So, back on the morning of October 4th I started working on this with the plan that I’d post it later that night as the return animation after a several week blog-break.  Well, suffice it to say, for now, I decided against putting it up.  There’s magick in the world if you know where to look.  Whatever, here it is now.

Under the load of an unfamiliar electric supply the sad yet somewhat expected demise of a special workhorse computer several weeks back triggered cascading problems that resulted in necessary overhauls of all my computers and network.

What should have been a smooth unpack-setup-plugin-poweron event turned into a hair pulling fiasco.

Ok, so this is the Deadline interface, the Monitor part.  After almost 30 years Autodesk’s Backburner has shit the bed.  And after trying too long to make it to work in Windows 11, I’m checking out Deadline.  It’s 20+ years old now and I’ve only used it a couple times at the Adler Planetarium where they use it for managing their render farm.  Someone online described the installation of the Deadline toolkit as dicey and it pretty much was exactly that.  I hope Autodesk eventually gives Backburner the love it deserves.  But, still a sincere Thank You to Mr. Bezos.  Deadline is pretty sweet.  And free now.

Deadline calculates 265.8 GHz of CPU rendering power on the farm.  Not much compared to cloud rentals, of course, but a fairly vulgar amount for a home situation…as I am often reminded :/

I looked a while back so it’s probably about 5 bucks or so now per hour per machine to render something with the same amount of computing power I have.  Some of these animations would cost a few to several hundred dollars to have rendered in the cloud in the same amount of time as my farm.  

There was a larger point to this post and if I ever remember what it was I’ll update it.

Since there are still hundreds of these gems this seems like a good way to shake out some blog cobwebs and begin\end. 

My dad used to say “a dime a dozen” and then a twelve year old me would look at him like he was nuts.  I never understood why he didn’t hit the gas and put some sort of portfolio together.  He clearly had the skill and the love.  Never got it.  Of course, I’m slow and it wasn’t until years later when I truly appreciated what the hell he meant 😛

When he died on Maui in November 2012 a dear friend of his shipped me his notebooks before they could be lost.  Thank you.  I thought I mentioned this the first time I posted his work here, but apparently (lol) not.  Anyway, point being a lot of my memories of him tucked away and hunched over at his drafting table are from the early to mid 1980’s.  I don’t have any notebooks or drawings that are dated from that time.  So, some things did get lost.