Ok, so as you all most likely have noticed, I am having the hardest time keeping up with this blog. So, I am officially announcing a schedule. If I don't keep it, email me, call me, IM me, whatever. Bug me until I get something up. As of my previous post, the schedule is that a new blog will be released on the last day of every month.

Also, I'm curious how many people actually read this blog, so if you read this, leave a comment just to say hi so I can see how many readers I have. Thanks.

Since my last post, the pace of installing steel has drastically increased. We are now done with all of the steel in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth bays. Now the third, fourth and fifth bays only needed steel to be put up in the east half, but that is because the rest of those bays is going to be removed and completely rebuilt. As a result, we were able to get through those bays very quickly. Likewise, the eight and ninth bays are mostly blocked by some of the existing structure, so until that is demolished, not much can really be done there. The seventh bay is blocked by a bunch of plumbing and electrical stuff that is on the ceiling, so all that is being moved to make way for more steel to be installed, but what is accessible is done. Of course, we aren't truly finished with all of that. There is one more thing that has to be done before we can say we are truly done and that is welding. Each steel tube we install on the ceiling must be welded in place. Unfortunately, with our limited number of welders, this process is far behind the steel installation crew. Beams in all the last three three bays need to be welded, and as if that were not enough work, soon we will be building the mechanical platforms that will hold all the building's transformers and air handlers. That phase is still a couple of weeks off, but bearing down on us quickly. Anyway, I have a few more pictures of the steel that we have installed, so go check out my online photo album of steel. I'm way behind on photographing this stuff. Hopefully in the next week or so I'll get some new photos in, so check back at that album soon to see if it has been updated.

We now have a dump truck here at Building 8! It's a sweet 1971 Kenworth truck with a flat-6 diesel engine. For it's age, this truck runs remarkably well. After getting a new set of batteries (it needs three) and a couple of new tires, this truck will be street-ready once more. Currently our maintenance team is cleaning out the engine, lubricating everything they can and otherwise tuning up the truck. Under the hood, this thing is a beast. Everything about the truck is massive compared to any normal truck, and it makes the whole process of tuning it up much more interesting. At least, now you can lay on your back and work on the underside of the truck without using a car jack (not that we have one that could move it, anyway). I haven't been allowed to drive it yet, but I have been asking about getting trained on it every chance I get. These requests are usually met with a laugh, but I think that's a good sign. Constantly asking like this shows enthusiasm. Employers love enthusiastic workers, right?

So, for the weekend of April 18-20, I went to a Christian conference targeting college students. I'm currently not a college student, but I went anyway, since the entrance fee was waived for me as a volunteer, and it was being held in Big Bear City, up in the California mountains. (The Building 8 project is loosely associated with the group that hosted the conference, hence the waiver.) The conference was great, and being out in the mountains was wonderful. We went on a hike in the mountains on Saturday that took us well up above Big Bear Lake. Here is a photo I took from our hike looking over the lake. It was really great being up in the mountains away from our construction work for a weekend, but we were so tired from hiking, not sleeping and the massively thinner atmosphere that when we got back the following Monday was really difficult for everyone that went. We know personally some of the people who are in charge of the camp we stayed at, so we hopefully will be able to go back to Big Bear some time in the future for a longer stay. Perhaps a week or so.

I have two new games this month, both of them come highly recommended. The first is Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law for the Wii. As I'm sure you all gathered in my last post, I'm kind of a sucker for lawyer games. Anything in the Ace Attorney series I will buy as soon as it comes out, because they are just awesome. Harvey Birdman, however, I was actually going to pass up until it came to me free for review purposes. Video game publishers, like movie publishers, will hand out free copies of their games to the press for them to review. I work for the third-party news site NintendoPlayers.com, and as such I have some access these free copies, as long as I write something. This is not the first free game I've gotten (a few months ago some third-tier publisher sent me a couple of titles), but this is the first game I've gotten that I really wanted. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law is actually a cartoon show that airs on Adult Swim (basically that's late night Cartoon Network). It is a hilarious show about a superhero who became a lawyer. Most of his cases are tried in a courtroom full of other super heroes, super villains and super weirdoes. It's a hilarious show and I love it. The game was actually made almost entirely by the same staff that produces the show, so all the voice actors, script writers and animators carried over to produce the game. As a result, the game is exactly like the show, only now with a lot more interaction and a healthy dose of hidden content. Anyone who likes very silly humor with a lot of wit and not a lot of logic will love this game. I wrote a review of it for NintendoPlayers.com, so check it out here.

The other game I got is Okami. This game makes me very happy. Very, very, very, very happy. In Okami you play as a Japanese god who incarnates as a wolf to rid the land of evil. Your most powerful tool that you use on this quest is the Celestial Brush, which you use to paint things into existence. If you paint a little on a bare tree, it blooms. Draw a slash and enemies take damage. You can even create things like bombs, trees, lily pads and even change day into night and night into day. Since this game is on the Wii, the painting action can be done by pointing at the screen. It takes some practice to get all the motions right, but once you get into it, it's so much fun. The graphics in the game are all done in a traditional Japanese art style, so nearly at nearly any point in the game, the screen looks like a watercolor painting. It's really very amazing. The beautiful animation and the ingenious gameplay make the game an amazing experience. This game also was given to me for review, and that is already underway. I expect to give this game a 9 or 9.5 out of ten. To see the final score, check with NintendoPlayers.com in a week or so. Or, if you just like good action adventure games, go ahead and buy this game because you will love it.

I don't know how many of you have visited Amazon.com recently, but if you have, you might have noticed the ads for their new e-book reader, the Kindle. I recently bought something through Amazon, which I will talk about in the next paragraph, and when I saw these ads, my curiosity was piqued, and then rewarded. The Kindle is the latest digital book reading device, and I have to say that I am very impressed. The Kindle uses SD cards to store stuff, so the number of books you can carry with you is totally unlimited. It connects via cellular data networks to the internet to download new content including blogs, newspapers, books and websites. Kindle has a rudimentary browser, and can check web-accessible email accounts. It seems like a pretty capable device, and it's wireless access it totally free. There are no monthly bills for the service, and books are very cheap. New releases and New York Times bestsellers are 10 dollars, with classics selling for two. There are a few things about the Kindle that are not that great, like the fact that it is against the Kindle Terms of Use to give copies of e-books to someone else or view them on a different device, but otherwise I think it is a huge step in the right direction for e-book readers. Check it out at Amazon's site here, or on Wikipedia here.

So, that thing I bought. It's a Wacom Graphire 6x8 bluetooth pen tablet. Wow, this thing is awesome. It enables me to use a pen to write on my computer screen as if it were notebook paper. Of course, this tool is much more powerful than notebook paper, being digital and all. I can now use the tablet and the free software that came with it to draw all kinds of cool stuff. Here I just drew a happy face modified to include my signature mustache and pointy goatee. Click here and here to see a couple of other things I have drawn. Notice these are pretty much just outlines. In these pictures I am trying to get a good feel for the proportions of the human body. The first was just drawn off the top of my head with no model. My left hand posed for the second. Both were done in Corel Painter Essentials 3 (which came with the tablet), using the 'pencil' brush. Notice how some lines are darker than others. This effect is created by the tablets ability to sense pressure, so pressing harder makes a darker line (very cool). I am working on a tree I took a picture of in Big Bear, but that has been put off due to more pressing projects. Anyway, hopefully I will be able to get that done soon, because I want to try to color it, as well. The more drawing I do, the better I will get at it, so hopefully finally having something to draw with will make life easier in this respect. Keep your eyes peeled for new art. I will be creating an album of it on my site at SockNinja.net.