The recent rains from the hurricane and our daily thunderstorms managed to wash away enough ground cover to expose the cable line coming into my home, which naturally I didn’t notice, nor did the lawn service. Friday I was busy working from home, with the local news station on the t.v. for background noise, just as I was ready to finish working I heard the gardeners out front with their lawnmowers, weed whackers and other assorted LOUD equipment. And then….in the blink of an eye the feed to the t.v. was gone as was my connection to the outside world.
So, naturally I called the cable company, they tried to reboot the cable box from their office without success, and the girl on the end of the line was puzzled since she couldn’t get anything back from my box. Okay, so we tried manual rebooting (not easy on the cable box I have apparently) and finally she just had me unplug it. Thirty seconds later I plugged the box back in, and there it sat trying to initialize… now early on in the conversation I mentioned that the cable went out shortly after I heard the gardeners start to mow the lawn out from of my townhome and I suggested that maybe they cut the line, okay no problem she said, we’ll send someone out….”We can have someone there from between now and 8PM this evening”. “Great I said”.
After the call I walked out front and yep, the cable line was exposed and sliced through 😦
Now, fast forward to 7:15 PM, and no word from the cable company, so I’m back on the phone with them, after waiting 30 minutes for an available support person, only to find out that the person I spoke with earlier in the day (around 1:30 PM that afternoon) did not put in my service request until after the cut off for the day. Oh joy, so I’m scheduled for the next day between 8 AM and 10 AM. Now during my 30 minutes on hold I was told no less than 6 times via a recording that I could solve most issues just by rebooting my cable box, great information assuming that you have a uncut connection back to the cable company ;), and by the fourth round of that message I was talking back to the recording – LOL.
So no t.v., no internet, my cell phone won’t let me post any PLURK messages, so I sent text messages to Kat to let her know I was offline (this would be the second night in a row I had not logged on at all). I had the choice of housework (uhhh no), watch a dvd on the computer (meh), or spend some quality time in Blender. So after a call with Kat, I decided to spend some time in Blender working on a collaborative kit that Kat and I had been discussing. Now for those of you who have never tried Blender, it takes some fortitude to learn how to use and I’m still in the early stages of learning the software. An hour later, I had saved a blend setup another half hour and success.
Fast forward to Saturday morning and the cable company finally shows up, fixes the cut line, buries it well and I’m online and uploading the sculpt maps and AO textures and sending them to Kat. And then we started to look at how the sculpts are taking textures and they look great. No sneak peeks on the kit yet, but we will be releasing the collaborative kit next weekend as part of Sixty Linden Weekends and we’re both very excited about the kit.
Tranquility Way Station 