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.
