Standard Saturday

Here's a boring, day-in-the-life-of post... Going to do a little yard work today - trim the palm tree, weed the plant beds. Then I need to look at the clothes dryer. The drum's not turning, so hopefully it's not a burned out motor (I think it is, tho). I also need to complete re-edging the den after painting a couple of weeks ago. That won't take too long. As part of that remodel, I need to talk to a cabinetry contractor about some supports for the new quartz worksurface that's being built, which should arrive in the next couple of weeks. I'll also need to decide on the wall cabinets and get an estimate from him on hanging them. Grilling is on the docket for today as well.

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Lots of Digging

It's been quite a while since I've posted up here. I've created a reminder on my phone to post at least once per week, so we'll see if that helps me or not. Over the past two weeks, I've finally gotten on the Minecraft bandwagon. Yeah, I know it's late, but I tried playing the game about 10 years ago, and for some reason I wasn't interested. But, I revisited it and have to say that it's really been a great mental relaxation game. Nothing too heavy. Simple. It's been fun playing on a server with a couple of friends, which helps too. I'm still working on the lighting project for the kitchen cabinets. I'm really hoping to be done with the entire project by the end of September. Decided to use a Raspberry Pi and a microcontroller, which is new for me. It's taking more time than expected, but...

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McDonald’s Update

I brought the Toyota to Walmart to get the obligatory oil change and it looks like it'll be about a two-hour wait. That's fine with me, though. I'm just sitting at the in-store McDonald's, having a cup of coffee. I was able to go measure the box containing the patio furniture and it looks like it'll just barely fit in the car. After reading some news articles, I'll hit the floor and scout for a few more things.

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2010 L.A. Trip

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.

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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...

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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,...

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