2015

Colin left today after coming down for a few days. We played a lot of Wii U when he was here, since we picked it up the day before he came down. I have to admit, while I didn’t want one when it came out, Mario Maker and Mario Kart are amazing and definitely make me regret not getting one sooner. I might soon also pick up Super Mario Bros U since it looks fun with multiple people. Just need to check if you can play online with it.

We also went to Buffalo Wild Wings, which is not something Kris and I do often since she doesn’t like their food. The Blazing Wings is what Colin usually gets, but these were reformulated and much hotter than he anticipated. His reaction was too funny not to start recording:

He says within a year he will be able to handle it, so I am thinking about recording his reaction next time he comes down and see if the wings are still too hot for him.

Kris and I have an old Windows machine that wasn’t being used for anything, so I bought a 5TB hard drive for it, installed Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL and we will be using it as an in house server. The 5TB is most likely overkill since it will be used only as an in house testing server, but you never know when we’ll need to use it as a cloud storage solution, or even a media server, not everything can be on Netflix afterall.

At this point I need to make sure Apache, MySQL, and PHP all run at startup and figure out some sort of admin panel. Plesk and cPanel are out of the question since they are paid, so I’ll need to figure out a free solution and then how to install it. With any luck I will have it installed by Friday and have a few test sites setup to test things out.

I found Red Vs Blue years ago, back probably at least 10 years ago, when I was in college. I remember it was a random episode in season 3 where the Battle Creek Zealots are battling over the flag. I didn’t know it at the time, but that video got me hooked on Rooster Teeth productions. I’ve watched almost all of their videos, love the Achievement Hunter content, talked to some of them on Twitter and their site. In a lot of ways, it’s inspired me over the years, especially when I first started making money online.

Season eight of Red Vs Blue was a huge one, they did things that you couldn’t do in a video game. There’s a scene where a car comes crashing through a wall and it’s entirely computer generated, mixed with the engine of Halo 3. It was amazing. There’s been a lot of cool things, but that one scene, the first time you see that after watching eight years of strictly Machinima, it stands out.

Last Sunday the lead animator and the person responsible for that scene, Monty Oum, passed away. Besides working on Red Vs Blue, Monty was the creator of RWBY, Haloid and Dead Fantasy. Monty was 33 years old when he died.

For someone who has watched and been inspired by these people for the last ten years, it’s absolutely heart breaking, but as Monty would say “Keep moving forward”, so that’s what I’m going to do. I am going to keep being inspired by the work that he did and the work he has laid out for the years to come.

Update: As of 2023, I modified this table to have stabilizing beams on the bottom and added casters for the ability to move it where I wanted it. The idea initially was portable table for stream things, but I have yet to use it for that.

Here we are 14 days into 2015 and it’s surreal. I swear I blogged just the other day. It feels like New Years was just yesterday and that Colin just left. Time just seems to be going by so fast lately.

While Colin was here we took down a half wall and moved part of another wall over so that we could put up a railing for the basement stairs. We also disconnected the kitchenette sink and water lines because it wasn’t being used. As the pipe was being cut, it snapped where it shouldn’t have so we had to turn the water off for the whole house as we went back to Home Depot to get a new pipe. We got rid of the half wall because it didn’t make much sense, there was wasted space and when we took down the wall behind the stairs that was previously inaccessible, we found a suitcase, a foam mattress, and just a bunch of scrap materials.

Right now the railing is only temporary since we haven’t finished the wall yet and probably won’t until we figure out what we’re doing with the basement, also since with the pipe breaking, we forgot to measure what dimensions we needed for the railing.

Since only part of the wall was put back up, there was a lot of left over wood. I salvaged what I could.

I then decided to make a table to use for things like craft projects, building models, etc.

I’m currently building a Master Chief model that Kris got me and after that I will be putting together a Back to the Future Lego Delorean that her mom got me for Christmas. For some reason everyone was surprised that I was able to build a table out of the spare wood, so now we’re coming up with plans for other furniture that can be built, I think for the next thing I build is going to be a table for behind the fireplace in the den that can house the controllers, and remotes for the television and the other electronics. I need to plan how I want to do it and come up with a plan then go buy the wood, but I won’t be starting on that until I finish some other things around the house.