Pasithea

Worked 25 hours yesterday. Slept 14. It's now Saturday and I just woke up. Time for a shower and some food. o_O

Just watched a film made in Secondlife by members of the team here. Pretty friggin' impressive stuff. Talked to some of the guys who worked on it and was able to give/get some extra cool information.
I'll post a link to the film when it's available online. In the meanwhile, check out http://alt-zoom.com Especially you, inaki Consider the possibilities of combining this with FCTV. :)

Wow. I've been so busy looking for a job and doing art and stuff I hadn't really thought about it.

E needed some references for my job so I listed all the people that said I could use them as references and wrote a little about my relationship with each of them and now I'm all weepy and crying. I really fucking miss my team. I was always so happy working at GPB. Thirty hour days are no problem when you are having fun and love the people you're working with. That just kind of hit me, damnit. The team at Allied Video was the same way. Everyone was awsome and I just totally loved them and it was hard to leave that place. I still keep in touch with Jim now and then but that was a small team, only a couple of people. GPB was like a family and almost everyone there is totally awsome. I miss them. :( Maybe once I'm working again I'll see if they want to meet up and have lunch or something.

I can't believe I'm this weepy over something like this. It wasn't just the mission, that place made me really believe in myself.

Bah. Okay, I decided to work from home on this project for work because I realized I could and maybe I won't get interrupted (I had a looooooooooooong day)

Technically, yesterday was my last day as a member of the GPB team but I'm still using my office there for this GPS stuff and when I got there today, I found chaos and spend several hours reigning in the madness. Technically, it's no longer my job but someone needed to take care of stuff ASAP and what I need to get done has to be done by Monday morning.

Anyhow, I knew MacOS supports X-11 and so I made sure I could ssh onto the machine at work and then came home, downloaded the X11 stuff and got it running (Okay, like 3 mouse-clicks. It's a Mac after all!) Also downloaded netbeans and did some quick code-flags so I can I work on my machine from logfiles instead of communcating with the serial port (Designed the program with this all along since there's only one serial port and two developers) Netbeans is almost bearable on my Mac. Still a bit slow but compared to sshing to a 400Mhz StinkPad with Fedora on it, it's massively faster (and prettier! Java looks cute on OS-X!)

I do, however, have one complaint. The icons for X11 and Netbeans are butt-ugly. The class with all my other mac icons. Okay, X11 has a lame excuse. It's mostly being used by unixgeeks who feel more l33t when they have a retro-looking icon but netbeans (and the Java one isn't very exciting either) don't have any real excuse. Sun is a big freakin' company. They could spend $100 getting someone to design a decent icon that goes with the OS you're running it on.

Ohwell. I just needed to take a break from thread messenging. Back to work slave!

Blah. Too many projects, too much to do. Commanding the satellite is time-consuming but dull and interruptive. It's impacting my programming time. I brought extra food with me, I think I'm likely going to end up pulling an all-nighter here to get this Java app ready for demo tomorrow. I've got all the core stuff working but now I need to put the pieces together and make them pretty. In theory that's an hour job, but I know better than that. Also, building with only some badly spaghettied Matlab code, and no spec is proving a bit of a challenge.

Also, Lok wrote me back and asked if I was ready to do some coding. I mailed him back and said sure, so long as it's not needed by 10AM tomorrow. That's good at least. I haven't had time to put out any more resumes and if we're down to a trial by fire, with him, I've got whatever job I want there. Coding is the easy part. Although I seem to be setting up my strangest business relationship yet with him. It's very adversarial and unusually gamey. A subject that deserves its own post when I get time.

Haha. Believe it or not, I'm also still finding time to sketch and animate. I did ~50 frames yesterday morning before heading up to GPB and I've been doing sketches waiting for the train and in slack time during passes.

So. Yesterday I sent out my first two resumes just because I can't count on us getting the next grants. It's a bummer looking for new work. I love my team here. It's been the Anti-Dilbert environment. Everyone knows what they're doing and likes doing it. Anyhow, one of the places I sent to I had a really good feeling about. I liked the energy the ad was written with. (And it was on Craiglist, so no e-mail rape from Monster) I got an e-mail a couple hours later asking for a phone call. I said I was free before 3 today (I'm on swing shift for command today) and got a phone call about ten minutes later. After a rather cool phone interview, I had a live one scheduled for this morning at 9AM.... Wait for it.... With Simon Lok. Oh yeah! Someone crazier than me! ^_^ I am so into this! FreeBSD development with a goal of undercutting Cisco and the like. >:D Smaller faster better and focused on good UI design! I wish GPB could last forever but this doesn't sound like a bad second.

