2022-01-20:

fri:
Work stuff, a task for Kevin that both Christina and I did. I wrote back saying I would do it, I had a machine set up for the test he wanted anyway. But apparently "somehow I missed all of your responses to Kevin until the last one, didn't see where you said you would do it until after the fact" but hey, no big deal.
Testing that one thing they wanted me to do, so I did it. At least, as far as I could tell, as still no one got back to me about what exactly all their gibberish meant. I logged in and out a few times after releasing some jobs, and Joe said sure, that was about right. So whatever.
Worked on the fan. Is it odd this is the best looking thing I've ever made, art wise? Look at this thing.

Here's the Samus thing I was talking about last week, and why it would be difficult to model her to scale based on the wooden figure I have.


click for bigger image

I started at the bottom and put the feet in the right place. Then I scaled the image of Samus so the knees were in the right place. I figured that would take care of the whole thing. Not so much. Look at how far above the head the model is! So I dropped in the person to the right, and did the same thing. I wanted to see if she just had really bizarre proportions or what, so I would compare her to a real human. That's a bit better, at least her waist matches up, but she's still a head taller. I mean sure, people can be taller or shorter I understand that and I suppose I could try and model each piece to fit but it would look like an odd, really stretched out Samus. Here's a closeup of the person and the doll, I started trying to make the head the same size this time to see if the model human and the real human would at least have some sort of proportionality. Not so much there either.


click for bigger image

It's all wrong as well, I guess something else is going to have to be done.

Xbox came today. Went home at lunch because it was delivered to the front door, something anyone delivering packages should know not to do anymore. I didn't want it stolen so I went home to get it. It exists! It was brand new, still sealed. Nice. Made sure it worked and went back to work.
Shopping, then saw my parents. No movie this week.
Came back here, checked out the xbox. I'm astonished how much better it looks, is it just a 4k thing or what? It looks way better, and I didn't expect that at all. At least in Warframe, meaning other games can show a similar improvement. Will they? Eh, who is to say, but at least we know what's possible at this point.
Faster too, even menus opening is faster. That I did expect.
Did the game, Sean did come up with plot. We didn't get through the whole thing, we've been thrown into some small community in Alaska that has taken up magic. I don't blame them in the least. I have no idea how it's going to play out from here, I'll have to see what the quran says about magic.

Sat:
Moved stuff to the new xbox. This proved to be a mistake because I should have done the simple experiment first. I could have just taken the SSD and moved it over. I didn't want to at first in case it got wiped out when I plugged it in but the new one picked it up just fine. I had left one thing on there, and it was fine. Well, live and learn.
Did some blender work. The latest video I watched in the series was like when you discover a huge difficulty spike a game and think "where did this super hard boss come from all of a sudden?"



I didn't do all the embellishments in the video he went into sculpting with no introduction and while I've done it for the farcian guy I made a long time age, that was a long time ago! So I would need to watch intro videos to that again. But I think it came out okay.

Checked my games on xbox to make sure the save data was there. Erased them from the old one. Now to discover a purpose for it.
Watched more The Good Place and then did some Control. No xbox tonight, the radon at Sean's is really high. In the winter too, odd. Very cold today, a bit of snow too.

Sun:
Watched the rest of the Blender videos in the list. I still have a lot to learn.
Cleaned up a bit around here, some boring stuff.
The usual sites and videos.
Played some Control and watched more The Good Place.
Dreaded the storm that's supposedly coming. A foot of snow in a day? No thank you.

Mon:
But we got it. Cleaned the driveway out first thing. It was pretty horrible. Especially the end. But my little electric guy got through it, and that's the important part.
Watched more The Good Place.
Then, and this is key, cleaned the driveway again. It wasn't so bad on its own, but the end was all plugged up again so it needed to be done.
More The Good Place.
Got two calls while watching. Not unusual I suppose, but they happened within two minutes of each other. Really. Two random people just happened to decide to call me in a five minute span, despite having the entire day to do so? And you don't believe we live in a simulation of some kind? Get real. What more proof do you need, anyway?
The one guy just had a question if I would help install his Ring doorbell, and I said I could give it a try. He's just down the street, and doesn't have it yet, so I'm not sure about the purpose of the call. He would have ordered it regardless, no? I don't get it.
The other called back and said to not call today. You know, you can just not answer if you're busy...
Finished Good Place. On to The Expanse!
Then some Back 4 blood but it started it back at the beginning because Sean changed xboxs to avoid radon? Odd. We did not make it back to the place we had left. The controls seem better on the Series X for whatever reason. At least I've got some good guns again.

