RIHAHN.COM

Month: November 2018

  • End of year bonus!

    My company does end-of-year profit sharing, so the check before Christmas is usually bit bigger than the rest.

    Well, the last two years have been pretty slow as our marketing department has been somewhat asleep at the wheel for years now (we’re working on fixing this), so I wasn’t really expecting anything this year… But I got a small bonus anyway. 🙂

    It definitely helps with my ten year plan.

    I still need to invoice for all of the artwork I’ve done as well, being as I’m doing that on the side under my own company. It’s not much as I’m giving my CFO a pretty massive discount, but right now I’ll take anything I can get; houses aren’t cheap…

    Other than that, I’ve spent the week attempting to re-re-write the 20 year old time tracking software we’ve been using here at work since 2003. 

    It’s open-source PHP code running on a Unix LAMP stack and was written in 1998 by Peter D. Kovacs in PHP 3 and using MySQL 3.22. The application was taken over by Dominic J. Gamble at Advancen in 2002 and moved to PHP 4 and MySQL 4… 

    Unix doesn’t stand still for very long — so I re-wrote large parts of it in 2014 to bring it up to speed for Ubuntu 14 which was using PHP 5 and MySQL 5.6.

    Well Ubuntu 14 is about to fall off of the support list, and PHP 5 is EOL on December 31st. Ubuntu 18 is the new LTS (long-term service) and it uses PHP 7.2 and MySQL 8 — both of which are incredibly different from the older versions… I can’t even use the same password hash algorithm between MySQL 5.6 and 8.

    Basically our time tracker will need a complete re-write to work with the new services, which is probably more effort than 20 year old cobbleware warrants.

    So now I get to convince the powers that be that they need to use something else.

    The complication with this of course is that there is 15 years of familiarity with this application, and that makes change really scary.

  • Update…

    Let’s see here.

    The Murano is about to tick over to 3000 miles — not too bad for having bought it with 13 miles on the clock back in July.

    It’s been a fantastic vehicle so far; super comfy to drive, very capable in any weather, wonderful amenities like the Bose sound system and the leather interior, etc. I really like it. I’ve even come to terms with the CVT in it…

    Speaking of, I need to schedule the first oil change and maintenance for it… I’ll do that today.

    Back on the first of November I signed another 18 month lease on the condo, so I’ll be in DTC (south Denver) for at least another year and a half. The condo is still really great too, though I do wish I had a bit more time and money to enjoy the location.

    Not that I’m doing poorly in those aspects, I just have a few long-term goals to hit and that means being frugal with both time and money.

    I’ve been part-timing my art skills to help offset the upcoming house costs and doing a lot of graphic design work. It’s fun, and I like spending time slaving over a hot Wacom — I just wish my clients were a bit more solid on what they want versus me stabbing in the dark over and over and over until I hit something they like.

    It’s the whole reason I stopped taking commissions back in the late 90’s; I have an allergy to doing the same thing over and over again.

    One of my other clients has me making icons for their mobile app, and I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that I’m the wrong person for making icons… They’re too small and too fiddly. And the existing design is two shades of green and white at 100 x 100 pixels, which simply doesn’t leave much room for creativity let alone communicating anything to the user.

    Give me 4-color process, 300 dpi, and at least business card size any day…

    Here’s an example of a recent marketing project.


    This is the front of an A2 card that encloses a 16G USB key that’s shaped like an actual key. Said key contains some promotional materials and whatnot, and is of a decent enough size to actually be useful — so it has some intrinsic value.

    It was a fun project. 🙂

    I’ve also done a couple of corporate Christmas cards, about two dozen business card designs, some thank you cards, a certificate, two booth designs, a roll-up banner, a dozen flyers of various sizes, a sample WordPress website design, and some other random stuff in the last six months… I should probably put together a portfolio.

    It’s not a huge income, but it’s enough to warrant the hassles and it’s helping to hit my ten year plan…

  • Some new art…

    Valinye in the Lower City of Aedis

    This goes with the short-lived attempt at a cyberpunk-esque roleplay setting I was creating with some friends.

    I got the setting backstory done, all of the races and whatnot, and even half of the build completed before enthusiasm dried up.

    Basically it was determined that it’s just far too much work, hassle, and expense to keep doing these settings in Second Life. So without saying as much, we all just quietly let the idea drop.

    Oh well; I got a setting to tell stories with and some neat art out of the effort. 🙂