Current mood:	optimistic
Current music:	Goodnight and Go - Imogen Heap

Wiped Out But Satisfied
What a weekend. My daughters kept me busy with performances and auditions during the end of last week while I rendered and rendered and rendered a DVD project for Conduit 16's Masquerade. I spent exactly one week rendering that project over and over again with error after error. Turns out I found a bug in Apple's iDVD. I had to free over 30gb of space on my hard drive for the swap file and let the project render for over 14½ hours. The hang up? A bug in iDVD 6 causes audio to take a small eternity to compress while giving the appearance that the program has hung. Even Apple tech support didn't know how to help me. They told me to reimport my audio as AIFF files, even though iMovie converts audio files into AIFF when you initially import them.

Geek speak, I know, but it is the only geeky rant I will humor in this entry. I'll save my wrath for Apple tech support tomorrow when I call them on a rampage. They owe me a week of my life back for being dunces and not knowing their own software. Oops, sorry. Ranting again.

So, the project is rendered and a two month ordeal has come close to an end. I am fairly proud of the results and look forward to sending it out to my paying customers. None of them will need to know how many bizarro events I encountered trying to get this video made.

And suddenly I am free to write again. Some of you know what a delicious feeling of relief that brings. I hope to continue my artistic progress, of course, as I retrain my mind and discover my "style". You can track that over on flickr, but the big goal is to finish my picture book ms and to continue the backstory work on my novel. Usually, I juggle these goals while working, but the DVD project was so demanding I simply could not afford to get distracted doing anything BUT that project.

Now I can bring Sneakers to life and walk Meridee around the fields of my imagination and still get paid. It's a good day.