May Contain Nuts

I’ve gone completely farking insane…

One of the things we have to do this quarter in school (which doesn’t even start until tomorrow) is create a “capstone” project… something that illustrates our mastery of the tools we’ve learned how to use over the past 7 quarters. It doesn’t have to implement ALL of the applications we’ve used, but it does at least have to feature MAX, Flash, Director, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, or some combination of the above.

Well, me being the insane person that I am, I decided that if I was going to be given a capstone project, then by god I was going to do a comprehensive capstone project. So, to that end, I’m planning on building a fully-realized model of Pahket, the Library, the Lab, the observation deck, the elevators, the bedroom, the observatory, the terrain, everything. But as if that wasn’t enough, once it’s all modeled and textured, I’m going to set up a slideshow exploration system and implement it using Flash (or Director, not sure which would be easier at the moment), which means I’ll also need animations as well as audio for background ambiance and animations. I may have to crib the sounds from Uru or something with full credit given in the program, since I don’t have a sound production studio on-hand, but that would really be the only part I wouldn’t be doing completely from scratch. Now, given that this needs to be done in 11 weeks, I won’t be allowing people to explore much beyond the confines of the Library and its connected rooms/halls/elevator shafts, but still, that’s a ton of work.

It’s a wonder I’m not bald ;).

Got my grades today… still a 4.0 student, w00!

Well, the quarter’s beginning to wind down at ITT… just one more week of classes to go and I’m done with my fifth quarter. Man, I still can’t believe I’m going to be graduating in March… seems like it was barely any time at all since I started at this degree. I don’t expect to do poorly in anything this quarter, though the team paper project in English may be a painful experience if it goes down poorly tomorrow morning.

Anyhoo. After the quarter’s over I’ll be going on vacation with my immediate family (just me, mom, dad, and Tim), so I’ll be gone for probably 5 days or so. After that, school starts back up again, yay. I still have no idea what I’m taking next quarter, but I hope Animation I is part of the courseload.

I need to talk to Pat on Wednesday about getting time off for my vacationing this summer. I don’t know if he’s going to go for all of it, but given the increasing number of competent people in Booth, it might be possible. On the plus side, I’ll only be missing one Thursday night shift and two Wednesday trailer shifts the entire time, and it’s not like we haven’t gotten by without maintenance getting done before this, so missing Saturday morning shifts shouldn’t be too much of a problem… it’s just making sure there are enough people with the availability to run the booth while I’m gone, because I basically have the shifts nobody else can work at the moment. I’m planning on having a Friday through Wednesday off in June, a Friday through Sunday off in July, and a Thursday through Tuesday off in September. He may not like me for that, but I’ll freaking work Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years if I have to in order to make up for it. (On a side note, I’d also like to have Ash here for at least one of those holidays, but we’ll have to see.)

With luck I’ll be able to get all of this time off, it’s just going to be a matter of making sufficient amounts of puppy-dog eyes at him while I’m talking. I’m not going to miss any major release weekends from what I remember of the release schedule… we’ll be leaving the day Harry Potter opens, so I’ll be available for build-up/teardown night that Thursday, and nothing big, to my knowledge, is coming out at the end of July or the beginning of September.

I’m really hoping I can get up enough money between AMC (did I mention I got a whopping ten cent raise?) and potentially a much better-paying job with Ubi Soft at the end of the summer to be able to move out-of-state when I graduate at the end of March. Wish me luck.

Good news on the education front. Got my grades back from the Quarter from Hell… I still have a 4.0 GPA. Go me!

Okay, so I finally decided to upload a few photos from my Christmas trip to Portland. You can see them here in HBI. Disclaimer is that anything Ash says I shouldn’t post is going to come down, so there. I tried to pick the most innocuous and not-stupid-looking pictures I could… I mean, I didn’t post the photo of Ash unwrapping presents in her bright red flannel robe or anything… (*is going to be thwapped for that one…*)

*Ahem* anyhoo. Operation Pointless is living up to its name, as the timestamp on this post will attest. I’ve decided that this is officially the shitty quarter in Multimedia, as there is absolutely nothing to make me really enjoy going to class, and there is a great deal more homework to do this quarter than previously (partly because on of my instructors is an anal retentive n00b who doesn’t realize yet just how much the textbooks suck at ITT, and so is determined to give us as much busywork from them as humanly possible). Even if I hadn’t gotten out of Friday’s class, I would have had no relief: it was English 101. So that would probably have just made things worse. Ye gods.

I’m beginning to suspect that if mom and dad actually save up the money they’re going to buy Ash a plane ticket. Well, mom might anyway… she seems to be very intent to meet her.

And damnit, I went into another window and completely forgot to submit this thing… again… that’s twice in as many entries. Yeah, I’m still awake from when I started writing too.

Pathos (now Ananke) is back up and running for the most part now… I just have to re-install a bunch of software apps to get some file assiciations and necessary registry keys back again. This is a Good Thingâ„¢. However, Themis’ keyboard is still not working following a reboot, which is a Bad Thingâ„¢, and will probably require being sent to Dell for repair, which will probably cost money which I don’t have right now, so Themis won’t be around for a while.

In other news, I’ve decided to scale my participation in the backend of things down considerably as far as Uru is concerned, for two reasons: 1) I’m honestly getting tired of being spoiled, and 2) I’m well beyond sick and tired of having to deal with the whiners and complainers *everywhere* on Ubi’s forums, which I am currently in the not-fun-anymore-at-all position of *having* to moderate. Given that there’s something like 20 mods now, I don’t think my participation is required or even necessary any longer (though I’m sure Khatie will be sad to see me go). I’m contemplating resigning from the Exile forum too, since nothing ever seems to go on over there anymore besides people posting email chain letters :P. I’ve realized that between work, school, and all of this volunteer stuff, I’m going to work myself into the ground very quickly. DPWR I obviously have to keep running, because nobody else will, and EGCore I’m considering working for only until they find someone dumb enough to take them up on their offer (since Uru is proving time and again that it refuses to be put into a mold with other MMOGs, which are what the rest of the site and its update/content material is centeres around).

This just in from the “gee, we’ve known about this for months” department: I need a new job. If anyone knows of a good telecommuting job that actually pays well, or if you’re in the Cincinnati area and for some strange reason happen to be reading this, if you know of a local job that pays easily more than $7.00/hour and isn’t incredibly labor-intensive (desk job = good), let me know. I intend to go talk to the guys at the IRS branch office down in Covington soon and find out when they’ll be hiring seasonal temp work for tax season.

I’m doing everything in my power right now not to backslide into a depression spiral the likes of which cost me a great deal of respect and dignity in 2001. Some of the above stuff is an attempt at reigning in my extremely large number of dedications to online stuff which has no payback other than feeling good about it (and even then, sometimes it lacks even that…). It’s amazing how quickly knowing what you want will center a person and cause everything else to fall away. The trick right now, however, is making sure that school isn’t one of those things that falls away with everything else. I let it happen before, and while I slid a little this week, I’m not going to let it happen again.

This has been Action 25 News for January 8th and 9th, 2004. Goodnight.