I’m still making components for the Marine Corps rank insignia.  The Eagle Globe and Anchor goes in the center of the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps rank.  I’ll need to make a bomb for Master Gunnery Sergeant, but right now I’m modelling an M14 for the rest of the rank.  I need crossed rifles, and they look like M14’s.  And as with the E G and A and the Great Seal, if I have to make it I’m going to make a good one that I can use for other items, so I’m modelling a full M14.  This won’t be offered for sale as a stand alone model, rather it will be a component I’ll use in future models.

So far I’ve done seven 2 rail sweeps.  Once I get all the parts made I’ll fit them together and do whatever sculpting I need.  The stock is 1 sweep but using 7  profiles. 

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I have just added the US Marine Corps Eagle Globe and Anchor emblem to the site.

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I finished the Seal Trident and posted it to the site.  Next up, back to working on the Marine Corps rank insignia.

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By request I’m making the US Navy Seal emblem.  Any requested item will always have priority over non-requested items, and since no one asked for the Marine rank it’s on the back burner.

I mentioned this to someone in an email this morning but thought I’d put it out there.  My goal is to offer every unit insignia for every military unit in the world.  If someone makes a request for a specific unit I don’t consider that custom work, I just move that unit up in the queue.  Even if no one requests it I’ll eventually make it anyway so doing it sooner is no problem.

Needless to say my initial non-requested offerings will be mostly US and European simply because that’s where CNC machines are most prevalent.  And since I loathe Chavez, Kirchner, and Imadinnerjacket Venezuela, Argentina, and Iran are not high on my list.

Trident, anchor, and pistol for the Seal emblem.

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My previous post was mostly about the problems I’ve been having with vodahost.  I got moved from customer service to server technician to server administration without anyone really knowing what to do.  Then this morning I had an email from customer service again, so I figured I was starting all over again.  But this time was different.  When I emailed my reply, Hank, my new CS agent, actually responded in the same day.  And fixed the problem.  Holy mackerel, someone there has a clue!  That’s two people out of around 10 that had a clue.  So I wanted to give credit where due.  So the two people are Hank and …Hank?  Wait a minute, this is the same guy that fixed my earlier problem.  Well, at least there’s one person there with a clue.

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Well, it’s been a struggle but I finally managed to get some new models loaded to the site, as well as a slight re-design.  Aside from the rank previously mentioned I’ve also added 305th MI Bn unit crest by request.

Now for the struggle part:  I can’t publish to the website using the site builder or the ftp program that comes with it.  I can upload a few files at a time using Vodahost’s web ftp file manager, but they keep blocking me.  I keep having to reboot my router to get assigned a new ip.  So tonight I’ve rebooted my router about 15 times in order to get all the pics uploaded.  I also got the new pages uploaded by previewing them in Firefox, saving the page source, then uploading that via ftp.

In a nutshell, vodahost customer service is worthless.  It appears that each shift change someone notices my ticket is still open, sends me an email saying something inane like “I’ve rebooted the firewall, try it now.”  Believe it or not this is the response I got after the third escalation.  I tried it, and emailed back that it didn’t make any difference 15 hours ago.  I suspect that I’ll have an email from them waiting for me in the morning suggesting I reboot my computer but hold my tongue out the side of my mouth and squint so the computer will think I’m serious about it.

So, to make a long story no shorter, I’m shopping for new hosting.  At least with all the rigmarole I’ve gone through to get my pages uploaded I now know I can use their web page generator for any hosting.

Anyway, here’s some pics of the new stuff.  Marine Corps rank should be ready in a day or two.

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but not available.  I’m having hosting problems, and while the models have been uploaded to my fulfilment provider I’m unable to access my site to provide links to them.  They’re working on it so hopefully it will all be up soon.

In the mean time, I’m sort of working on Marine Corps rank.  By that I mean I’m doing the Eagle, Globe and Anchor that I can then use on 1 enlisted rank insignia.  This is similar to the way I ended up doing the Great Seal despite having no desire to offer it.  I needed the Seal for 2 enlisted ranks so I made a full size one so I could offer it separately.  Similarly I’ll be offering the E,G, and A as a stand along product.

I will update again when the rank is available on the web site.

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Quick update on the rank insignia.  Army is done, Navy is done except for Warrant Officer.  I still need to do Marine Corps and Air Force Enlisted.

Right now I’m trying to get a good picture of the Army rank.  I don’t want to take individual pictures of it because that’s too much to display on the site, but I haven’t come up with another way to get a satisfactory picture.

Regardless, I’ll most likely have all the rank up on the site by the end of the week.

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I finally finished the Great Seal.  I had a major delay from the whole windows read only fiasco, basically spent most of a day straightening it out, but finally have it done and uploaded to the web site.

So what’s next?  Rank.  I will be finishing US Army rank insignia then doing Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.

Following that will be the 16th Field Artillery Regiment, which will complete the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division.

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As if I didn’t already have plenty of reasons to hate Microsoft, I’ve spent the last 3 hours trying to fix the folder permissions to allow me to save what I’m working on, namely the previously mentioned Great Seal.  I really expected to be done with that thing by now but I can’t save my changes to my shared folder because Windows 7 has decided that it’s read only.

I should explain this set up.  Close to 10 years ago, I had enough of windows.  I was tired of spending so much time so often tinkering with the operating system to get it to work right.  Viruses, malware, bloatware, whatever.  On xp, the registry setting that controls internet speed is set so low that unless you change it you can’t get high speed internet no matter what your service provider is offering.

Anyways, I switched to Linux.  Originally I used a distribution called Mepis, then tried a few others and ended up with Kubuntu.  For a while I would install every update that came along, and they came along every 6 months, but over the last few years I’ve only been installing the Long Term Support versions.  Currently I’m running 12.04 Precise Pangolin.  It works very well right out of the box.  Unfortunately, since upgrading, I’ve found that Aspire is no longer useable under WINE.  It runs, but the 3d view is garbled.  It’s probably something that could be corrected if I dig in it but I’m not really interested in digging in it any more.  So I use Virtualbox, a virtual machine running Windows 7.  Aspire runs just fine in the virtual machine along with my wacom tablet complete with pressure sensitivity.  I’ve got 6 cores of my processor assigned to it and more memory than it can use so I don’t even take a performance hit.

Now I only use the windows virtual machine for things I just can’t do in Kubuntu, mostly Aspire and Bluevoda.  Everything else uses Linux native applications.  This includes my file handling for the website.  Everything I upload to the distribution system for sale is zipped, sometimes nested zips, and it’s all done in Linux.  I’ve got 2 ways I can do this: a shared folder which the virtual windows sees as a network drive and Dropbox.  Both work, but these big files I work with can take upwards of 10 minutes to upload to dropbox, so I generally work from the networked drive.

Enter the newest (to me) windows feature: At random it will decide to make your folders read only.  And it randomly decided to do it to my shared folder last night.  After much googling I found multiple things to try, none of which worked, but I also found that Microsofts response to this problem was to explain that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature and they’re not going to fix it.  So tomorrow instead of doing something productive with my Sunday afternoon like watching football I’ll be creating a new virtual machine, installing a fresh windows 7, installing aspire and bluevoda and all the updates that entails.  And once I have that done I’ll happily continue working with it until it does it again, then I’ll start over again.

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