Made it to another Thanksgiving – yay me!
Dinner tonight was a Prime Rib done sous vide, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, fresh dinner rolls, and a chocolate silk pie.
The prime rib itself was a 5-pounder, so I have plenty left over for dinner tomorrow and some sandwiches over the weekend. 🙂
Listening to "A Thousand Lives" by At 1980
Back on July 4th I sent off a request to the SSA for an itemized list of where I’ve worked and when – mostly just to keep the dates and places in my memoirs straight.
Today they got around to charging me the $92 fee for the service, so I may have a mere 120 more days to wait for this information.
Again, dealing with the government is good for you – it asks you to slow down and take it easy, because getting uptight over it taking a year to do something that should take ten minutes won’t change anything but your heart-rate. 🙂
Listening to "Innocence" by Morgan Willis
So, here I am a bit over a week from when I came down with the 2022 model year of the flu – and I’m pretty much over it I think.
This year’s iteration of the flu was definitely something special, and this was the sickest I think I’ve ever been with it… Luckily it kinda bounced between my sinuses and my throat and never really got into my lungs, so the coughing has been merely annoying.
My treatment regimen was the usual; sleep, hot showers, orange juice, Theraflu, cream of chicken soup, and any time I felt up to it – something cataclysmically spicy. And I worked from home through the whole ordeal, so I didn’t miss any work and nothing fell too far behind.
I did manage to score the bonus sinus infection, so I’m on a week-long course of Doxycycline to clear that up.
I’m pondering taking a few sick days though simply to rest a bit. That and the Doxycycline makes me a bit sick to my stomach…
Listening to "86'" by Kalax
It’s been a while, February 2021 in fact, since my last tussle with a yearly flu bug. But yesterday I finally got my ticket punched by this year’s variant.
Yesterday by lunchtime it was a scratchy throat and a slight fever, today it’s an epic sinus headache, shallow cough, fever, chills, muscle aches – the works.
I’m pushing Theraflu and liquids, downing lots of V8, and enjoying the occasional hot shower with one of those Vicks “VapoShower” tablets which makes my shower into a eucalyptus sauna. I’ve been napping a lot as well, which always helps.
I tend to eat a lot of epically hot / spicy food when I’m ill, and today for lunch I had a Wendy’s chili with extra hot sauce and a few of their spicy chicken nuggets with their delicious Ghost Pepper Ranch sauce…
En garde flu bug!
Outside of that though, my breathing is fine and my blood/oxygen is fine, so I doubt it’s the mysterious virus of unknown origin and is probably just a run of the mill flu bug.
I’ll be over it soon enough, and once again earn my immunity to the yearly creepy crawly.
Listening to "Neon Blood" by Kalax
The view from my guest room this morning… It’ll look like this for a couple of weeks, and then it’ll snow for five months. 🙂
Listening to "Endless Summer" by The Midnight
I’m pondering taking some time off from work and driving back to New London Connecticut to do some site-seeing and reminiscing. It’s a mere 2000 miles, each way; easy if you stop a few times along the way to smell the proverbial roses.
See, the most formative years of my youth happened in and around New London; when I was in the Navy and ‘on my own’ for the first time… This is where I met some really amazing people, lived in my first apartment, got my first new car, met my first girlfriend – and ultimately married her.
It was 1986 when I arrived on the base in Groton. I was 17, and the world was a limitless adventure just waiting to be discovered… And the place kind of encapsulates the best parts of my teenage years.
This is where I came to the realization that I could eat as much ice-cream as I wanted from the container in the freezer, because I bought it, and that a salad at a restaurant wasn’t all that bad. Where I learned that if you stay up all night partying, the next day’s PT sucked ass. And where I got my first taste of adult responsibility because I had someone other than myself to support and take care of.
Groton / New London is old enough that it is pretty much a time capsule; the place is essentially the same as it was when I lived there… The apartment I lived in is still there, the arboretum where I played Lazer Tag is still there, the Crystal Mall is still there… Hell, even the pizza joint, “Pizzarama”, that I used to hang out at with my ex is still there (on Broad St., across the street from the cemetery…)
From New London I made dozens of road trips to various parts of Massachusetts, and even drove as far as Maine a couple of times. I knew every twisty back road in the area intimately from putting countless miles on the several cars I owned while I lived there, and this is where I got my early education in the school of hard knocks.
