the Scarlet Letters

Brilliant!! Sven, this is great both the engaging/clarifying questions vs. (my infinite and overwhelming) to-do-lists. But not only that bit, your other breakthrough idea to bring improvisation into each stage so that it stays alive and fun for you is also a really new way to proceed. Those of us, most of us, can get comfortable with a way to approach our tasks. Your idea to break the mold, so to speak, of the methodology you are used to employing, is like a whole new life, don't you think? Great work! 226 Q's?! We'll have to start calling you the Tornado.

Move your stuff out of G's way until you get the studio flooring sorted out.

Forget cd shelving for the time being, just stack 'em against a wall in towers.

Forget Pergo or anything else, strip the mother done to the bone, concrete sub flooring, baby, you heard me.

Vacuum on Thursday.

Make a Q&D animation test of the son in the chair you've already made, unless the scale is horrendous.

Consider making the Q&D film in installments, the film "act" being them talking, the squirming, and then the cushion disappearing act.

Consider holding writing weeks and animation month-a thons in alternating months so as to maintain your mental health.

KIDDING!!!--I'm not seriously getting all up in your bidness, Sven. It was just such a fun chance to comment on someone else's life! hee.

Hey! I'll get all up in Sven's bidness too for a minute! ;)

I didn't read the list, but just in response to something Shelley said above, I've gotten rid of the cases and liner art for most of my CDs, and I just keep 'em all in a few CD wallets - the big ones, that hold like 120 CDs. It's amazing how much room it saves! What would fill an entire bookshelf fits into a wallet the size of a thick dictionary.

Can't bring myself to do it with the DVDs yet though. I bought some video storage boxes from http://www.bagsunlimited.com/cart/detail.asp?cat=465&subcat=238&product_id=xvhs48 .

i like what shelley did: if everyone who read the questions answered some of them, all of your questions would be answered! :D so...

yes, there are 4 computer issues: confessor, camino, backup & itunes.

you need more ram and more hard drive space for confessor. we're only backing up home directories, so i think the backup space will be okay for now. yes, you can repartition the drives yourself. rsync is a whole different beast, but i think you'd get it. take a look at the "confess" file someday.

take in the laptop during a week you're busy with other things so you don't miss it as much. if you upgrade the laptop, -they'll- order the parts. in your case, i wouldn't bother shopping around for better prices; you just want the computer back as quickly as possible. hard drive & ram upgrades are something you could do yourself, but i don't know if you'll think it's worth it.

if you run out of harddrive/memory again, you may still be able to upgrade then, but you may be in the market for a new laptop. yes, i think you can move to the macbook's intel processor (i think this is what you meant when you said 'pentium') even if the rest of our network stays at powerpc for a while.

when you look at camino, look for the files you really love or that are important to lsgl: everything else is stuff that you probably don't miss, anyway.

camino makes a good fileserver & backup machine. it's connected to the giant lcd screen. when you get back to lsgl, you'll be happier to have the dual-processor power. but we could replace it with a mac mini to do the fileserving/backup stuff, and let you plug in confessor to the lcd screen when necessary. in which case i'd recommend waiting until we had to upgrade confessor to a new dual-processor laptop. but then, maybe you'd need to upgrade lightwave....

we have a lot of movies & movie files on confessor that should probably be living on camino. you can work on current projects on confessor, but let camino be your final resting place for video projects.

itunes: i think i'd start over. *sigh* i have copies of the playlists and can rebuild them again for you. just give me a stack of cds & i'll do a few every time i go to the studio. carl's music is mixed in now, yes, which is one of the reasons to start fresh. (sorry, carl!) yes, we'll have to go back to the cds, i think.

yes, yes, yes, only keep the files on your desktop that are relatively current. it's like the office upstairs: you like to clear off the desks from time to time.

we're on 10.4.8.

we'll do a backup before you take it in, but i'd ask them to back it up & reimport like they did when we replaced camino's hard drive.

i'd guess in-stock pergo, but what's the difference? for your first remodeling project, do an easy baseline, then figure out what you'd do differently next time.

fall artist's way ends dec05. spring artist's way starts jan30, but figure a week before that to vaccum/shampoo setup.

thanks via email.

take the svan in wednesday, thursday or friday. i can go with you then.

vote today or tomorrow. i have to vote before artist's way tomorrow night.

Gretchin, with the tech chops! Way to go with answering all of Sven's dilemmas! Now, if we could only get Laika to call and beg him to work!

Yowza! Thanks everyone!

If we had concrete floors, I'd probably just strip off the carpet -- but the floors are plywood, so that's not an option.

I like the idea of doing the film in acts... With Let Sleeping Gods Lie, I've been thinking of using the teaser -- unaltered -- as the first act. And with writing, breaking easys into subsections has helped me enormously. I'm going to have to chew on this, as a general principle.

Yeah, I've thought about taking CDs and DVDs and putting them into a few big binders. It certainly would save an enormous amount of space... And yet, there's something about the physicality of being able to browse spines that I'm just not ready to give up yet. (Maybe after I learn to not leave all my file folders on the computer desktop, then it'll seem like a more natural organization?!)

If I order the harddrive in advance, I get to keep the laptop a few days longer. I'm really just using it to read and write blog posts right now. I can do that over at the studio if need be. ...But it's also my tool for framegrabbing when I'm animating in the garage -- so when the laptop goes into the shop, there's a couple of days when I KNOW I won't be animating.

I'd forgotten about Camino being a dual proc. That's a good reason to keep it as my primary CG machine.

I don't think the iTunes situation is as bad as you think. All the mp3s are still there on the computer -- iTunes just doesn't know where they are. Whereas ripping takes 10-15 minutes per disc (trust me), drag'n'dropping the files into iTunes should be pretty speedy. The real pain is going to be renaming files (e.g. from "The Vapors" to "Vapors") -- which is a personalization issue that I don't think can be delegated.

Since I'm going out tomorrow, I can drop off your ballot at the same time I'm delivering mine -- if you want.