Today was the wrap for most of our Mummy crew (as a matter of fact, I think it's still going on). We've been slowly letting artists go over the past couple of weeks as things die down, and today was the last big hoorah. We lost the majority of our compositors, and a couple support staff, lighters, animators, and so forth. This is par for the course for the industry, companies ramp up for the show, then ramp down, so it's to be expected. This show is no different. We've got a couple shots left in house that we're just finessing up, and we should be done shortly. I'm one of the artists left over, still working on a big shot. It's almost like Pirates all over, as one of the last remaining compers, finishing up bits and pieces and making sure things fall into place and look decent. These past four weekdays have been 7am-10pm. I think on the weekends I was able to work only 10 hours. The past several weeks have been probably about 80-90 hour work weeks.
Luckily, this weekend will be first weekend free, from four weeks solid. Maybe I'll get to see Wall-E.. Or maybe Wanted. Or just sleep. For 48 hours straight.
You'd think 16 gigabytes of RAM would be enough. Of course, Nuke 4.8 can only use about three and half and change before you get farked.
Memory: Allocation failed, attempting to free memory, sbrk = 306MiB. Memory: Successfully freed some memory, continuing.Memory: can't free any, throwing std::bad_alloc. This will probably crash!
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
what(): St9bad_alloc*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x7374fbf0 ***
Awesome.
Some times we make difficult choices. This is one of those times. On one hand, there's this and on the other, this. But it's more realistic to think that it'll probably be this. A possible treat to the end of Mummy? We'll see.
If you haven't noticed, I think the views stats have been fixed. Excellent. So now you can see how many people care about what I write.
Seriously. I ended up buying the Offspring's Americana (mostly for The Kids Aren't Alright) and their latest album, Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace from Amazon the other day. I think the only album from them I don't have is Splinter. Anyway, after listening to Rise and Fall last night, I've gotta say that it's an excellent CD. It's a great turn back to their roots, with some excellent tunes. There's nothing like immersing yourself in a pair of headphones and blocking all the crap that's around you, listening to some blasting punk rock and yelling. Sweet.
Inspirational? You betcha. Check this out. The writers of most of the songs on the new album are by Dexter Holland and Kevin Wasserman. Dexter is the lead singer as well.
Holland (born December 29, 1965) was the class valedictorian at Pacifica High School in Garden Grove, California and was a Ph.D. candidate in Molecular Biology from the University of Southern California; however, he abandoned his Ph.D. in favor of focusing on The Offspring. He has a Bachelor's degree in Biology and a Master's degree in Molecular Biology, both from the University of Southern California.Holland is also a licensed Airline Transport Pilot and has made a solo trip around the world in 10 days.
So far my favorite track is "You're gonna go far, kid" followed by "Nothingtown" and then "Stuff is Messed Up". However, pretty much every track on the album is gold. Another artist I got earlier in the year was Talib Kweli's Eardrum. That was a great CD, but I prefer his earlier work on The Beautiful Struggle better.
In other fancy news, a coworker and I have embarked on an epic project. Siggraph LA 2008 is prolly too early to release it, but possibly Siggraph Asia 2008 in December in Singapore.Time will tell if we can get the underlying architecture to work well and seamlessly. We finally got releases from Digital Domain to actually work on it outside of work, so that's the first step. It's very similar to the disclosure I had to provide with my product patent when I started at DD. As we are both on the Mummy, we're waiting until the end of this crazy show to actually start work on it. I've had the idea for it for a long time now, over a year, and I've got documents and business plans for it, and a nice five year plus plan for a sequence of events, I just needed someone that had the same drive and motivation as I did.
You may have noticed that almost every entry on the main page has zero views, and that's basically because something broke in February, and I haven't had time to troubleshoot. Somehow I think I may have gotten it to work, so we'll be seeing Views greater than zero on these entries again.
I've got a fair number of new readers and subscribers, and if you haven't read any of the other entries I've created over the years, give the archives a read, at the bottom of this page! Unfortunately, a lot of the great comments for some of the entries have been lost to time, mostly to my persistent upgrading of equipment and hosts.
One of the recent comments that was not lost in the great DigitalGypsy blog revival asked, "If you could do it all over, what changes would you have made?" Suffice to say, we create our own futures, given the opportunities that we are presented. Often those opportunities repeat themselves, giving us a second chance at promotion. Other times those opportunities come and go. If you haven't read my bio, give it a read for a brief introduction into how I got into this crazy business. Continuing on this path, here are some turning points in my career, and how I chose to pursue them. You'll find that risk is its own reward.
Click the extended entry link below to read the rest!
