Up and running, Too long, Holding pattern, Back, Bad B, 8

This weekend I finally got around to setting up my SnapMaker U1 printer which was sitting in it’s box for most of the week. The set up process for this printer is significantly more involved then what I have been accustomed to with my last three Bambu Lab printers. If I were to guess I probably spent double the time getting the U1 up and printing compared to my Bambu’s.

That being said, the process was not difficult. It was made very straightforward by the excellent manual that they include with the printer. The U1 takes a very different approach to multicolor printing utilizing four print heads instead of one as the Bambu Lab printers do. The advantage to this is two fold. There is significantly less waste material when doing multi-color printing. When I say less, it’s a minute fraction, especially with a print that has a lot of color changes.

The other advantage is speed. I loaded up a multi-color print on one of the Bambu printers and the U1. On the Bambu the print was estimated to take over 14 hours. On the U1 the estimate was 5 hours, that’s crazy how much faster it is because of the multiple print heads which have their own color assigned to them instead of one print head servicing all filament colors which requires tons of time purging and priming with every color change.

On the negative side the printer is louder than my Bambu printers, mostly due to it’s open top construction. It’s touch screen is nice but not moveable. I would say the overall fit, finish and quality doesn’t seem like it matches Bambu either but it’s less money while delivering much faster prints with almost no waste so that is a trade off that most will be willing to make. The U1 branded version of Orca Slicer is not as polished as the Bambu Studio version but it is fine. So far I am very happy with the U1 and plan to be putting it through a bunch of testing.

I spent a little more time in WoW over the weekend, speed leveling more characters to 80. At this point I have a system in place that seems to work great. My goal is to get all of my characters to 80 before the expansion launches, it might be doable if I get enough free time to do so.

I played pickleball Saturday morning but didn’t enjoy myself as much as I normally would for several reasons. They had 5 courts closed because they were a bit wet with dew which I thought was stupid. In the 4+ years I have been going there they never did this. It’s pretty simple, if the court is a little wet you take a little extra care with your footing. It was like they were treating the players like kids in my mind.

With less courts available it made the wait between games even longer than normal. I was waiting at least a half hour in between playing which sucks. By the time I got back on the court again my body had already cooled down significantly which is not great for my problematic knees/IT Band. Despite being there two hours I only got three games in and I had a sore IT band as a prize. I was not happy.

Elsa had a pretty normal weekend. She is now off the appetite stimulant and diarrhea meds. I have noticed she is not eating as much and requires either myself or my girlfriend to get her started eating by hand feeding her which is frustrating. She still has issues with “leaking” although my system of big absorbent pads that I can throw in the wash seem to mitigate the damage. I did not have to wash the bedding all weekend which was progress. She was acting more or less normal otherwise except for drinking a lot of water.

The next hurdle will be trying to transition her to kidney friendly food. I have a box of it coming. It is expensive as you can imagine since it requires a vet prescription. The food is lower in protein and phosphorus content. If she does not like the way it smells she won’t eat it, period so I am crossing my fingers she actually likes the stuff. It’s supposed to be human grade food. The stuff we are giving is high quality but has more protein then it should with her kidney numbers.

The Winter Olympics opened this weekend. I saw some of the opening ceremony which I thought was well done. The venue and backdrop in northern Italy seems absolutely beautiful. I caught a few events on TV over the weekend as well. I have always been a big fan of the Olympics. The idea of competing against the best of the entire world has always fascinated me. I also find myself amazed at the amount of planning and preparation that has to go on while hosting the Olympic games. It must take a team of thousands to get all of the details handled.

I watched the Super Bowl last night and although I had no significant rooting interest I preferred if the Seahawks won, which they did on the back of a crazy good defense that made the Patriots look clueless for most of the game. I did not pay close attention to most of the commercials although the one that I did see and like the most was the Dunkin Donuts spot which had a ton of famous actors in it from the Friends cast, Ben Affleck, Ted Danson from Cheers and more.

There was a lot of anticipation about the halftime show featuring Bad Bunny. Trump has been very active criticizing the singer who is very well known in the hispanic community. Bad Bunny has been vocal criticizing the activities of ICE and what it represents. So everyone was curious exactly what the halftime performance would be like. I was not impressed.

I understand the point he was trying to make but doing every song in Spanish on a Super Bowl stage was lame in my opinion. If this was a soccer game, sure, but this is American football, doing the entire performance in spanish just was not cool nor necessary IMO. Even my girlfriend who is hispanic didn’t like the show and said even she had a hard time making out the words because of the way Bad Bunny performs/sings which is very fast and poorly enunciated. It was probably the least enjoyable SB halftime show I ever witnessed. As a throw in they had Lady Gaga sing a quick song in English but other than that it was todo espanol. There are plenty of ways to make the world aware of the outrage over current day events. I don’t think taking the Super bowl halftime show hostage was a good way to do it, IMO.