The interview this morning went pretty well, though I stumbled on the most embarassingly easy of questions (How do you get data from a CGI variable with Perl CGI. Anyone with 20 seconds to spare and a web browser could answer that one). The rest of it... I was a little puzzled bye how simple the questions were. I mean they were really really basic things on code optimization and algorithms. Started to worry they were giving me the soft touch or something. I wish I'd brought some code to discuss. So much easier to talk about code with code. Anyhow, I spent two hours there and talked with a half dozen people.

Anyhow, now I'm at work 3 hours early which is a good excuse to get ahead on this Java app. >:D

I was going to post a long witty reparte' about the joys and horrors (mostly horrors) of the Coconut Colada, A party in a box that we found at BigLots for $2.99 a couple weeks ago buuuuuuut. Washingtonpost.com has something in it that consistently crashes Safari under 10.2 and I blindly clicked on a link that went there and it killed my masterpiece essay. Doubtless, this was one of the great works on the wonders of cheap booze found in a mylar sack in a cardboard box for three dollars, but this epic is now lost.

Instead I post some whimpy little note that I got officially told my contract now extends through at least the end of October and 50/50 on whether or not it continues beyond that. But, the closer I get to new years, the better my odds for never leaving this place. (Which is awsome because I love this place!)

Also, I got shiny new 64-bit libraries to play with today to deal with files sizes > 2.147G so now I get back to coding! :)

-me

Looks like it's official. My job ends at the end of September. :/

Last night when I went to bed we were less than 20 days from launch. Today they are removing the vehicle from the top of the rocket and it will be into the second quarter before it is ready for flight again. :(

I don't know why this has me so depressed. Technically it means I just got a six month extension on all the things I wanted to add to the software to make it even better. I have another six months to comb through my systems and make sure that they will run absolutely flawlessly and that my department will look fantastic.

I was ready to see her fly. :( I've been looking forward to launch for two years. The past few months I've worked harder and more seriously than I ever have at any job I've ever held. I've tested and retested, aggressively queried users and got feedback and done everything to make my part of the project the most successful I could possibly be. Everyone has worked hard.

I guess maybe I should be proud... My software was used (in part) to help them validate their concern about the hardware and fix it before it launched. If the parts were to fail in-flight, the consequences and cost would be much worse. Somehow that isn't very comforting though. I didn't realize how wound up I was for launch. I'm left feeling sort of battered and empty. I left workf or the afternoon because I realized I probably wasn't going to be productive for the rest of the afternoon... Also... What was to be my final pre-flight software approval testing was scheduled for today. QA cancelled it. *sigh* I don't have time to be depressed like this.

Oooh! I got a job. :)

Well, okay, I big on and successfully obtained sort of a comission to do pieces of a fake comic for student film. A color comic-book cover and two or three pages inside it. The catch, of course, is that it needs to be done by next Friday. Pays a whopping $25. :)

Still. I feel like its an accomplishment. I showed a portfolio, and displayed knowledge of the output media and arranged a schedule and beat out my competition. Little things like this make me feel like I could possibly make it as an independent commercial artist one of these days, though I'm still about two years away from that at the minimum. A credit on someone else's project is very helpful though. I think on eof the major things lacking in my experience is collaborative projects.

Anyhow... Winter is over! I can tell. My productivity is back up. I'm now at full capacity on projects. Making progresses on the project with paka even if our meetings keep getting clobbered by my job. Making TONS of progress on Free as a Bird I'm going to cut a rough sound-track after school tonight so I can present the animatic in class tomorrow. During class, I'll work out the concept stuff for this comic-project. I've already got a bunch of good ideas for it and the whole 'in-depth-study' of Preston Blair is really returning huge dividends. After class tomorrow, I'll upload the roughs and get input from the director on what he likes/doesn't like and get his comic done. In the interim, I'll build the storyboard for WireHead, and knock out the woodcutter and some other ideas for the project with Paka.

I have some garden work and housework to do Sunday and then its pure creative time after that. I should be able to knock out the guy's comic stuff in a few hours and get final approval from him, well ahead of his Friday deadline. I think I can get a final cleanup of the Free As a Bird storyboard and timing. From there it's just a bunch of drawing. :)

Before I start on that drawing Free as a Bird I think I'll switch gears and knock out the video of roon's magic act and the compilation video of stuff for my parents so I can get those off my task list. If I can keep up the pace I've been at this week, I should be able to get all those done and have only Free as a Bird, WireHead, and the project with Paka on my 'to do' list. No problem! :) I've cut down a LOT of projects this week.