Papercraft

Papercrafting (the art of making 3D objects out of paper)has become my newest addiction. I discovered it a couple years ago with a YouTube video of a papercraft dragon you can make, and when viewed correctly it appears that it's eyes are following you. It was really easy to make, and once I made it, I wanted to find other papercraft to make. I discovered a site called RavensBlight. The webpage is based around a fictitious town, and has pictures ans artwork from the site creator, as well as some papercraft toys. The town is a horror inspired town, with characters like zombies, vampires, werewolves, and all the usual type of characters you'd expect. I made a few of the papercraft from that site, but they weren't that complex to make (except the SlaughterBot, which had movable and changeable parts), so I continued my search for more sites. Here's a picture of the SlaughterBot:


I then came across the ReadyMech site, which featured about 20 different papercraft models. Generally though, they all had a very similar design to them, and they were very easy to make.

After doing some more searching around, I hit the jackpot with CustomPaperToys, a blog about papercraft, with models created by the owner of the blog, as well as many links to other papercraft sites and blogs. These papercraft models weren't just box characters, but were all different. Among them are characters like Igor, Princess Kitty, Owwwl and Buck Shot:




From that site, I discovered many, many other papercraft sites and blogs.

One of the sites I discovered was Ninjatoes. The models on this site are all based after video games, or cartoons. The models are more complex than the other ones I've been doing, but I wanted to try something different. I decided to start off and try the Indiana Jones model. It was harder, and took longer than all the other ones I had made, but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The instructions of the Ninjatoes' models are really done well. Instead of step by step text, with a few diagrams, its actual pictures of how to put it together, with accompanying text to explain certain things. Here are some picture on my Indy model, during construction and the completed model.



You can't really see it that great, but the third picture is the model next to a 12 inch ruler, showing how tall the model is. It's actual height is 13.5 inches tall. This is by far my favorite model I've made so far.I've just started another model from Ninjatoes; Young Link, from the game 'The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask'. So far, I only have his head finished, but here's how it looks so far (unfortunately, I'm still not that great at hiding the white parts on the joins, and you can see all the areas that where folds are made):


Because it's almost Christmas time, I decided to look for some Christmas papercraft models to make. Most of the ones I found were very boxy, or were models I had already made, but with a Santa skin instead of the regular one. Then I found this cute model of Santa, Rudolph and his sleigh. It came as three separate models that can be put together. Unfortunately, the site and instructions were in Japanese, but I still got it figured out, and I think it turned out alright.


I am constantly checking out all the pages I've used before for new web sites, and new papercraft models to make. Maybe one of these days I'll take a stab at making one of the papercraft model cities I've found that include roads, buildings, landmarks, building and even the people that live in the city. My only problem is that I'm quickly running out of room to display all of my models.

The devil hates Christmas

That's right, the devil is still inside our little kitten, and this time it's attention has turned to ruining Christmas for everyone. Well, not quite everyone, just Amanda and I. Amanda was getting ready to head out this morning (I had already left for work) when she heard a crash, and then another. She went to investigate, and discovered our Christmas tree (a small fake one, located on a table in the living room) lying on the floor, with ornaments scattered around, and one of her small plants, with soil and broken plate fragments scattered around it. She sprayed Pixie with the spray bottle we keep around just or occasions like this, but Pixie decided she wanted to play instead of being punished, so she started hiding as if to do sneak attacks, and playing with the ornaments and stuff. Amanda was not pleased, and neither was I when I heard about it. Neither of us have paid much attention to her tonight (except me telling her she was a bad kitten when I got home) in the hopes that she will learn her lesson. She probably wont, but we'll try to teach it to her anyways.

WTF??

