JCanimator.com
Internet Home of James Clarke, Animator

Wife and I inspected our ‘Verona’ behive today and I think that has to be hands-down the  best inspection we’ve done to date. First real detailed bee work we’ve done this year, and probably a more thorough inspection than we’ve ever done. We swapped the bottom and top hive bodies for this season and took out the medic strip that was in the bottom hive (already took out the top one earlier this week.) What is now the bottom hive body had about 60% filled frames of honey, and the other 40% was mostly filled brood combs. Plus! We found the queen on this one, first time we’ve found our own queens anywhere. The now top hive body had a lot less filled comb, you can tell that was on the bottom for winter and they ate there first. A couple of frames of pollen stores, a frame or two of partial brood and larvae, and the remainder was partially filled honey frames.

All in all they look to be doing great, this was around 2pm in the afternoon, around 70 degrees outside turning to overcast. Had to use minimal smoke and no one ever got upset with us much throughout the whole ordeal. Queen excluder and one super placed on top and they’re back in business!

Well, after setting up WordPress on a variety of other sites off and on for the past year, I finally got around to installing it on my own website! More to come in a bit, plus I hope to migrate my pages from my old blog over to this as well just for history’s sake.

Alright, with a sudden desire of ‘out with the old in with the new’
I’m off to backup this handful of posts from over the years
and install wordpress. The first steps to completely
revamping my domain. Stay tuned!

Edit: Woah. SQL exports, csv file editing, xml formatting.
Conversion may be more difficult than I was initially hoping!

I’m starting to dig into different blogging/CMS systems lately.
Drupal and WordPress mainly. Might change things around here
and update with something I’ve done more recent than 6 years
ago. Anyway I just wanted to update and say that my webhost,
Hostrocket.com is amazing. Best support I’ve ever received.
If you need a website, go there. Seriously.

Time for another update. This time my site was invaded
by some hackers and redirected a bunch of stuff to Russia.
Exciting.

Still working at HNTB as a 3D Visualization Team Lead.
Focused on R&D and have stepped out of the day to day
project production work. Looking at integrating workflows
across groups, scripting solutions, training/support/troubleshooting,
investigating new tech. Lots of fun stuff.

Been married a year now, bought a house. Lots of good things.
Haven’t been spending any time developing my website because
of the myriad of other things to do around work/home/play,
but I’d love to hear from you, just drop me an email.

Nothing like domain registration expiration to
get you to update your website news eh?

If you visted my page in the last day or two you
may have noticed it had undergone some extreme
changes, like it had turned into an autogenerated
link farm shenanigan.

Thankfully, a three minute phone call to hostrocket
customer support got everything straightened out,
so all is well now.

In other news, I comnpleted 1 1/2 years of employment
with Trinity Animation, and as of July 2006 I have taken
on the role of “3D Visualization Specialist” at HNTB.
It’s lots of fun.
Sometime soon I hope to get some recent work up here.
I’m in the corporate office and therefore get to work with
clients from all over the country. We do lots of highways,
bridges, airports and the like, which is actually
much more exciting than it sounds!

Take care & keep in touch,
I may not update this site much,
but I’m always available for contacting at
James@JCanimator.com

In fact, not only am I alive, but I’m employed!
That’s the reason for my 6+ month
departure without any update whatsoever, I’ve
been hard at work at Trinity Animation.

During my time there I’ve become proficient in 3dStudioMax7
and have been getting familiar with combustion4 as well.
Most of my latest work has been in the architectural field,
however I am making plans on expanding my character
animation abilities within Max as well.

I plan on giving another update shortly with some
new media, so look for some of my new
architectural work in the coming weeks!

..but it’s here! The update took longer than I wished
it would, however I have just completed a major
overhaul of my resume (included a plain text
version of it too!) Microsoft Word .doc and
Adobe .pdf should be on their way shortly, along
with some new media as well! Stay tuned!

In the meantime don’t forget to checkout the
updated resume and I’ve also added a few
bits and minor corrections to the Bio page. Thanks!

New update coming soon, check back
later this week for more info!

Things are progressing nicely on Forsaken. I have
learned the basics of getting a working model into the
Hal-Life2 Model Viewer, from exporting a .smd file from
Maya to writing my own .qc script file to getting custom
facial animation working.

In the interest of getting things up and running quickly,
I opted to do the first few characters for the game in Maya
instead of 3dStudioMax. I would love to learn Max right now,
but I didn’t want to hurt our team’s progress
by having to be learning the details of both 3dsMax and
the Source engine at the same time. Once I get the first of
our characters working I plan on switching over to Max in an
effort to expand my knowledge base.

In website related news, I have added a few bits to the Bio section
of my website as well as added the “archives” feature to the
front page news portion, a link to which is found at the
bottom of the first page.
Take care, and remember anyone is always welcome
to drop me a line via my contacts page if you have
any questions/comments about anything.