2022-01-27:

fri:
Working on the next model. Nothing work wise. I can show you next week, it's coming along but it's pretty complex.
Went all the places- bank, pet store, staples for batteries, and saw my parents. There's all different people in the bank now, what the heck happened? They couldn't have gotten rid of everybody could they? Very odd.
Did the game, we didn't beat the guy, he beat us up actually. By a lot. We had to escape, I was the only one that was up and the angel guy was hardly damaged at all. I even threw a "clever" attack at him, from both the front and the back so even if he dodged one part of it the other part should have hurt him. He just put up a barrier so he didn't have to dodge. Sigh. I'm not sure what the plan is at this point, given we are now low on morale, energy, and half the party almost died to this thing. We may not even need to go back, the whole situation was just to get us somewhere so the angel guy could make us his offer. We refused. Will he even stick around? I wouldn't think so.

Sat:
Game was canceled, Sean hadn't realized he already had plans for the evening so it'll be Feb before we do that game again.
Got the Xbox ready to go to my father's. I realized having "myself" signed in two places may confuse people. Would it even let me? But I figured out how to make him part of my family (he actually had an MS account??) so he can keep the games on there but still be signed in as himself. He won't get anything from the gold account without manually downloading it but that's a small price to pay.
More videos, blender sculpting, which makes my model look really bizarre. Whoops. I'll have to try and fix it I guess? Or should I even care? It looks pretty good as is, I'm not trying to be a disney artist or anything here it doesn't have to look perfect. It's just practice.
Okay, I can fix it, but I don't know if I want to sculpt. There are still problems when I do that.
Cleaned up a bit around here, as movie night is now on.
Tried to do some fire, which Blender makes really, really difficult for some reason. I can't just make a fire object of some kind and get fire. I have to set up a whole bunch of stuff, and animate the fire, and then I guess pick a frame of the animation? Not very efficient. I followed a tutorial on my Mac and got a really bizarre result the fire was way too big. And it seemed to render really slow and in the movie his wasn't acting like that at all so I thought maybe it was a Mac thing. We can't GPU render yet until 3.1 (hopefully) so I switched over to the PC. Blender crashed working with the model. Nice. Thanks PC, you're living up to expectations wondefully. So I just made the ball object and followed his tutorial exactly. I got... smoke. No fire. It was halfway though and he was like "now pick a frame you like!" and I was like "uh, why do you have fire and I just have smoke? I paused your video every 5 seconds and did your every move."
So it looks like I'll just model a tail, mane, and leg poofs for this little guy. No actual fire, which would have been cool but what can you do?
Played some Control.
Watched some Expanse.
Had my parents over, wasn't crazy about the movie. We basically end up right back where we started, and have we really learned anything? I'm not sure.
Back to the Expanse.

Sun:
Mostly the expanse. Still not through what I already had. It seems like I've seen all of series 2 though I had my little marker tag only on episode 2. I remember stuff going on in the later episodes. Oh well, it's a good refresher even if it will likely take all week to finally get to the newer seasons.
Snowed, cleaned the driveway about 3:00 though it wasn't too bad. Have to stay on top of it before it gets worse.
Did some sunday things, made my calls. Seeing the duplicate photos guy tomorrow, he can't tell me what happened when the program finished. Typical.
And for Wednesday dentist guy says his phone is installing apps on its own. Uh, no, it's not. It's impossible. You have to sign in to your account and give you password before you install anything. That's how it works. So I get to go chat up a guy who's totally losing it. Neat.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Mouse is still good, runs in the wheel fine so they are clearly feeling okay after their game of cat-and-mouse-and-human catching them.

Mon:
Finished my latest 3D project. Back in collage, and this was more than 20 years ago folks I actually minored in animation. I know! What a fool I was in those days. Granted I haven't improved really but that's a whole other thing. Anyway, the point is I recalled one project I had saved from those days, rapidash running! Yes, that's how old Pokemon is too. Anyway, I yanked the old image up and look at this beauty.



This is just a still frame from the amazing, jaw dropping animation I had created. It is too good, even today, to be seen by mortal men so I will protect you from it by not posting it anywhere and setting it on fire but suffice to say, I wanted to try my hand and recreating at least the model for it. So here it is.