I had my first vehicular accident at this intersection when I was heading over to pick up my ex at Pete’s mom’s apartment (the red brick places on the left)…
It’s a blind curve to the left and as I inched out to see if anyone was coming, a parts delivery truck going waaaaay too fast appeared in front of my LeBaron and took the license plate off the front bumper… Everyone was fine and all I had to do was screw the license plate back on, but you always remember your first. 🙂
Good times.
But I’m approaching my mid-50’s and it’s been over thirty-five years since those heady teenage years, and I can feel the threads of my past tugging a bit.
“You can never go back”, and I know this, but like the skeleton in The Last Unicorn; “I remember…”
Listening to "Los Angeles" by The Midnight
So after some discussion yesterday morning, I sent my roommate and his relatives off to Rampart Range Road in his jeep while I enjoyed a quiet day at the house – for the most part.
See, it’s typically not a good idea for both of us to be away from civilization at the same time because something always comes up at work and needs our immediate attention, and yesterday was no exception… At about lunchtime my boss calls and says theres a surprise data collect going on at the office and the wifi isn’t working – so everything is pear-shaped.
The “problem” is that we don’t run the building wifi on weekends for security, and haven’t for years, but no one thought to mention the data collect to I.T. so we could enable it.
An easy fix, and as I needed to get a MAC address off of the new HP Z8 for the mac-locked software they need to run on it before Monday morning, I just drove in to take care of both birds.
As soon as I arrived at the office, my roommate calls and had both managed to get lost in the Pike National Forest and declined to top off the tank in the jeep before hitting the trails; so he had about 20 miles of gas left and no idea where he was.
This was another easy fix once he enabled “Find My” on his phone so that I could see where he was from here at the office. I used that to guide him back to the proper road and they made it into Woodland Park with about four gallons left in the tank.
Once I had the office back up and running, I went and washed the car and then decided to go get dinner at Hickory House in Parker…
As I was leaving the subdivision I was flagged down by this older lady who was in a panic; she was at the community mailboxes and looked to be having an issue with someone in a nearby car.
I stopped and she very apologetically explained that she had a terrible fear of spiders and there was one on her car door… I chuckled, pulled over, and got out to face down the pencil eraser sized wolf spider on the glass of her driver’s side door.
With a suitably super-hero flick I sent the monster flying off into a nearby bush – and bid the relieved citizen a nice evening.
The rest of the day came and went, and ended with the roommate’s relatives gushing over how amazing their day was and showing me all the pictures they took.
Colorado is really quite photogenic. 🙂
Listening to "Don't Want to Change Your Mind" by FM-84
Today my roommate’s sister and her husband arrive from out of state for a short visit. I’ve been volunteered to take the lot for a tour up in the mountains tomorrow (Sunday), so I’m sure I’ll have something to post about (and a photo or two) that evening.
We’ll be taking my rocket-barge I guess, as it’s a bit more comfy than the roommate’s Jeep and actually gets slightly better gas milage – as long as I drive it like I’m retired.
Other than that, not a lot to report. Over the last week or two I’ve pretty much just hunkered down and tried to save money wherever possible in expectation of a $1000+ tags and title fee for the 300.
I’ve re-textured a friends avatar in Second Life, which took several days… The avatar is a zebra sort of thing, and 3D stripes suck – but I got it done and said friend is happy, so yay me.
Today I unboxed, configured, and loaded a new computer for the biometrics department at work… I wanted to get it done yesterday, but FedAxe was running late and didn’t drop the machine off at the office until 5pm.
It’s a new(er) HP Z8 G4 workstation, meaning it’s somewhat on-par with my old gaming rig that my roommate eventually sold to work to pay off his new Mac Studio. It’s a dual 6136 Xeon machine with 512 gigs of ECC DDR4, and a Quadro P6000 in it… Not too shabby for a bit over $4000.
It’s a ‘refurb’, and being as we need it for science-y stuff I had to do a full hardware certification on it once I got it configured and loaded, which took about four hours this morning. But it passed and I’m back home for the remainder of the day.
Listening to "Escaping the Void" by Timecop1983
Given the insanity in the world right now with spiking energy costs, ill-conceived federal spending, and generally piss-poor state government timing, I’m once again cutting a lot of my usual expenses to weather the storm. This ranges from shutting down / cancelling fun stuff I do online to adjusting my grocery spending and even how I run appliances here at the house.
For example, I’ve trimmed my weekly grocery bill from around $120 to around $60 by clipping coupons, taking advantage of in-store deals, and only purchasing essentials… No more deli salads, fancy lunch meats and cheeses, flavored seltzer, and pre-made meals; it’s all about five dollar tv-dinners and long-term storage things like canned goods now.
