
I’m in the middle of a big, important project at work, the sort of thing where I’ve been cleared to work overtime. Looks so far like that won’t be necessary. See, my Big Trick at work, the one thing I can do better than anybody else, is what we call “draping” — using this obscure program that straddles the gap between 2D and 3D and lets us map patterns onto flat photos so as to make them follow the apparent curved surfaces. There are a couple of other guys who can use the software, but I’ve logged at least one order of magnitude more time than they have, so I’m just vastly more experienced with it. The current project involves a shitload of draping.
Fortunately, at some point we ponied up a few grand for the SDK version of the software, which lets us automate it. So one of the programmers got this running, and the upshot is that while somebody still needs to do the skillful end of the job, the mindless repetitive part can now be handled by a computer, the way things oughta be. What I feared would be a day or two of tedious donkey work turned into a couple of hours of me typing two commands and then doing other things for five minutes while they executed.
Inspired by this, I’ve finally installed
cygwin, and on Monday I’ll give GTK+ and
the GIMP a try, and I’ll see if I can’t automate the rest of the donkey work.
Anyway, turns out there’s no Games Club tonight, so I walked down to Union Square, parked my butt in Starbucks for a while, read some more of my current read (
Karel Čapek’s The Absolute at Large, because
Nick Tosches’s King of the Jews had become unbearably tedious), did a bit of sketching, fed my notebook fetish (and my fantasies of
getting shit done) by picking up a Miquelrius gridded notebook at Barnes & Noble, then hit Virgin and picked up four CDs for $10 a pop.
( More art below the cut )