So I was all excited to go back to work after the holidays (I know, the holidays haven't even started yet) because I was going to have a new office, with a desk!! No more workbench that I have to share with a server, a switch, countless cables and random computers that I'm working on. It was going to be great!! I wouldn't have to fight my way through caffeine starved co-workers to get into my office, or listen to their conversations about the latest episode of ER or American Idol. Sure, I would be loosing the fridge conveniently located right outside my current "office" but it would be worth it. But then today, all my dreams were smashed into tiny pieces (about the same size as my work area on the workbench actually) when I found out that the renovations weren't going to happen over the Christmas break, if they ever actually do happen at all. The reason: managers. In one of their manager meetings, they decided to skip the renovations happening in the building, and do them at a later date. When is that later date? No one knows. Matt and I don't know the exact reason it's not happening, but we both aren't happy. I also found out today that we are getting a new server in tomorrow, which is awesome, except that I have to share my workbench with it. Great, even less room for me now! So now all I have to look forward to when I get back from holidays is a smaller work area, and my 5 foot tall chair that I need to jump up to get on, all because of the workbench, which is meant to be used while standing. At least the fridge will stay outside my office for awhile longer now.

Food has never tasted so good, as when it's fully cooked properly!

Eight. That's the number of months Amanda and I have been cooking on a stove that doesn't work properly.

Twenty. That's the number of minutes it would take to boil water on the stove that's already pre-boiled in the kettle.

Three. That's the number of work orders we've gotten to try to fix the stove.

Ten. Thant's the number of minutes it now takes to boil water from the tap.

Those are just some of the crazy stats about our stove. Now, here's the story;

When Amanda and I moved into our apartment in May of this year, we noticed the stove wasn't quite working upto par. So we setup a work order for them to fix it. They came up the next day and replaced the elements on top. Great, that should fix it (at least the burners on top). But no, it didn't do anything except give us clean elements. Nothing much else was done for awhile after that, because the office is open 8:30 - 4:30, and Amanda and I are usually out of the apartment working and going to school, so it was very hard to go back and complain. Finally one day when Amanda was down at the office taking care of some other business, she mentioned again that our stove wasn't working. This time though, we didn't hear anything back from them. Once again, school and work took precedence over going down to the office to get our stove fixed, so nothing happened for awhile. Then on Tuesday, Amanda had some time (now that she's done her practicum) to go visit them again, and get another work order. They said they would be up that afternoon, but didn't come up until yesterday afternoon. And lo and behold, we now have a working stove! Al they have written on the work order is that they fixed the wiring. What was wrong before (I believe) is that the bottom element in the stove wasn't working. This was confirmed when Amanda was preheating the over for dinner, and all the stuff that we had spilled before was burning off of the element. A little later on, I took over making dinner, and while I was waiting for the water to boil, I heard a funny noise, and smelt a funny smell coming from the kitchen. I soon discovered that the wrong element was turned on, and instead of boiling water, I was melting our plastic tongs that were sitting on the stove! I rescued them before they melted all the way through, but not before a large chunk had melted off. So now we can start following directions on food, instead of making up our own times, and hoping we don't burn/undercook it! Now, we should probably start doing something about our leaking fridge...

Tomlinson Christmas Party

Every year around the beginning of December, Tomlinsons throws a big fancy Christmas party at the Centurion Center (a conference center/banquet hall that they own). This years party was on Saturday. It was lots of fun. The party is for all employees of Tomlinsons, so there was about 500-600 people there. They had an open bar with beer, coolers, liquor juice and pop (nothing too fancy, but still good stuff) which was only closed once at the beginning of dinner, which caused a slight panic at my table, as we were out of drinks! Dinner was amazing! It started with meat and veggie cannelloni, followed by a spinach, mandarin and pecan salad with some weird poppyseed dressing. Then came the main course: veal t-bones. I had heard ahead of time we were having veal, so I was expecting a thin, half centimeter thick piece of veal, but was quite surprised when they came with a fill inch thick t-bone! And it was delicious! Angie wasn't too impressed that it was veal, so she didn't eat hers, and gave it to me instead. Dessert, I wasn't to happy with. It was an apple pastry concoction, with chocolate, raspberry and caramel sauce. The display was nice, because they put it on square plates, and made it look like it was a wrapped present, very clever. Unfortunately I'm not a big fan of cooked apple products. After that they brought out a band (not sure who they were) and had some disco lights going. The band was different. They played a mix of rock, country and Latin music. By 11:30 the girls had had enough of the weird music, and we left. So overall, it was a great night. Unfortunately I didn't get many pictures (I think I got about 5 of our table) of the event because the batteries died in my camera died.