I’ve got about 90 days of reserves food-wise, and just recently finished eating all of the “expires in 2022” stores so everything in the pantry is good to at least mid-2023.
Interestingly, King Soopers (my local go-to for groceries) recently started a service called “Boost” which is a $95 / year thing that’s intended to offer cheap grocery delivery and in-store deals – but it also offers double the gas points for groceries. So, today I put twenty-two gallons of $3.39 high-test in the 300 after taking advantage of the $0.90 off a gallon for buying groceries.
If I time it right, I can tank up my gigantic planet-destroying hemi for pre-Biden prices and either save a few bucks or drive a bit more for the fun of it.
Speaking of that gigantic planet-destroying hemi, I need to mention that the only reason I have it is because I live five miles from the office and only go in every other day during the week. So, compared to someone driving a hybrid back and forth to Boulder every day, I’m not even moving the carbon footprint needle.
My utility costs have also gone up quite a bit thanks to the state government deciding to turn off 90% of all fossil fuel use by 2024 – but not really having a plan for how they will do that without everyone freezing to death or lighting the hundred year old power grid on fire… Regardless of hoi polloi problems, they press on and the expense of “going green” is showing up on everyone’s bill… Which is fine, because inflation and recession have been redefined away and spiking PPI is a myth or something – so why not raise everyone’s utility costs?
And because everyone is supposed to get an electric car, which is yet more load on the above-mentioned hundred year old grid and hit-or-miss green systems, the local utility is switching everyone over to time of day billing. This is to try and bribe everyone to turn off the A/C in the afternoon and use their dryers and dishwashers late at night so that when everyone gets home from work and plugs in the car, the state doesn’t melt down from the load.
This means I now do laundry Saturday night versus Saturday morning; not a huge hardship. But it does save a few pennies due to the reduced electric cost in the evening. I’ve also adjusted the washer to run the spin cycle longer to extract more water in order to hopefully not run the electric dryer for as long.
All in all I will survive the 2022 insanity just like I survived 2020 and 2021, it’s just getting a bit tiresome and I’m getting a headache from all of the facepalming.
Listening to "It's Not the Night" by The Cars
I despise mayonnaise, and that goes double for the “Better Living Through Modern Chemistry” liquid fat analog that passes for mayo at a fast food place. So, you can imagine how often I’m disappointed by a drive-through – which is a contributing factor to how rarely I’ll stop at a Burger Barn.
Today I had to drive into the office real quick, and on the way back I was going to stop and get a couple of sodas. But gas station sodas are expensive, it was close to dinner time, and I drive right past a Burger King on the way home… So…
While waiting for the drive through to catch up with the Suburban full of kids, I got a chance to peruse the menu and, as I tend to prefer bird over beef, I settled on a BBQ Cheddar Chicken Sandwich. BBQ is usually safe because mayo and BBQ sauce aren’t a good mix, but just in case I asked for “no mayo” and was told the sandwich didn’t come with the stuff.
Except that it does. And they did – because everything has mayo on it these days… I’m surprised the soda doesn’t come with mayo.
Anyway, it’s not the end of the world and I’m not going to explode or anything. I just left off the top bun and the insulating lettuce layer.
But with all of the “health conscious” noise these fast food places make, you would think the first thing to go would be the 200 calories of fake mayo artery-hardener on every sandwich… But nope – it’s all about the fake burgers that they put the fake mayo on these days.
Listening to "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel
I guess it was about 1980 or so, on one of my routine trips to the local book store on Main Street in Longmont, that I spotted my first Xanth novel.
Back then towns actually had Main Streets and they were actually the main street through the town – as odd as that is now. And most of the stores along the street in Longmont were 1800’s era shared-wall brick hallways about a hundred feet deep and maybe 15 feet wide… Essentially two-story mercantile closets.
I need to detail the book store as well, as they have pretty much gone the way of the dodo in the current millennium… Book stores back then tended to be mostly hobby shops; someone with a joy of reading would open up a shop and fill it full of physical tomes – most of which they had read. The one in Longmont was a maze of mismatched shelves holding a visual cacophony of books in disjointed piles that constituted a “system” only decipherable by the old gnome who ran the place.
This book store always reminded me of a cave made of books; it was dimly lit via the two small front windows and a smattering of early-industrial hanging lights, was preternaturally cool even in the hight of summer, and had a pleasant smell of old books, older bricks, and pipe tobacco.
