greyduck.net

Unexpected Downtime

I apologize for the several hours during which the greyduck.net webserver and its entertaining contents were unavailable. It looks like Cacti went haywire… something I thought I’d cured for good the last time I ran into the problem, but I was clearly mistaken. So much for pretty monitoring graphs. Cacti is nuked. Again.

One thing did give me an extra moment of panic after Infinity Internet bounced the server: Apparently, during initial setup of this server, I never got around to configuring MySQL for automatic startup at boot time. Hey, the machine has only been rebooted three times since I was handed the keys; this is the first reboot in almost exactly a year.

Now I’m going to attempt relaxation after a bit more than three solid hours of being a raving stressmonkey…

18 April, 2009
Testing The New Lighting Gear

Following Dad’s suggestion, I picked up a couple of “sunlight” bulbs for scene lighting from Freddy’s. A quick trip to Office Depot netted me a pair of flexible desk lamps to put ’em in, and here are the results:

Lighting Test: Li

Lighting Test: Rusty, LI, Score

The colored towels are there for testing purposes. As you can see, these ducks look pretty good now. My next trick will be to come up with a “set” of some kind. Mind you, I don’t plan to restrict things to just the one location, and in fact with sunnier weather on tap this weekend I’m considering getting some usable shots out-of-doors if at all possible.

Another, albeit less critical, task that I’d like to accomplish involves some softening of the lighting. Both Dad and Uncle Pete have given some good suggestions on that, it’s just a matter of acquiring materials and performing more tests. (Oh, shucky darn, I’ll have to take more pictures. Boo hoo.)

Progress, it is being made. Once the physical requirements are met, though, I’ll have the really tough work: Cranking out enough scripts to get a few weeks’ worth of material into the queue… and there’s the whole “gotta do something about the website design” thing, too. Ack. What have I gotten myself into?

17 April, 2009
Captain Tightpants I Am Not

I strolled toward the front door, shades in hand, denim jacket on, ready to enjoy a few minutes of sunshine. Feeling whimsical, I announced, “I aim to misbehave.”

Without missing a beat, Dolly (front desk/accounting gal) replied, “Do you even know how?”

“…Well. A little bit. I’m learning. Taking night classes, you know.”

Apparently I exude more of a straight-laced demeanor than even I myself had previously suspected. Hmm.

16 April, 2009
Dialog Bubble Test Image

Post tagged: Quacked Panes

I tried to tweet about this, but for some reason folks were getting a 404 error… even though the image link was 100% correct. So. I don’t know whether WordPress or Apache is at fault. I don’t have the luxury of time to spend tracking it down, either, especially when a simpler solution can present itself: I can blog about it! Duh!

So. Here you go (click the image to embiggen):

Meet Poe. He’s a pretentious little twit duck. Figures he’s named after Edgar Allen, but everyone else knows that his name’s just short for poe-zur…

(Also, I won’t be using the Dragonbones font in the actual project. I just liked how it looked during testing so I kept it in the “final” image.)

13 April, 2009
Old Software

I’m in a rut.

No, not in my love life or anything like that. I just keep finding myself falling back on old software that may not be ideally suited to the task, but I’m familiar enough with that I’m willing to put up with the quirks for the sake of not having to relearn how to do everything.

In this case, I’m looking at using my old copy of Fireworks 3, the (vaguely) object-oriented for-the-web image manipulation software from Macromedia. (Remember them?) It was released a decade ago, positioned in the market as a sort of competitor to Adobe’s ImageReady, itself a companion to the mighty Photoshop. The key reason I’m leaning toward Fireworks is that you can copy attributes from, say, a text box and paste just those attributes to another object in the same or another open image. This will allow me to create effects templates for the project.

Part of me is thinking, though, “Fireworks 3? That’s so ten-years-ago! C’mon, there must be something newer!” Sure. I could use the current version of GIMP. That’s the only other option within my budget. It would, however, necessitate learning a whole new interface and figuring out how to do the things I want all over again. I don’t know if it’s worth the trouble. On the other hand… how long do I want to stay bound to an old software product?

For now? I think I’m going to stay with the “don’t fix if it ain’t broke” philosophy. If I want to get the new project off the ground in a timely fashion, then I don’t want to switch from fixed to rotary wings shortly before takeoff.

(Wow. That metaphor almost gave me airsickness. And I wanted to be a writer when I grew up? Huh.)

13 April, 2009
Ducks, Redux

I still need to get my hands on a good light source for indoors (so if there any shutterbugs in the Rose City who have good tips on inexpensive lighting, let me know) but I wanted to show you what that earlier picture of my recently-cleaned ducks was supposed to look sort of like.

From left to right in that photograph is the starting lineup for that silly little project I’ve been prepping for: Rei, Shimako, Roger, Sachiko, Li, Poe, Neil, Rusty and Score.

The next bit of preparation will involve layout, image editing software & templates, and… fonts selections. Stay tuned, duck fans…

10 April, 2009