I didn't pose him (or animate him which I have no idea how to do in Blender currently) but you get the idea. At least this looks mostly like a horse! And not the bendy legged monstrosity I had created before. Oh, there's still problems with the model I can see, but there's at least some improvement. Ironic, as I've improved more on my own in the last month than I ever did paying all those teachers at RIT. Now granted tools may be better now and such, but I was using Maya before, which was the industry standard at the time and very, very expensive. I can't blame it for the above. It does however further illustrate (it's an art pun did you get it) my theory that if you're going to learn something, you have to do it on your own. If you're in collage to learn stuff, you're doing it wrong. You should have already learned it, and your "teacher" is there just to make sure you've not learned anything incorrectly and to grade you so you can get the piece of paper you need at the end. I know, I know, some fields you can't do that, like medicine but for the most part, if you wouldn't be practicing/learning whatever it is you're paying to learn anyway, you're in the wrong field. Believe me, I know. I lived it.

You see now why I was messing about with fire, which I sort of modeled onto him and so it doesn't really look all that great. Maybe the next time I do him he'll look even better?

As a reminder, this is what he looks like officially.


Otherwise, same story at work. We're reorged again, and nothing new came in.

Went to see photos guy, the program did something as some duplicates were moved and ready to delete. But I saw lots more. I ran the program again we'll see if it does another 5000 or what. Did it crash? Stop part way though? Did he stop it? Who can say.

Checked sites and videos, watched more the expanse while eating dinner.

Made my phone calls. A guy that wanted to talk about upgrades to play games better. With an 8 year old processor. Yeah, maybe should have bought a better one 8 years ago? I told him what I could.

Also made a call I said I would make a few days ago, to install quicken. No answer. Lovely.

More Expanse.

Tues:
Actual work today. Don wanted us to look over the readme file for the new plugins and make any suggestions so I looked it over. I think Christina is making test cases for something so I was "happy" to do it. Got through it, basically a mess if you don't mind my saying so. We can't stick to a convention of bold or [] in a single document? Really? That was the most obvious thing, anyway. Sent it back with a lot of questions and changes, she emailed me just as I was leaving so we'll pick that back up tomorrow. I don't know, documentation doesn't seem like my job but it is writing which is fine so...

Otherwise worked a little on the next 3D render, here's my progress.



Ha! You caught me, there's no way I made anything that looked that good, I shouldn't have tried to fool you. You knew it right away. That's just the reference I'm trying to use.
Here's a picture of my real progress.



Yeah. I've tried 4 different ways but I've not been happy with any of them to start the body. With the last one I took a sphere and stretched it out, which worked okay but gave me a lot of problems. I wanted to do this one "properly" whatever that means. But it's not working out so well. I've downloaded some tutorials at home to watch in greater detail if I get a chance tomorrow.

Came back here, sites, videos, and supper. Some calls, maybe I'll reach quicken guy? Then warframe with Sean.

I did reach him, that took half an hour. And you only get a website, not a program. For a monthly fee. The desktop version is crazy expensive. Yipes.

Told dentist guy our appointment was tomorrow, he called twice. Really?

And picture guy I'll probably have to go down there again, at least it's only just down the street.

Wed:
Well, that went even worse than expected! Yay! But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Morning was consumed with finishing up the document. I got zero answers to any of my questions in the return document so I just did whatever I thought was best. Cleaned up the formatting, made sure the convention of bolding was followed, made sure everything was in the right place and similar sections existed for all three products. Oh by the way I hate the way word does numbered lists. It's impossible. You click on the little button to make a list, or add the line to the list above and what happens? Nothing! That's what. I resorted to cutting the text out, pasting it into notepad so it didn't have any formatting, cutting it again and then pasting it, and then redoing the lists from scratch. This is a 30 year old program folks, it should work better than this. But no, MS is too busy buying up game companies for 90 billion dollars to throw some green at their QA department.

Worked on ninetales. It's actually coming along much better than yesterday, when I had nothing to show for it. The tutorials I watched really helped.

