monday meltdown

the arc of the day was rather short. a discussion and two meetings in the morning -- and i was spent.

oh, yeah. woke up with a headache -- maybe that had to do with having some milk the evening before, to help me get to sleep. milk, after all, is rich in calcium -- and my hypertension medicine is technically a 'calcium channel blocker'. so, to my layman's mind, those are probably not good things to mix. milk, much as i like the stuff, is nowadays a double-barrel of problems. lactose intolerance and the hypertension medicine... ...ugh.

when it rains, it pours: the long awaited project that saw the group's assembly is now on the cusp of finally arriving. although not quite in the form expected. two hurricanes, a brain cancer(?) and some money matters have resulted in the latter part of the production reaching us. rendering, compositing and, unless i'm mistaken, the soundtrack. still, it's a ton of work. 44 minutes of rendering and composite -- in a month and a half. the company will have to seriously up the render farm units to make that deadline.

then we have the other stuff.

one of which is the motion capture cleanup software. an oddly named software at that. then again, they're all oddly named. our main package is named after an extinct civilization -- and its main competition (which i hold an irrational bias for) is a three letter non-acronym. our compositing package is one in a family of products that could safely be categorized as a full-blown conflagration... ...about the only thing that's honestly, if somewhat unimaginatively, named is the editing software. and that's called -- and i paraphrase here -- "the end" professional. hmm. maybe that hit the nail on the head. imaginatively (or not) named.

back to the mocap peeve. i've been wrapping my mind (however unwilling -- it's that 'old dog new tricks' saw) around it for a couple of weeks now. it's made all the more, shall we say, challenging, by the fact that the documentation/tutorials are almost a version and a half older than the evaluation software we have. talk about lost in translation. they changed some syntax, they deprecated some functions, and they left no documentation of either. so slogging through the tutorials strikes me as being somewhat akin to archaeology. you could also think of it this way: you've a recipe written in language version 1.7. but your food replicator is version 2.3 and is not 100% backward compatible. imagine the joyous food you'd get out of that combination.

ok, so that's not an accurate picture, but it'll suffice... hehehe

anyway, after much progress over the past week, somehow the day's meetings left me in no state to interpret the hieroglyphs of the mocap tutorials. not that i was really feeling well to begin with. by the afternoon, my hands were colder and wetter than normal, and i was feeling very hot...

...but not as heated as when i have to confront the works of, i'm told, an ex-contributing-editor of the local version of a british car mag. that, then, can be considered good news. leastwise, i can now peacefully buy the next issues without fear of encountering strangeness like 'over productive wedding vegetables' in reference to the volvo hybrid station wagon/minivan/suv. granted, that quoted line didn't make it to the magazine (yay!) -- it is, however on the website. read it and weep. (isn't it ironic how much advertising i'm giving the site?)

(",)

at any rate, the rest of the afternoon was a lost cause insofar as the mocap was concerned. made very little headway.

and thus ended the day. odd, no? i began the post noting a short arc of the day -- and look how long this got.