No rest for the weary, as break week is a bit of misnomer for the “behind the curtains” part of fxphd. In reality, it is an incredibly busy week and a key chance to get to some mid-term sysadmin work done, start firming up the October08 term courses, re-doing the fxphd tour movie, and planning the next 5 weeks of classes.

We made some under the hood web changes this week with an improved torrent mechanism and an even clearer display of the class schedule for members. Those are things we don’t want to do in the thick of a new term, as even a misplaced quote mark can wreak havoc on our torrents and files. With over 6TB transferred per month…..changes aren’t something we take lightly. Here at the loft, fxphd and Hootenanny added a new XServe, LTO-4 and external 12 drive RAID to handle all our assets…even that takes some time to set up.

David Hamner has started as an intern at the Chicago loft and has been a great help in getting things done. He’s ramping up to speed on filming with our fxphd workhorse the HVX200 and diving head first into brushing up on Final Cut Pro and learning all of our compression/distribution scripts. Having David around will free up Mark Dascoli to make even more improvements on the site and provide better support to our members. Though I have to say — Mark already gets huge props from members for his attention to detail and responsiveness. We might not do everything right, but almost everyone seems to feel we’re there to help people out when things go wrong.