Tues:
Did the rest of Kevin's work from last week, the same scan test on the versalink. His results were as he expected. Also got an email from one of the tablet guys, a manager type, that Friday was his last day. Some other people more related to our group are also talking retirement, seems to be a theme around here, can't imagine why...
Otherwise tried to replicate this image.



It didn't work out.



Note the background, the wall in particular, which is angled. But note to get this effect the camera must be tilted. But tilt the camera, and the column is no longer straight in the picture. Also how did they get the slits in the wall to do so few beams and how are the edges so crisp? How can you see much more of the column?
How did they make the back wall so dark yet so close to the light coming around the wall? How are their beams of light a uniform size, the light is shining through slits of uniform size. There's a lot to wonder about.

Went to see the guy by 390. He's still trying to use his RR email after switching to greenlight. And asking dumb questions like "how do you delete a website?" You're talking nonsense dude, give it up.

Got home at 6:00, love driving at night, at least the roads were okay. Spent an hour and a half working on some email passwords, and at the end his wife's iPad wasn't picking up "any new email" and after totally erasing the account and putting it back I finally decided to look at the webmail on her account. Oh, it matches? Look at that! She just hasn't gotten email for two days, that's all. You stupid. So of course her last email is from the 16th. That's how dates work.

Got ready for tomorrow, and did some xbox, no Neil though.

Wed:
Loaded the machine to do my wednesday task assigned last meeting day. I realized not only is "mail" missing from the list a lot of entries are added when you search. I took screenshots and emailed everyone "should we be concerned about this?" The only reply I got back was that it wasn't in it. Yes, I realized that myself thank you.

Otherwise more modeling practice, I'm doing one of the small printers in the room. The basic shape is done, I need to add a lot of detail.

Went to transfer the lenovo guy's stuff, again. Copied it all to my flash drive as I didn't want to tear apart the machine that was going back. Mistake. I love how we have USB 3, and Tunderbolt ports, and all of this, and copying in windows is a game of watching less than 100kb/sec across the interface for longer than watching 1mb/sec+ over the interface. I'm not kidding. Has no coder at MS looked at the abysmal rate they achieve copying small files (hey look at that the majority of files are small files!) and thinking, "maybe we should do something about that, maybe look at the filesystem code and see what we can do to improve it" I mean really, it's a brand new system and yes it's a spinning rust drive but over an interface that can do 50mb/sec + why are we only getting 100kb/sec? File handles can't have that much overhead to create, can they?

Of course once that was done I turned on the new one. And waited ten gol darn minutes for it to boot. This is a new PC, mind you. And it took ten minutes before the lenovo logo went away, and the please wait went away, and the 'we're getting things ready' went away, etc. Second boot was only TWO minutes. What a speed up! Then I had to tediously copy his files back. Don't get me started on what onedrive was doing.

Finally got home a little before 8, meaning it was a 4 hour journey for $50. Worth it? Heck no!

Two calls, spent some time getting a new cert loaded onto an old iPad, (stupid certs!) and didn't reach the second guy. Then I got to call my bestest ever pal Ellen, and explain how to make a folder for the seventh time! Nice! That took twenty minutes or so.

Finally able to eat dinner, check my videos from the last two days, sites, and then get ready for bed! What a time to be alive.

Thurs:
I can show you the printer image I was working on. There's some bad geometry and I wasn't 100% accurate with the top, it's sticking out too far. I'm not sure how I would fix the messed up geometry, I was looking at it before the render and thinking "how in the heck did that happen?" I thought I was being so careful. I guess not. So not sure how I would fix it but the meeting was starting so that was that.






Otherwise, it was meeting day. Went to meeting, virtually. Still not going to be anything new for a few weeks.

Stopped at good will, got a few goodies and came home.

No calls, thank you! Checked sites, watched videos while trying to clean a metal thing I got. It's cleaning up but there's more to do. I keep pulling dirt off the thing, don't know how.

Oh yeah, little mouse found the wheel, did I put in I got a mouse a few days ago? The cats were chasing it around and it went under the shelf with the games and things on it. I built a prison and lifted the shelf, which isn't attached. Managed to get them. They were running in the wheel which is good, that means they haven't been hurt too much.

So what's coming up for the last week of January already? Probably more 3D work tomorrow, plus shopping, 4 whole checks, I guess I could go to the bank? Then visiting with my parents. Finishing up the adventure from last week with the two angels.

Then Saturday making brownies for the gang and going over to finish the latest Tayana adventure.

Otherwise not much else planned at the moment. Probably more Control, maybe some Back 4 Blood of course. Trying to stay warm, it's going to be cold this weekend.

That's it! See you all next time.