The Future of the Cybersphere’s Show Schedule

Okay, so the current “randomized” show schedule hasn’t really made a big splash yet. Granted, I shouldn’t expect much because it IS the beginning of the year, but I was thinking… Before, we played the same set of shows for 2 months at a time… this is way too long. Now, my change to the schedule, while it lets more popular shows come around more often, even I can’t remember what’s being shown without looking at the schedule I made. I think for the next schedule, I’m going to make the same set of shows play for a month at a time. Not too long, not too short. We’ll see how it works out.

Skyhook Spires will be the last…

… Last level I make for Unreal Tournament 2004, that is. It’s true that I’ve only made a handful of levels anyways, but I think it’s time to pony up the dough and actually buy Unreal Tournament 3. Need to keep up with the times, haha. That said, I think it’s time to actually finish Skyhook Spires instead of wasting time… then again, wasting time is what I’m good at doing.

Take a Break, Get a Break

It’s just been one annoyance after another at work ever since we got back from our Christmas break. Actually, it started before the break, but was simply amplified by our absence. Here’s a happy little list of all the random stuff to break or malfunction both before and after the break:

• One of our Digistar 3 projectors has a problem which appears to be a blown out ballast preventing one of its two bulbs from igniting. This had been hovering over us since before Christmas and we are still dealing with it as getting the part from a 3rd party has been delayed… that aside from the part being expensive… $1,100 excluding the $400 to have their guy come out to fix it… we may try to do it ourselves.
• There was a problem with our VMIX (video mix) that prevented any of our [horribly outdated] laser disc players and DVD from being any use to us. This one took a while for us to track down as it seemed to be a few other things before we narrowed it down. GG for everything chained together like Christmas tree lights. This existed before Christmas and was only recently fixed (as in this week). Turns out, one of the cards in the VMIX decided it wanted to become unseated… I suspect sabotage.
• Our [once again, horribly outdated] Kodak 35mm slide projectors are always having problems. Usually power supplies, but sometimes fans or slide masks.  Well, after Christmas, we had not one, not two, but FIVE of these old crappy projectors with problems. 3 decided to have blow out their power supplies (which sounds like popping popcorn until they’re turned off completely) and 2 decided to have slide mask problems… either they don’t open, or don’t close, or don’t do either of those in a timely manner. I would find much joy in just taking a baseball bat to them rather than getting the parts to fix them… parts that are slowly disappearing, since they aren’t manufactured anymore. Here’s a couple more hundred to spend…
• Last but certainly not least, our [once again, horribly outdated] Digistar 2 projector decided it wanted to stop working as well. Oh, what joy! We’ve had to do test after test to figure out what in the world is wrong with this thing. One moment it’s the high voltage power supply, then it’s one of the low voltages, then it could be one of the deflection amps (in this case, the x), and now we think it’s just the correction card with a possibility of being the deflection amp as well. Anyways, we’re probably going to do a swap of the card with E&S which comes to a pretty penny of $2980 plus shipping. Ugh… these old pieces of equipment are nickle and diming us to death… if you can call $2980 nickles and dimes.

Phew, it’s a mess, but it least the D3 system and our Omniscan laser are still functioning… knock on wood. But to make matters worse, we still have schools that occasionally want to see our old (and when I say old, I mean 20 year old) planetarium shows like In My Backyard or Larry Cat in Space… which just so happens to make use of all of these old pieces of equipment that keeps breaking on a semi-regular basis.

And wouldn’t you know it… we’ve got not one, not two, but THREE different groups wanting to see these two shows NEXT week. Ruh Roh! What are we gonna do Scooby Doo?! Well, our solution is to try to get these two shows converted to D3 as quickly as possible, starting with In My Backyard. Can we do it? I’m not so sure, but we’ve been trying. We’ve only got about 1/3 of the show in working order. Another 1/2 of it is in a “Oh crap, we need to make this look better” stage, then we have to finish it off, and then go back and make sure that it all lines up with the laser portion of the show (which we’ll replace at a later date).

*Mind Blown* Too much to think about at once.

A New Place

I just recently got a new apartment and have been busy getting all of my stuff moved over into it. Sometimes you don’t realize how much crap you really have until you have to move it from one place to another. I’m almost done moving stuff now and then it’s on to getting it all unpacked and stowed away somewhere. I also got a bunch of new furniture too. Needless to say, it’s all been one big distraction over the past few weeks. Aside from that, there’s also been a lot of distractions going on at work which I’ll discuss in just a moment…