore. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone and go into details, but I loved it and would like to see it again in the theater. It was a long movie, but flew by. Yesterday was a big day - I resigned from my day job. I have something lined up. More to come. I'm now going to spend time organizing all of the comics we bought on Saturday.
Full of Renders, Comics, and BBQ
I was able to get the final render for SCS047 off to Carl this morning. I found that supporting an alpha channel in the animation required QuickTime using the Animation codec with a depth Millions+ of colors. Today was Free Comic Book Day. The whole family participated as we visited Emerald City Comics in Pinellas Park and The Comics Club in Brandon. We got a ton of stuff that I'm too tired to list here, but all-in-all, got some fantastic deals and bunch of fun reading material (and games!). We grabbed some food at a BBQ kiosk outside Emerald City and some Mexican at Vallarta's in Brandon later in the day. After all of that, since Melissa was back in town for the last day or two, we took her by the new house. Nothing's changed since the photo's I posted yesterday, but neither of the girls has been to...
House Photos
We swung by the lot today and saw some of the early work. The basic framing where the slab will go is complete and they've run most of the plumbing. [caption id="attachment_524" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Cari standing where the master bedroom will be.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_525" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Standing where the property line is. We'll have a decent backyard and pool.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_526" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Looking out toward the front.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_527" align="aligncenter" width="640"] In the front yard, looking into the lot.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_528" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The plumbing for the master bathroom sinks (foreground), master bathroom shower and tub (midground), and guest bathroom and laundry room (background).[/caption]
All Sorts of News
A lot has happened since my last post. I'll start with the more mundane... I had trouble rendering SCS047 and guessed it was a Windows issue with my main workstation. So, about a week ago, I reformatted the box and re-installed everything. Since this is pretty painful to do, I thought it might be nice to make my C: drive an SSD, so I bought one and installed it. I made my old 1TB HD a secondary drive and installed less-used software to it. I also had a bunch of unused RAM laying around, so I upgraded the machine from 8GB to 16GB. I'll most likely up it to 32GB in the coming months. I got everything shiny and new, fired up LightWave and ... the application crashed again. So, I decided it was time to upgrade from LightWave 10 to LightWave 2015.3, which ended up curing the problems. SO,...
