Category Archives: Personal

My Office (2014)

I had some time off from work for the holidays, so I’ve been catching up on other stuff. In particular, I’ve been rearranging my office for the past couple of days.

I unpacked my Canon Pixma iP6600D printer and realized that it’s probably the oldest still-functional device in my office. Out of nostalgia, I went and fished out some old photos of the various office setups I’ve had over the years.

2007

There’s the printer, a tiny 1280×720 15″ monitor, plus a mouse and keyboard, connected to my old Gateway desktop PC.
office1a
I can’t get over how barebones that setup is. Mind you, that was half of the office–the other half fit into a backpack and included a Gateway convertible notebook, a scanner, a portable Canon Pixma iP90v printer, and a bunch of other stuff.

2009

We moved to a new place in 2009, and the room I was using as an office was so tiny that we had to refurnish it in order to find a place for my stuff to go. I used IKEA’s 3D planner and a lot of catalog surfing to come up with a way to make as much use of the much smaller space as possible.
office1b
Same PC, display, and printer, new furniture.

2013

2013 played hell on my workspace arrangements. I was juggling several part-time jobs doing papercraft design, freelance graphic design, web development, and a motley variety of odd jobs during 2012, none of which really needed a dedicated workspace of their own. In 2013, however, I took a huge detour into full-time video game development after a successful Kickstarter project.

The first change was making room for a bunch of new development hardware, including an enormous and powerful Shift workstation furnished by Maingear, one of the sponsors of The Gallery: Six Elements.

workstation1
And it grew…
workstation2
And kept growing…
office1
…until it completely dominated nearly half of my office space, displacing almost everything else into the closet or storage. Printers, hobby cutters, laminators, cutting mats, nothing was safe from the voracious appetite of the ever-growing video game development beast.

Until this week, when I finally had enough time off to turn the rest of my office into productive and usable workspace for other pursuits!

2014

I got a 21.5″ iMac in December, which runs both OS X and Windows. It’s dedicated to OS X and iOS development, graphic design, papercraft design, web development, and entertainment. In setting it up, we come right back to the beginning of this blog post. The Canon Pixma iP6600D that I received in 2006 as a gift from Mrs E is still trucking, and it’s back on the job.
office2
I find the fact that it color coordinates so well with the brand new iMac hilarious. It’s like that printer never goes out of style. I’m planning to move my venerable Craft ROBO cutter under the riser below the printer, where the black wire basket is.

I relocated the webcam boom stand to the corner, between the 2 tables, and artfully positioned my shredder in front of it, at a 45 degree angle. The table on the right is for general home office stuff, like paperwork.

I also cleared out a bunch of crap from under the tables and re-homed it. I now have an empty 50″ closet table to work with, which I want to deck out with some riser shelves and a couple of lamps. That’ll give me a proper hobby workspace again, which I’ll cover in another blog post!

Surfacing for air

The indie game studio I work with (Cloudhead Games) has hit a point where we’ve got enough to put together a video for the Kickstarter, so I had some time today to post here.

Indie video game development is…exciting, stressful, exhausting, and always interesting. I don’t think I want to make a career out of it, but working on an indie video game has always been one of the items on my bucket list.

It’s one of the environments where being a jack of all trades comes in useful. I started out as an environmental modeler and scripter, but in practice, I’ve been doing a little bit of everything else as well. I’m even picking up some new skills along the way, as well as dusting off a few lapsed skills that I hadn’t touched since the 1990s, like character animation.

I can’t wait to revisit some of my personal projects with that additional experience under my belt!

My wallet!

I just added a dozen new reference books to my bookshelf, all in the name of self-improvement and continuing education. They should arrive sometime next week.

For character modeling, I got a bunch of books covering human anatomy, and some books on figure/portrait drawing for good measure. Sure, I could use online reference sites, but I don’t really feel like explaining why there are random photos of naked people on my display every time somebody walks into my office. 😆

I also loaded up on books about animation, both 2D and 3D. I have a bit of rust to shake off there, so it’ll be nice to get a refresher for the basics.

Things sure have come a long way…

I spent a lot of time over Thanksgiving shooting family videos and taking photos with a fifth-generation iPod Touch, and it was a remarkable experience. Smartphones, tablets, media players–they’re all becoming cheaper and more capable every year. I’m a little light-headed trying to imagine where they’ll be 10 or 20 years from now.

In 1996, my computer was an IBM Aptiva 2159-S90. It cost me $2800, and it had a 200MHz processor, 32MB of EDO RAM, a 3.2GB hard drive, and a 56k modem. It had a CRT monitor and shipped with a recommended display resolution of 800×600. It ran Windows 95.

My digital camera at that time was an Epson PhotoPC 500 that cost me around $500 and had a whopping 640x480px resolution. It had 2MB of internal storage for photos, and it weighed almost three-quarters of a pound.

My camcorder at that time was a huge and heavy shoulder beast that used full size VHS tapes, could shoot up to 3 hours of video on one battery, and had a foam-filled rigid carrying case for transport. I don’t remember exactly how much it cost, but it was several hundred dollars at least.

16 years later, I have a $300 media player that fits in my pocket and weighs less than 4 ounces. It has a 1GHz dual core processor, 512MB of DDR2 RAM, a 1.2MP/720p front camera, a 5MP/1080p rear camera, 32GB of flash memory, a 1136×640 display with 326 pixels per inch, wireless and Bluetooth, and several hours of battery power. It does everything that all of the older devices mentioned above do, does every single thing better, and does more to boot.

It’s just incredible. I’m never going to complain about the lack of personal jetpacks and nuclear-powered flying cars again.

Feline Dynamics In The Ebbles Household

We have 3 indoor cats (Ivanka, Ruthie, and Speckles) and one grizzled outdoorscat (Mack) who kind of adopted us. We took Mack in to get fixed and get his shots at the local vet a couple months ago, and he’s been coming inside for a visit every now and then.

Speckles is Mrs E’s cuddly 18 pound sweetheart. He’s big, friendly, and still thinks he’s a kitten. He wants to play with anything and everything. Mack is equally lovable and cuddly to people, but he’s still 13 pounds of lean, mean, muscular, battle-scarred alley cat. He’s friendly enough to other cats  in a sort of “Nice to meet you, now piss off” kind of way, and holds dogs in disdain.

The two get along great…for a few minutes at a time. The problem is Speckles can’t take a hint, and Mack’s not used to other big male cats wanting to play, and immediately assumes they’re after his Lucky Charms. Hilarity frequently ensues, and Mack goes back outside until their next play date.

It hit me earlier that I can perfectly cast those 2 cats in a movie with the following actors:

Danny Trejo as Mack the Cat

Bill Fagerbakke as Speckles

Yep. Perfect.