Anyway, this was where I had found my first copy of “The Last Unicorn” by Peter Beagle a few years before, and since then I had been coming in every week or two to pick up a new book to vicariously live through. I’d picked up Jack Chalker’s early Well World books here, as well as the start of John Varley’s Gaea trilogy. But for this entry it was a chance encounter with Piers Anthony’s “A Spell for Chameleon” that got me into the Xanth series.
What really intrigued me with the book was the cover art, done by Michael Whelan. It made the book really stand out in the piles and it had the look of a story being told – and I wanted to know more about that story.
Over the rest of the early 80’s I picked up the Xanth novels as they came out; The Source of Magic, Castle Roogna, Centaur Isle, Ogre Ogre, Night Mare, Dragon on a Pedestal, and Crewel Lye.
In 1986 I went into the Navy and this more or less ended my association with the Xanth series as I got into esoteric comics, girlfriends, BBSing, and the Internet, in that order. And through all of this there was my own fantasy settings for my various role playing games that I spent a lot of free time working on.
Well, here we are in the bright and shiny future, and a month or so ago I decided I’d read the Xanth series from chronological cover to chronological cover; a daunting task as there are, as of this writing, 46 Xanth novels.
So I picked up the entire series in Kindle format and have been plugging away as time permits… I’m currently a few pages into “Night Mare,” which was probably my favorite of the nine books I’d read all those years ago.
Normally I don’t re-read books, just like I don’t normally re-watch movies; my memory is good enough that after the first time through I retain all of it and re-reading/watching it is mostly a waste of time. But it’s been, what, over 40 years since I read those early Xanth novels? And while I can still recall various plot points in them, the finer details are gone. So it’s been a pleasure to dive back into the setting.
Piers also has a very simplistic style, so the novels are literary candy and generally just a lot of casual fun to read.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to outside of work, cars, second life, etcetera, etcetera. 🙂
Listening to "The NeverEnding Story" by Limahl
For about a year now, the local Chrysler dealership has been pestering me to come buy this 300 sedan they’ve had on the lot since fall of last year; it’s the “S” model, white with black leather interior, has all of the bells and whistles, and it’s powered by a huge gas-guzzling hemi V8.
See, right before I bought the Kicks, I’d gone and test drove the car thinking I might buy it. But that the time the dealer markup was too much and I just couldn’t justify the cost… So I instead went with the super cheap Kicks to hold me over until the new Z came out.
Well, here we are about a year later, the 2023 Z is nowhere to be found – even in Japan – and Chrysler kept offering me better and better deals on the 300 and more and more money for the Kicks… For some weird reason, there just isn’t much market for a car that gets 16MPG down hill with a tail wind, so anyone who shows interest gets pestered.
After my mountain drive in the Kicks I was really jonesing for a car with more hustle, and this morning I caved and drove over to the dealership to look at the 300 again…
The car had acquired a whopping 18 miles on the odometer, and I added another two on the test drive – and decided to take it home.
So, yeah – another 300, though this one is ten years newer than the last one.
This is basically a mafia staff car; it’s full of top-grain leather and lots of technology – including a dozen speakers and a huge amp… So it’s very ‘adult’… But lurking under the hood is a massive slab of Detroit iron that really just wants to have fun.
And I’m pretty happy. 🙂
Listening to "Drive" by The Cars
A quick video walkthrough of my latest sim build; Selentia.
This is my personal hidey-hole in Second Life. My roommate owns the sim next door, and I themed that one as well to make it contiguous.
Listening to "Heartbeat" by The Midnight
My neighborhood has both a regular trash service and a recycling service, each with a different can.
I generate so little trash that I don’t really participate… I mean, by each Wednesday morning I have about a quarter-can of refuse to put out, and if I split it all out I’d have two eighth-cans.
My neighbors though? They need 3-4 cans and usually have a mound of other stuff sitting next to them that won’t fit in the smaller recycling can – usually a pile of Amazon cardboard and random packing material from other delivery services… Pet food delivery, meal delivery, clothing delivery, grocery delivery; it makes one wonder if they ever leave the house.
Anyway, the problem is they like to put out the trash Tuesday afternoon because the trash trucks come at around 10am – and that’s just too damn early. And, invariably, on Tuesday night a good breeze will blow though and evenly distribute the recycling all over the neighborhood…
So, the neighbors get to feel good because they’re “recycling” and saving the planet! Meanwhile their “recycling” is filling up the little woodland area in front of my house.
