After a very long silent period, the gallery has a new post.  It’s something I started in the early summer and actually had some time this month to finish up.  It’s a model and animation of the Planet Express building from Futurama.  Check it out in the gallery section!

My backup server is up, running, and storing backup data for all of my computers plus backing up the data from this site.  I have a nice script that will run most of the backups from the backup server itself, with the exception of my main PC (with all my Vista problems, I did not want to add an SSH server).  To back up my main computer (the new one), I can run a backup script from it that will push the data over to the backup server.  The only task left is to add the scripts to the Windows Task Scheduler so the backups run automatically.

All of the programs I am using in my setup are free.  The only costs associated with the setup are for the computer (in my case, I had to buy a new hard drive because the old one was too small) and a Windows license.  If, however, you wanted avoid that expense, you could easily install a Linux distribution and my setup would work just as well (probably better).

Rather than bore any non-technical readers with my setup, I wrote up a nice long tutorial on how to make your own centralized server using freeware software.  It is still pretty rough and does not have content in the section for automating the backup on a schedule, but it has enough information to get backups running on-demand.  Let me know if it’s useful to anyone out there.

I converted the gallery section of my site over to WordPress, as well.  Now you can post comments to the gallery section without logging into Blogger.  All I need now is new content to go into the gallery!

I finished the scene from University State and now I’m working on another one.  I’m hoping that the animation production will be done soon so I can get back to improving my modeling/texturing/lighting skills in Lightwave, plus I want to test out the new features of Lightwave 9.2.

I have made some changes to the back-end of my site, mainly to get away from the hacked-together system I’m using with Blogger.com. Don’t get me wrong – Blogger.com is a very nice blogging system. But I prefer to house my own content, and Blogger.com keeps the raw data in their databases and only pushes out the formatted pages. I had an odd system in place that parsed the Blogger.com pages and pushed them into my database, which was then formatted on-demand to you users out there when you wanted to view my posts.

Not anymore. Now these posts are generated from a version of WordPress installed on my server. I’m still experimenting with it, so if you see any weirdness let me know. My eventual goal is to move some of the other content (the Gallery, for instance) over to this system, too, but that’s a future improvement.

With this update, you can now post comments to any of my posts without using any kind of login. All you have to provide is a nickname, email, and optional website address.

A few days ago, I upgraded my version of Firefox on my home computer because it was running an older version (it was running the last released version of the Mozilla Suite, which I think is no longer kept up-to-date with the latest Firefox versions). Anyway, after the upgrade I checked out the different plug-ins available and found some really nice utilities available for the browser. Some of the more useful: ForecastFox (keeps local weather info and forecasts in the status bar, very clean looking and useful) and Sage. Sage is a RSS feed reader, which allows you to organize different supported blogs and information sources without actually visiting all of the sites you usually watch. If you use Blogger, you probably already have a RSS feed for your blog. Sage is the client piece to this technology.

Today, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7.0 to the masses, including it in the automatic updates. I installed it and it’s pretty nice, although it seems that right now they are playing catch-up to Mozilla. However, built into the browser is an integrated RSS feed reader, with your favorites organized and categorized in a separate tab of the “Favorites” sidebar. There is even a button that you can press for sites that have a feed available from the page.

The point? I’ve begun using the feed reader in Mozilla, which I’ll keep using until there is a compelling reason to switch back to IE. Also, I made sure that my “Posts” and “Gallery” sections have working feeds, so you should be able to add them to your favorite feed reader. If you run into any problems, drop me a line!

I’ve added a new feature to the gallery that allows registered users of Blogger.com to post comments in the gallery. It works the same way you post to this section of the site.

Tucson is going well. It isn’t very exciting but it is relaxing. I’m almost done with The Fall of Hyperion and at the rate I’m going I’ll probably be done by the end of tomorrow. Plus I had time today to add in the gallery comments feature.

I’m hitting my main work goals this week and I should be on-track to finish everything so I can take a day off Friday to explore Phoenix. Kori is excited to show me around her alma mater, Arizona State University.

I have an early day tomorrow, so I’m going to turn in soon. Maybe after reading another chapter 🙂

I made another change to the site, although you probably won’t notice a huge difference (although it took most of an evening to implement). My site is now integrated with Blogger.com, the blogging service from Google. If you register with Blogger.com (it’s free and doesn’t collect any personal information), you can post comments on my blog and many other blogs in the community.

Why did I choose Blogger.com? Because I like the blog editor, it allows me to publish the content to my website in any format I choose, and it’s simple to use. Hopefully this means that I will start posting more often.

Enjoy the new gallery section! I’ve put up three pieces into the gallery:

Check them out!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this site (except for the occasional photos update), but I decided to change the look of the site. I expect to have more content in the near future as I slowly improve the site. Stay tuned for more!