What weekend?

As usual my weekend was 80% work, 15% entertainment, and 5% home maintenance. One of my main focuses over the weekend was preparing for the next MAX conference. I have been invited to be one of the featured presenters. I will be presenting a session on Object-Oriented programming ActionScript: Design Patterns. MAX is the newly re-named Macromedia Developers conference. It used to be called UCONN, then DevCon (when we merged with Allaire) and now MAX. I am sure Marketing will rename it once again for next year. Maybe "Macromedia Super User Conference MX 2004 Gold Edition", MSUCMX2K4GE for short.

The conference is not until the end of November but the organizers are requiring our presentations to be completed exactly one month before. Today, is the deadline for the draft of our PowerPoint presentation. I spent a good deal of Saturday in front of the computer wondering how I am going to simply explain the Strategy pattern to the audience in 10 minutes and show ActionScript examples that are clear yet syntactically brief. Ugh. Needless to say I will be working at it more today and I may have to deliver it a day late.

I spent the rest of the day Saturday kicking it with Dave E. and him forcing me to buy records. The bastard *grin*. Okay, so I can't really blame him on my purchases but he was the one that wanted to go shopping and me in record store is like a alcoholic with $100 bucks at BevMo. Needless to say I am going to have to buy as much as I can. What makes it even more painful is that I am starting a new collection of Hip-Hop, specifically focusing on instrumental and acapella remixes of the tracks and that means that there is a ton of "essential music" that I don't own.

One of the things that is spawning out of the record collection is that we will be intergrating this music into our Fourdecks set. This will allow us to create a set that both Dave and I can play instrumental music and then Jim and whoever is not currenlty mixing the music can scratch and lay in Acapella vocals over the top.

Originally we talked about doing this with DnB, and we can work some of that in, but I think the 90 bpm range is so much better for the style of scratching we use. That, and I really dig the sounds and breaks that are coming out right now.

Sunday was a day dedicated to the studio. I had Tai Chi in the morning and then headed over to the studio to get a crack'n at it. Julia, the general contractor for the construction, was there with an airless spray-gun to paint the outside of the studio. Because she was there to paint, Chris and I put off the interior to focus on the exterior.

Chris was not exactly thrilled to tell me that we where going to be working on the exterior. The reason is, I personally HATE the exterior of this building. Not because it looks bad, but because I have spent so much time working on it.

First you have to prime the eves. That means climbing an ladders while fighting trees, ditches, plants and gravity to get into the nooks and crannies of the eves and trying not to spash too much Zinser primer on you or everything else. Once all the eves are done, you have to roll all the stucco. This means hitting all the 12' walls with this stuff, and since this is the first coat of the primer it sucks it all in on the first roll.

Once you have primed everything (took 3 people 2 days) you get to start painting. We had to do 2 coats of white on the back walls and these were the 12' walls that you had to lean over fences, fight ditches and jab yourself with Mr. Spikey McPlant (yup Campbell, I got to know him really well) to get access to.

By the time the exterior was in that state I had two huge blisters on my thumbs, I was covered in Zinzer and white paint from head to toe and I managed to get a fucking huge piece of stucco in my eye (thanks DB for helping me wash it out). And now Chris is telling me we have more to do. Damnit, I was fearful this would happen.

Luckily, we had an Airless. An airless is like a airbrush, but instead of using air to push the paint it uses just the material you are pumping into it. What would have taken 3 days to paint we did in 1.5 hours. The rest of the time was mixing paint and cleaning/priming the gun.

The process of painting with an airless goes like this:
1. Mix the paint (Julia hand mixed our colors, thanks to her I now have a little understanding of paint chemistry)
2. Clean a bucket (scrub/scrap out every little piece of paint so it won't jam the gun)
3. Strain the paint into the clean bucket
4. Mask all doors, windows, jboxes, lights, etc.
5. Prime the gun with the paint
6. Get into the highest angle possible and spay downwards
7. Spray the paint on the walls (make sure you don't turn the lock state to on, that just sucks)
8. Backroll anything that was sprayed (this creates a texture on the smooth paint so touch-ups match later and grabs all the excess paint, which there is a TON)
9. Try not to breath or look into the paint mist
10. Repeat steps 6 - 9 for a second coat
11. Clean the gun by running water through it 4 times (takes about 30 min)
12. Repeat all for every color

It sounds like a lot, and it did take all day but let me tell you, it was SOOOO much easier then hand painting the whole thing. We still need to spend next Saturday cutting in all the colors (where the eve meets the wall), do the trim with the teal/forest green-like color and catch all the knocks but the outside is looking really, really good.

I think Chris is taking three more days off so he will be hitting the inside. He did find the circuit issue so that is taken care of so all we have left is the track lighting (happening Wednesday), the 14 jack wall plates and the paint touch-ups left. Almost there...