Been a while since I posted one of these, things are going well, work is keeping me busy and my free time is kept busy by my girlfriend. Time is just flying by, but it’s fun at least.

(kinda) got answers about my knee. it’s not a bone problem, and it’s not an artery problem, so i’ve been taking larger doses of ibuprofen and got a better knee brace for cycling. so far, so good!

little dog got her first agility ribbons! border collie is probably getting her trick title soon, and we have our first lesson with a new agility trainer wednesday morning.

went bike camping over the weekend, which was nice. just a short ~13 mile ride there and a single night. i felt strong, knee held up well, and we had excellent weather and a fun group. RAGBRAI is only a couple of months away, which means i gotta get serious about riding my bike longer distances. the good news is i think i’ve only missed three days of biking so far this month (yay, bike month)!

I’m back in Vegas visiting my folks for Mother’s Day, which was yesterday; Happy (belated) Mother’s Day to the mothers and caregivers out there! Anyway, it’s a nice change of scenery.

Work has been crazy last couple of weeks. We’re getting close to launching a project I’ve been working on for two years. So lots going on with that to get everything completed on time. We’ve started vendor-led staff training on it, which is taking up a lot of time. In addition, we purchased another service, so we have training on those as well. So practically everyday, I have like 3-4hrs of trainings. We also have our big annual event coming up, so I need to start focusing on my responsibilities there. It’s normally busy this time of the year, but I’m not normally juggling three big projects at once. Maybe I’m just a baby, but I’m not used to it. Either way, its not unmanageable. Yet. Hopefully it won’t be at all.

The nice part of being in Pacific time zone is that I finish my day around 1-2p local time (I’m normally Central time zone). The downside is that I’m having to wake up at 4-5a local time to get going, get ready, have coffee, etc. Oh well, at least I can still roll out of bed over to my laptop.

Group project is due tomorrow, including the presentation of the completed animation to the client. After one person on the team (who has been thoroughly documented in these threads over the last six months) got caught lying about how much of his sequence he had done, he was given an ultimatum: a hard deadline that passed fifteen minutes ago, and if he failed to meet it, someone else is doing his scene and his name is getting taken out of the credits. We could justify this as he hasn’t contributed significantly to any other part of the project.

He failed to meet the deadline.

I would like to note at this point that his scene is two shots totalling about 15 seconds. My scene was eight shots totalling 45 seconds and I was done last Friday.

We have another assignment due at midnight tonight, which I sensibly/foolishly completed and handed in on Friday. Since everybody else is finishing that assignment this evening, I am the only one with any time available to animate and render this scene, I get to rig and animate the final scene of our animation. That’s why we can’t just cut the scene and work around it: the story would not have a conclusion without this scene. In retrospect we probably should never have trusted him with it, but it’s not like there was anything else that was short and simple he could have done.

I am very angry with this guy, and I’m not convinced I’ll be able to hold my tongue if he turns up for the presentation tomorrow.

Lots of programming actually. Rewrote a thing from scratch and now it’s so much better. Feels good. :)