It's been awhile since I posted an update on the office remodel, but the big stuff is complete. The countertops were installed several weeks ago, I've purchased and hung the cabinets and have also gotten the guitars and electronics parts bins on the wall. The only things left to do are: Buy a 70" (or less) sleeper sofa. Buy an area run. Get some art and/or shelving for the walls. Here are some photos: [caption id="attachment_668" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Cari's desk.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_670" align="aligncenter" width="640"] My desk.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_671" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The guitars' new home.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_672" align="aligncenter" width="640"] All of the storage.[/caption]
Category: Studio
Office Remodel Day 68 – Part 2
I measured the room, cut the 2x4s and mounted them today to provide the extra support for the new countertop. Only took a couple of hours. Next up is to paint the wood to match the walls. [caption id="attachment_660" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The new 2x4 supports under Cari's side of the desk system.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_661" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The supports under Matt's side of the desk system.[/caption]
Office Remodel Day 68
It looks like we're near the end of the long road to a remodeled office. Typically, the fabricator comes out and measures everything, you pick the materials you want (we're doing quartz), you get an estimate, you sign off on it, you get an install date, and then they do the install. And that whole process usually takes three to four weeks. For us, they came out and measured... two-and-a-half months ago. That room has been cleaned, painted, a few things re-arranged and completely emptied out. The drawer pedestals have been installed and affixed to the walls. All of this was done the first two weeks after the initial order. Yesterday, we finally got the estimate and signed off. We're expecting the countertop to be delivered in 7 to 12 business days. Today I need to finish building out the supports for the counter to sit on and it's also...
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...
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...
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,...
SCS047 Progress
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.
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...
Life, Work, and Fun
So, a lot has been going on lately. I've been working a decent amount (yeah, big surprise there), but I've also been getting organized in a lot of ways on the personal front too. We went through a new logo redesign for Suncoast Studios a few months ago and recently we've printed up new business cards as a result. The next step is to do a website redesign, which is (kinda) underway right now. Actually, I'm building a development server, which is a first for SCS. Normally I make changes to the live server, but since this is going to be an entire redesign, I didn't want to potentially mess up the live box. The dev environment should be complete this week, and the goal is to have the new site live by November 1. I've also been making headway on app development. I've recently signed up to be an...