Then dentist guy. We secured his accounts relating to money because he was worried about a house guest. Great, why let someone into your house you don't trust? The usual stuff, then I "looked over" the iphone (the real reason I thought I was there). I noticed a bunch of alerts relating to the apple account and said "oh, we went to apple recently and straightened the account out, right? I specifically told him to do this. The iPhone is working so he must have done it." Wrong. It asked for the PIN which he still didn't know. He was just getting in with the face thing. Well after several failed attempts to recall a 6 digit number I gave up. I figured he would just have to live without backups, iCloud, etc. But then it got stuck wanting the PIN instead of using the face. What?
And we can't do anything with the account because the "trusted phone number" is not, as you might expect, the phone number of the phone in my hand. No, no, It's some other phone number he can't remember. Great. With him being locked out of the phone the only thing to do is restore the phone. So I got to sit for 45 minutes and download 6.5GB over wi-fi. This did work, and the phone restored itself. Whoops, it immediately asked for the other phone number again during the setup. So what have we accomplished? Nothing! That's right. See, the story I got from him is he remembered the number once, and rather than write it down or some crap that's logical he just put it in and forgot it again. Rather than, you know, calling me and saying "I remember the number, let's go into the account and change it so we don't have this problem in the future." No, that would be too logical. So now he's stuck with nothing on the phone, I have no idea if he has any backups, and Apple has to review the case: This means "account recovery" which asked for a code in an email (ah something logical at last). That I could do. Then it asked for the credit card he used for iCloud. Oh, we don't have that card. So who knows if they'll even let him recover it.
He's a mess. He fell off his chair sitting down. Then he warmed up a drink in the microwave. He took it out, set it on the table, walked into the other room, came back, went back to the microwave, and opened it again expecting his drink to be in there. This is my life!

So I got home at 8:30 and had 4 calls. What?

Made all my calls, got a printer working by reseating the cable at both ends. Photo guy said maybe he's okay, the guy I was just out at by 390 wants me to come again for some unspecified reason, and doorbell guy got the doorbells but no batteries, did I want to come and look them over. No, no I do not want to do that.

So that took until 9:00. I will now eat dinner, check my sites, and go to bed. Neat!

Thurs:
A fairly busy day today. Meeting day, of course. During the first meeting we had the demo for the port of the auto release job features from D5.6 to D4.0. So as it was in the daily build I loaded it on two machines and went through it. It's fine. Apart from the fact I can't log in with my smartcard, that is. Huh, maybe I need to check a checkbox, something about Kerberos they implemented recently. It's been awhile since I did 4.0 stuff. I'll have to look into that. Anyway, and SNMP not working. Like, at all. Neat.

So wrote those up, had the second meeting, did the plants, did a little sculpting which is not working out by the way, and went to my second job. I just can't get the leg to look right. And sometimes it super deforms which I'm pretty sure is not supposed to happen. I just don't get how I'm supposed to fix it. It should be simple enough, add "material" or take it away, and smooth it down. But it just doesn't look right no matter what I do. It's frustrating and this would be a time for a teacher, to say "oh, yes, do this instead." Not that any I've ever had had really done that. Because that's not how it works.

Second job was shorter than I expected. I answered a few questions we could have done over the phone, and I was out of there. Neat.

Got back here, watched yesterday's stuff, ate dinner, got ready for tomorrow.

One call, a lady who let some random stranger on her PC so now I have to go check it out. How are we still dealing with this?

So, let's look to the future. Not much of January left, odd. Not sure what work stuff I'll have tomorrow, I think I've got the current stuff under control. Looking into that login issue more I guess. Then shopping, no bank this week, and seeing my parents. We'll do game though I hate to rush off as we're celebrating my father's birthday.

Saturday I'll hopefully take my father to a movie if he's free. Don't know how much longer the Bond movie will be there. And the scammed lady in the morning.

Otherwise more of the expanse, I'm finally onto season 3 and new stuff. Some Control maybe, and working on Ninetales. Or just resign myself to modeling things that can be measured and consist of mainly flat surfaces, nothing organic. I seem to be able to do that much, at least. We'll see how it goes.

Hope the first month of the year treated you well, see you in Feb.