Happy Yule! Today is the shortest day/longest night of the year. Light a candle to help the Sun through.
Not much posting lately-busy and not that interested, to be honest…
Here’s a wrapup: making a buncha music cd’s from eMusic, flew an indoor kite in the Seal Beach parade-super hard work, plus driving there on Friday night, it was rainy and I was sick, took a day off and cleaned out our outer closet, got our christmas tree, Erika’s first priestess died, I went on a commercial shoot for the Weather Channel-I was an extra, and wrangled kites-fell down on my elbow-had an endless drive back-it was in Calabasas, moved my in-laws to a new apt., super tired.
The commercial shoot was very interesting-the last filmic experience I had was for a PBS kids show called “Dragonfly TV”. It was small and pretty relaxed. This was a full shoot, with all the trappings-craft, lunch, trucks, real film, the whole hierarchy. For the extra bit, I stood on top of a hill with a few other people and they shot my butt. Woo hoo. Ten or so takes later, we sat down and waited. For anyone in the business, this is normal. Finally they had us all back to try to put up this big Indonesian train. There was no wind, so they had a fan. Anyone who flys kites knows that this is pretty much useless, especially with a train. They did a few shots of that, failing miserably but prolly OK for film, and then it was lunch-a good lunch. After lunch I wrangled kites, putting up two at a time. I fell down launching one and banged my elbow-it still hurts. They would film an extra or principal launching the kite, we would launch, and they would film the kite in the air. There were the inevitable snafus, as the other guy doing the kites wasn’t a top single line pilot, and would have difficulty with the more tricky kites. The wind ended up being light and variable. The other guy brought his daughter, and they flew dual lines as a pair. Again, they weren’t top-flight pilots, and crashed several times. I flew my zero wind deca on 12 foot lines, and had nary a problem. I think they filmed it a little, but I was concentrating on keeping the kite in the air. I actually got it into a nice stable backflip at the end, but had trouble getting it out, and gave up. They were on to another shot, and I called it a day. The drive back was really bad-it took me almost 3 hours to get home-it only took an hour and a half to get there. I’m having problems with my right hamstring when my leg is bent and in the same position for any amount of time, so I was in agony the whole way home. I got $250 for it, though, which pays for gas and a nice gift for Erika. I’ll put up a note when I find out when it airs.
What else? I’m SO done with politics, every bad thing just makes it worse. I’m just sick of it all.
I burned a bunch of CD’s, installed Solaris on my third server. I got a few versions of Oberon and Modula 3, some J2EE dev tools, the mapmaking tools for cartograms, Java struts and faces dev tools, Java source, a wiki and some pdfs.