March Has Been a Good Month

  • I have finally found a good lighting solution for my sound stage.  Lithonia Lighting is now selling linkable LED strips.  The 4-foot ones are 3200 lumens.  You buy a power cord for one and linking cords for the rest, and you only need one outlet.  They are silent, compact, and easily mountable.  They have a color temperature of 4100K.  I’m not sure how many I will end up using, but I will definitely want more than one.  I guess I need to finish the sound stage and start using it.
  • I basically have a new job with my employer.  As expected, I have been assigned full-time to the product group for which I received an emergency knowledge transfer.  Less expected, I have been given the responsibility of leading the other two guys on the team.  This is a good opportunity for me, and I plan to make the best of it.
  • I bought a truck.  It is a 2008 Ford Ranger FX4, a seven year newer version of the Ranger I had before.  Everything works, and it runs significantly better than my last truck.  I can do truck stuff again, and it’s amazing to me how many things I had mentally put on hold for lack of a truck.  Camping, hunting, vacation, cycling, filmmaking, woodworking, and lawn care were all impacted by it.  I look forward to becoming acquainted with the new truck.  I sold the Corolla a couple days later.  That whole episode is now behind me.
  • The electronics work I’m doing has made me realize I’m using the same cheap Radio Shack soldering iron I’ve had since my teens.  It works, but I can afford something better now.  So, I’ve splurged, and I’ve acquired a real soldering iron, a Weller WESD51 digital soldering station.  I can’t wait to use it.
  • I’ve also acquired my first wireless lavalier microphone system, a Sennheiser EW 100 G3 system.  I am really quite happy and impressed with it, and when they say broadcast quality, they seem to mean it.  It came with an ME 2 microphone, which is not very great.  However, when I attach a good dynamic mic to the plug-on transmitter, I can really appreciate the quality of the wireless transmission.  My next purchase will be a Sanken COS-11D lavalier microphone.  Then I’ll want to expand the system to handle two actors.
  • My new role at work is going to expose me to some technologies that are new to me, including Citrix Xen, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nagios.  Oh, and Globalscape EFT.  There are other technologies I hope I never have to deal with, including Delphi and Modula-2.  I took my first dive into Nagios last weekend, and this weekend I hope to dig into Citrix XenDesktop.  I really should build a crash system at home that I can use to play with different operating systems.