The Power of Negative Thinking

See-Stage hardware sitting on a workbench.

I’ve been thinking of all the things that could fuck me over for Machine Horror House. The main one up until last week was contractors not finishing their work on time. But it turns out all my contractors came through. I’m sitting here with enough art and audio for a half hour animated show–like an episode of some Futurama spinoff. So thanks to Bettina Throckmorton, Sebastian Caceres, Firoz Panna, Rahul Sonker, Marc Rose, Rich Vreeland, Niene Pugliano, and Jeff Pollard… I got 99 problems, but a contractor ain’t one of them.

Friday night I kept waking in a panic about backing up my data. Gigabytes of it sitting on a Macbook that I take everywhere and handle roughly. So yesterday, I took some hours to put everything in a proper repository with scheduled backups. Whew! Now I can continue rough-cuddling my Velveteen MacRabbit.

And late last night I looked at the whiteboard, and saw one simple task that I’d let slide for a few weeks–“Verify netbook plays Flash okay.” One last thing to do before I go to bed. I started up the piddly little Asus and loaded some test animations. Oh my. Crazy frame-dropping. This was the Little Netbook that Could Not. So today, I shelled out some more cash (ouch!) for three cheap desktops that could handle Flash playback reliably. I actually ran my Flash tests at Fry’s using my phone hotspot to let the floor demo computer access Internet. A sales guy came up and asked “How’d you get Internet to work on this?” I felt pretty L33t right then.

Now I’ve got all the components spread out on three tables, and I’m triple-checking it all before I stow it up on the two twelve-foot shelves where it will be relatively inaccessible. And I’m also thinking about what else might fuck me over. Termites? Terrorists?