The icing on this cake of disappointment is one of these neighbors is a loud and proud “Eco Warrior” who will go on and on and on (and on) about global warming and how horrible humanity is… Meanwhile her trash is everywhere, she drives an urban assault vehicle big enough to require its own zip-code, and runs her A/C 24/7 – rain or shine.
It makes me wonder if this is common, and if it is just how much attention I should be giving these people.
Listening to "Chasing Yesterday" by FM-84
Yesterday I posted about the Pink Floyd show I saw in 1994, which was notable as being the last Pink Floyd tour ever.
A few years prior to this I got to see the Yes “Union” tour… It was May 9th, 1991 at the now long-gone McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, and was the first and last time all of the 70’s and 80’s band members were on the same stage.
I had just gotten back from I-CON in Long Island and had a few spare dollars in my pocket, so I took advantage of the situation and went to a show. My ex had hooked up with a couple of guys across town while I was at I-CON and she wasn’t around for the show, so I saw this one solo.
All in all the show was amazing and I’m glad I got the opportunity to see the whole band in one place. I got to see Yes again for the “Fly From Here” tour in 2012, but the lineup did not include Jon Anderson… So while the show was really, really good, it wasn’t quite the same. 🙂
Listening to "Lift Me Up" by Yes
It is June 18th, 1994, just after sunset…
I’m standing in a throng of 69,788 people on the field of Mile High Stadium; the scent of pot thickly fills the air. Ahead of us at one end of the stadium is a massive stage, above it hovers an equally massive circle of lights suspended by a huge arch, and all around the upper reaches of the stadium are huge sets of speakers…
“Astronomy Domine” begins to echo through the stadium, the lights on the stage come up to reveal the band, and the crowd goes nuts…
It’s the Denver leg of the Pink Floyd “Division Bell” tour… The last tour Pink Floyd would ever perform.
I saw this show with Michi from the BBS, and it was pretty amazing… All told it was about two and a half hours of standing, though I didn’t really notice – to me it all seemed to be over far too quickly.
The most memorable bit for me was the second encore song, “Run Like Hell” as the intro guitar riff flowed around the stadium from the speakers surrounding the audience. The whole show was in “surround sound”, but Run Like Hell really put it to use.
It was a helluva show; I’m glad I got to see it.
Listening to "High Hopes" by Pink Floyd
I’m sitting here at work, working (as one tends to do at work), and I’m playing my ‘old man’ music… Today is a selection of old Rush from the recent 40th anniversary reissue of “Moving Pictures”.
Moving Pictures came out in ’81… I remember picking it up at the record store shortly after it was released, zipping it up in the front of my jacket (it was February in Colorado), and biking home as fast as I could. This was so I could put the album on before my parents got home, so that I could listen to it with some volume.
The opening chords of “Tom Sawyer” literally stopped the world for me.
But, while the album is chock-full of amazing music, as a Rush album tends to be, it is the dystopian “Red Barchetta” that sticks with me the most all these years later.
I was a serious motor-head growing up, and the late 70’s and 80’s tended to have an undercurrent of dystopia to it, so the song instantly lit my imagination.
The song’s lyrics tell a story set in a future in which a “Motor Law” has banned cars. The narrator’s uncle has kept one of these now-illegal cars (the titular red Barchetta) in pristine condition for roughly 50 years, and is hiding it at his secret country home – a farm from before the Motor Law was enacted.
Every Sunday the narrator commits a “weekly crime” of evading omnipresent surveillance, hoping a cargo train to get outside ‘the wire’, and sneaking out to his uncle’s farm to go for a drive in the countryside.
During one such drive, he encounters a “gleaming alloy air car” that begins to chase him along the roads. A second such vehicle soon joins the pursuit, which continues until the narrator drives across a one-lane bridge that is too narrow for the air cars. The song ends with the narrator returning safely to his uncle’s farm.
Kid-me in 1981 thought the song was an excellent musical story!
Adult-me in 2022 thinks the song was prophetic and that I should buy a very analog sports car and hide it away before the Church of Climate Change enacts the inevitable “Motor Law.”
Listening to "Limelight" by Rush
Long, long ago software came on physical media – actual floppies, CDs, and DVDs – and I’ve held on to a lot of it that I’ve purchased over the years.
I still have things like Windows NT 4 server install floppies, a boxed copy of OS/2, and even my old Amiga kickstart and workbench disks. But without period hardware for said period software, they aren’t very interesting outside of “I have these”.
With all of the old Macs I have, having a collection of similarly old Mac software is more interesting because I can actually install it.
