Author Archives: Christopher Roe

About Christopher Roe

The Artist Formerly Known As Mel Ebbles. I'm a programmer, 3D modeler, papercraft designer, gamer, and tinkerer. I live in the Republic of Texas with my wife Gin and 4 cats.

Office Re-Organization

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We finally got a start on the second phase of re-organizing my office yesterday. We hauled several hundred pounds of unused shipping boxes and materials to the recyclers, and I recovered just under half of the floor space in my office, and we also donated the huge laser printer to the Salvation Army. I also moved the furniture around a bit so I could make more efficient use of the freed-up floor space, and re-adjusted the shelves on my workstation desk so I could move the laptop back to a more comfortable position.

Today, I spent some time de-cluttering the various tables and putting everything into its new home. As part of that process, I had to pack up all of the business paperwork, printed sales records, the Supply Depot shipping scale, and a bunch of other things. I didn’t think that a sense of awful finality would hit me as hard as it did, and in some strange way, I felt a bit like I was finally laying an old friend to rest after a long terminal illness. I’d pick up some item, and it would remind me of something, and I’d either chuckle or feel a little bit sad. I guess it’s something I was able to push aside in the interest of moving on and taking decisive action, so I never really gave myself the time or the luxury of thinking too hard about it until now.

I also transitioned a lot of stuff over to the new notebook and set up the other hardware to work with it, and I’m composing this post on the new machine. The keyboard is gonna take some getting used to–the spacing and positioning is different enough from my old Gateway convertible that I have to pay extra attention to spelling.

I also found some more stuff that needs to go to a good home. First come, first serve.

  • 2 packs of Copplestone plague zombies, 5 figures each. Metal, unpainted. The original buyer flaked out and never got back to me. Asking $10 plus shipping for each pack.
  • 1 pack of Copplestone zombie troopers, 5 figures. Metal, unpainted. The original buyer flaked out and never got back to me. Asking $10 plus shipping for this pack.
  • My whole Games Workshop bitz box. I just finished culling out all the useless stuff. All plastic parts, either still on the sprue or desprued and bagged. It’s mostly Imperial Guard figure parts. Also included are most of the Stupid Bitz Tricks and Colonial Marine conversions shown elsewhere on the blog, in varying stages of completion, plus a few baggies of Space Marine and Tyranid bitz. 14″ x 10″ x 4″ box. Asking $25 plus shipping for the whole box.

I finally have my papercraft and photo tables back. I also have room for a Detolf display case next to my work desk, and the whole top shelf for models. I should be able to hit the ground running whenever I get back into making new models.

News at 11: The World Is Still Here

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3 items of interest today:

1. Harold Camping is full of bologna, as I predicted.

2. It’s been 6 weeks and 1 day since I quit smoking. Yay, me.
3. I’m looking for a Mac. I need a work hoopty for a cross-platform desktop application project in the near future, so I don’t need anything fancy or top of the line. At the moment, I have my eye on a Mac Mini. Comments, suggestions, and so forth from resident Mac users are welcome.

Mr. Counterfeiter, part trois

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Amazon gave me a full refund for that bootleg copy of Photoshop CS5 Extended that I returned. So, that part of it is over, at least. Adobe support, on the other hand, was not as pleasant to deal with. I’m glad Amazon made things right instead of leaving me to deal with Adobe.
I don’t think I’ll be buying any more Adobe products. No, don’t get me wrong–I’m not mad at them for not being helpful or anything like that, it’s more a matter of seeing how they routinely deal with support issues. My experience with them was an eye-opening taster of what I could look forward to if I had a problem with their products at some point in the future, and I didn’t really like what I saw.
If I’m going to shell out $1000 on a program, I’d kind of like to not have to spend hours on the phone repeatedly and patiently explaining to some thick-accented dude named Rajneesh what my boggle is, or waiting 5 days between web support case updates. No thanks, my time is money too, and if I’m going to pay that much money for software, I’m gonna expect timely and efficient support if I happen to need it. Naive and wishy-washy? Maybe, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
So, I’ve installed my trusty old copy of Photoshop CS on the new notebook. I’ve used it for 5 years without any complaints, and I can certainly use it for a while longer.

Blogger outage

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I wasn’t able to post for a while because of technical issues that Blogger was having. More information here: Blogger Buzz status update

As a consequence of those issues, they took 30 hours of content offline in the process of rolling back to an earlier stable version, so some of my recent posts and their comments disappeared. Those issues seem to have been resolved now. I nearly went into withdrawal.

Edit: No, they’re not resolved yet. Comments are still missing, and the timestamps were off. Guess they’re still working on things.

Mr. Counterfeiter, part deux

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Mrs E’s taking the RMA box to the UPS joint after work today, and the Amazon seller in question (RetroSoftware) got back to me a few minutes ago. My hunch about it being an innocent mistake on their part is reinforced even further by their response. They were incredibly nice about it all.
They’re aware of the Chinese/Singaporean bootlegs on the market, and they actually do have a routine for spot checking and discarding bogus inventory. Unfortunately, the batch of CS5 Extended they got from one of their reputable suppliers came during a location move and accidentally made it onto the shelves. They’ve pulled all of their remaining inventory of CS5 Extended off Amazon for double-checking.
They’ve offered to source the real thing and honor the original $699 deal, even if it means a loss for them. I appreciate the offer, but I won’t be taking them up on it. My inner businessman thinks they’ve lost enough money already, and my inner customer is pretty much in the “once bitten, twice shy” camp. I’m going to send them a nice thank-you note in response and consider all this a lesson learned.