Thank Yous For This Weekend: Macromedia, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and of course Microsoft for making my weekend a living hell!
Non-stop up to the point that I’m writing this, I’ve been working on the much-aformentioned Flash project, Rupert. I’ve bragged that I’ve been getting paid $40 an hour to make this masterpiece, but I was supposed to have gotten $40 an hour because Ben Parker, my employer, thought it would be finished in a few hours. Instead, it’s taken a few months.
I was working on Ben’s PowerMac G4. The project was going fine until camp started… then I had to focus on being a counselor and put the project off. This gave my trial version of Flash enough time to expire. So I couldn’t work at Ben’s house anymore. Pretty professional, eh?
So I frantically looked for a place to continue this project. Unfortunately, Macromedia decided to make Flash development files incompatible between operating systems, and, like any SANE person, I use Windows. I couldn’t continue working on the project at home. So I had to go to Kinko’s, for God’s sakes!
After a hectic day of working at Kinko’s, I still wasn’t done. And the computer was getting slower and slower, and the file size was getting bigger and bigger. Fortunately, James directed me to the DigiQuest Learning Center, where he’s been loafing around all summer being an “intern,” and I was able to finish animating the project there, thanks to a wide selection of great big Mac G4s.
But I wasn’t finished yet!
Sure I was finished, but GOD DAMN, was the file big. So I couldn’t email it or upload it to myself at home to put on a CD burner, so I had to split it into sections and send the files one by one. Great, now I had the file back on my home computer, in one piece. Hold it… my HOME computer? But that’s a PC! Ben won’t be able to read this!
Which brings us to THIS weekend.
After a long, boring vacation to Bear Valley, I came back to find that my file was too big for my computer to process into an SWF (a regular Shockwave Flash internet file). After hours of deleting semi-valuable stuff off of my computer, I finally gave my computer enough virtual memory to complete the conversion. Yay! I’ve got the file in its final form, ready to go to Ben’s!
I go to Ben’s, the CD-R decides not to work, and my internet backup version is 5 minutes of nice, smooth WHITE. Everything on the Mac is CORRUPTED!
So far, all I’ve accomplished is the WHOLE PROJECT. That sounds like a lot, right? Well, it’s like having created the Lincoln Memorial in my bedroom. There’s NO WAY TO MOVE IT. But there’s always tomorrow! And I’ll be spending all of it doing the SAME THING AS TODAY!
Well, happy happy joy joy. That’s my weekend in a NUTSHELL. I’ve got to stop capitalizing THE END OF EACH SENTENCE. Good NIGHT.