Hey all!
We're being reminded that its been way too long since our last blog post, and I feel like once we get most things caught up it will be easier to do more impromptu updates more often.
I am all wrapped up right now in two things. The first is work; spring is the busiest time of the year for us because we have to juggle so many things. First, we run a spay/neuter clinic and now is the time when all small animals go into heat. This means that our Trap-Neuter-Release program is working overtime to try to get as many female cats spayed before 'kitten season.' Also, everyone who hasn't gotten their cat or dog fixed yet is panicking because they are also going into heat, and we have about a 100 person waiting list for our clinic right now. I both run the TNR program and do all of the spay/neuter scheduling.
Spring also brings a pick-up in both adoptions and people wanting to surrender their animals to us. We're trying to handle adoption applications as quickly as possible to free space up for new animals coming in, but as always we're not keeping up with demand. I dream of the day that we're able to pull from other, more desperate shelters to free up space for them.
My other time sink right now is Richmond Civic Theater's rendition of A Chorus Line, which practices 15 hours a week. I am having a lot of fun, and the show is going to be exciting, can't wait for opening night. Its also opened the door to meeting a lot of new friends and learning a lot about a new group of people, which is always a fun adventure.
In the meantime, while I'm not home, Nate and friend Ben O'Brien have started seriously working on a video game. They are making 3D models of ships and are starting to put them into a program that allows them to move around. Its all slow going, but very exciting when they make some new headway. I am sure that Nate can fill you in on more.
Hey folks, Nate here.
Let me start out by saying I'm really proud of all the hard work Justine has been doing. I know I'm biased, but she's been a force to be reckoned with in the animal world, and yet she still finds the energy to make it through 3 hours of play practice 5 nights a week. That said, we're both looking forward to when she has more free time!
My days have been busy at work where the website is still going strong. My latest big project at work was getting our phone server upgraded. We use a hand-built and hand configured VoIP PBX that I put together as one of my first projects when I was hired. It served us well, but the software is years out of date, would be hard to upgrade and we're still using analog telephone lines that introduce nasty echo. We've been talking about upgrading for years and switching to digital lines, but I've never had the time. It's also our production phone server, meaning if it doesn't work, we don't have phones so I can only work on it outside of business hours.
Recently my boss and I had been spit balling the logistics of upgrading the phone server verses buying/renting a hosted solution from a company and just washing our hands of it. We were planning on meeting to get a quote for the hosted PBX that Monday but we were both curious how hard doing it ourselves would be. So that weekend, while Justine was working at the shelter or practicing for her play, I went into work and started building a new phone system. I attached some extra hard drives we had lying around to our old phone system, and just disconnected the server's old hard drives. That way I could set up the new system on the new drives, and when I was done for the night I just switched a couple cables around, rebooted and the server would go back to using the old phone system.
About 8 hours later I had a new phone system that did 95% of the stuff we needed and was ready for digital lines. That Monday I got to surprise my boss with the new system and that also gave us a much better comparison for the quotes we'd get later that day. When we got the quotes for the hosted solution they were much more expensive than having me build and maintain the server, so we ended up just using our own solution and buying digital lines. The next day I switched us over to the new system, and a couple weeks later I switched us to digital lines. All in all the operation went off smoother than I expected and no one has had any problems with the switch!
It's neat that I did essentially the same project five years apart so I got to see how much my abilities have improved since then. I'm more confident, faster, less likely to get stuck, more likely to unstick myself when I do, and ended up building a more robust system the second time round.
That's entirely too much tech talk for now, but it was a fun accomplishment.
Okay, a little more tech talk; Justine mentioned a friend and I are working on a game. We're still at the very early staging of putting it together, but we've been learning to build 3D models in a free (but very powerful) program called Blender. Here are two untextured models I've worked on:
Once we have some objects, we put them into another free (and also very powerful) program called Unity. Unity is a game engine and it's what you use to breath life into your world. Once in Unity we can define what each object does, how they will interact and how the player influences them. It starts as a blank slate with a vast array of tools, so I've been spending a lot of time learning how they work and slowly shaping what we have, into when we've envisioned. A neat feature of Unity is that it allows us to build our game for the web, so once we have something to show, I'll send out a link and you guys can play around with our creation.
That's all for now!
- The Busy Busy Bells
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