And in that regard, here’s my PowerPC Macintosh shelf…
From left to right there’s Mac Office 2004, which is PPC.
The orange cardboard has OS8.5 and 8.6 CDs, the jewel case has OS9.0 CDs, the thin white folder is OSX 10 public beta, 10.0, and 10.1 (the folder is from my purchase of 10.1), then 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 (the universal PPC/Intel version), and the DVD on the far right is a 10.6 PPC Beta which never made it to the final 10.6 version.
Finally there’s a copy of iLife ’09, which was the universal PPC / Intel version. The last PPC software Apple ever made.
All told, that shelf spans the entire PowerPC decade; 1998 to 2009.
Listening to "A Thousand Lives" by At 1980
Still on my personal quest to nail down specific dates and places for my memoirs; everything gets a bit murky after twenty-plus years, and I’m a stickler for detail.
Today I discovered that the social security administration, for the low low fee of $92, will send you an itemized list of every place you’ve worked, where that was, and when.
Of course the SSA is a government agency, so there’s a hefty form to fill out (SSA-7050-F4) and then mail in. And now I have to go procure an envelope and a stamp.
I’ve not seen a physical un-postmarked stamp in like a decade.
Once they get the form, and charge me the fee, it can apparently take up to 120 days for them to send the data back to me – via the mail, of course… Dealing with the government on occasion is good for a person; gets you to slow down and enjoy the process. 🙂
I’ve also started the process for my OMPF from my time in the Navy – which is another lengthy form – online this time – from archives.gov.
See, my military days were 32 to 36 years ago; before smartphones and digital cameras and social media were memorizing every aspect of your life for you. So, while I know the big dates, like the day in July I raised my right hand and enlisted, and the day in October when I drove through the front gate of the Groton Sub Base base for the last time – the rest is kind of a blur.
Anyway, now that the zombie virus has abated, the archives folks are back up to speed and handling cases not directly involving death – so I sent that e-form off today.
Listening to "LA Late At Night" by Timecop1983
I’ve had a few odd art requests from various acquaintances over the last week, and as they seem to be happy with them, I’ll post there here for posterity.
First was my HR director at work; he’s been working on a roleplaying game called “Athia” for like a decade now, and it has recently been published. He’s had all sorts of art made for the book, and last week asked if I could arrange a few of the banner images into a poster for him.
I said sure.
The way art usually works is that people don’t know what they want – they only know what they don’t want, once they see it of course. So, any time someone asks you to do a thing for them, be prepared to do it over and over and over and over.
To avoid this as much as possible I never really charge anyone for anything I do, because people tend to be a lot less picky when they feel bad for making you work for free. So I got away with only redoing the poster once… So far…
The first one was to-the-letter of what he asked for; “Organize the banners into a decent sized poster while making sure the banners are the central theme”. I explained that the banners were wide and narrow for his book, and due to this would be about 7″ wide and 3″ tall when printed without some trickery to make them bigger – but even then the aspect ratios were sort of set in stone… So he was looking at them being stacked artfully as the upper limit of what was available for free.
He agreed to this and sent me the site for where he would be getting the poster printed, with the 36″ x 24″ size and aspect highlighted.
And given the okay and the working dimensions, I did this:
He was pretty happy with the layout, but the “Athia” world is apparently frozen tundra or something, so he asked if I could do the same layout but make it look ‘colder’…
He was pretty happy with this one too – and then asked if he could get both done as 24″ x 18″… Which is a different aspect ratio and would require redoing everything – of course.
I explained this (along with the redoing everything part) and have not heard back on if he really wants me to do it…
Then on Friday someone I know in SecondLife, out of the blue, asked me if I could make a 3D model for them. How they found out I do 3D stuff I assume came from my roommate volunteering me – which happens on occasion.
The request was for a jukebox – specifically a late 60’s Wurlitzer “Americana II” – to hold a jukebox script that people can use to play music. He was kind enough to include a link to the machine in question at least.
So I set bout finding some old photos of the thing, along with a manual that had some rough dimensions, and banged this out in Blender…
This had to be done a couple of times to get the geometry complexity and physics down low enough to not be a problem for SL, and then I had to argue with SL’s weird implementation of emissive masking for the subtle lighting, but it eventually worked out.
The model, at 1:1 scale, fully textured with specular and bump-mapping, and with an LOD that makes it visible more than 5 meters away, weighs in at 5 P.E. Not bad.
And that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to for the last week – outside of work at least.
Listening to "Leave It" by Yes