Burning Man 2008 - iPhone

Our theme camp was a complete success and we couldn't have gotten a better placement! This year we were a registered theme camp (for link - search for Circus Boot Camp) with classes teaching various circus arts and we got placed on a corner lot! We offered training for slack line walking, unicycle riding, juggling, trapeze performance and hoola hooping. I'm pretty amazed at how many people showed up for these classes. We were darned busy. People really love to learn this stuff! (I'll put more pictures up when my campmates come out and I get ahold of their pictures; this was another year where I didn't take a single picture.)

The especially cool part of it all is that many people who already had some skills would often help out those who were trying to learn. So we ended up having a really good trapeze arts teacher, even though nobody in our camp had much experience with it.

My honeypot and I arrived on Saturday, Aug 23rd around 6pm or so. We were so lucky to get the placement we got because we were pretty close to the action, but not so close for it to be annoying. The weather was so perfect, except for a couple serious storms. The storm on Monday started around noon and lasted well past 8 hours or so. It was the worst storm I've ever seen in my 7 years of Burning Man. The only other storm I saw this year was also relatively bad. It started yesterday afternoon, Saturday. I left during that so I have no idea what the weather was like today. I hope it was perfectly clear for everybody that was still there.

I left on Saturday afternoon before the man burned. For me, being there for 7 days was long enough. I had an opportunity for a ride out, and I took it. My honeypot is still out there and if the temple burn hasn't started yet; it will in minutes. Even though I missed the burning of the man and the temple burn by leaving early, I don't really mind. I enjoy the earlier days of the week more, as it's more mellow and there are less "lollipop raver kids". I like the "old school" crowd a bit more. Also, the playa was very loose with deep dust, so riding a bike was very challenging out in the open playa. You'd be riding along on a bike and then hit one of these loose places and come to a screeching halt while fish tailing and struggling not to fall over. It wasn't very conducive to exploring via bike. And the distances are really large to be walking everywhere all the time.

In other news, I finally went and got my iPhone. I've wanted one for a while and agreed to wait until the second version came out so the hardware and software was a little more stable before dropping so much money. I dropped by the store today and walked out about 10 minutes later with my new iPhone. It was easy as pie. So far, I'm pretty impressed with it. Of course, I haven't really gotten deep into the software yet. I'll let you know what I think in a couple weeks or so.

17h 20 mins until we leave

Last night I got my v2 prototype LED hoop done. It's a harder plastic so it was much harder to get the electronics in side.

The hooping action is much better because it's stiffer.

The downside is that because it was so much harder to split open the tube, I wasn't able to hot glue the leds inside. So basically if it has any force on the leds, they're going to pop into the tube.

Oh, well. It's what I can manage given the time left.

4 days and 13 hours

Until we're on our way out to the playa. (For some reason blogger has a config issue and is failing on image uploads..)

This past weekend was a whirlwind of activity. There was the birthday dinner for Marc. And friends hanging out crafting until 3:30am in the morning. There was breakfast with Rose and her Mom and sister at the new restaurant down the street. And then so many things to prepare for Burning Man.

This is the first year that I will not have a day off before leaving for the playa. It makes it quite a bit more hectic getting everything together because I have to squeeze it in around work. Add to that the fact that I can no longer go to stores that have short open hours - like fabric stores. It's a little more planning ahead than I'm used to.

The picture is of a hat and cape I made for this year. I'm really excited about the hat (and all the other flair pieces I'll soon get to wear.) I think having the shoulder protection will really help me get out during the day. It can be so sunny out.

Erika's a human backpack!

Whirl Wind Weeks

It's been a really busy couple of weeks, and it will probably continue to be until we are out on the playa. No time to blog!

My friends Mari, Nathan, Dora and Amelia arrived on Thursday the 7th and stayed through Wed the 13th. They are a really cool family! They were making the rounds visiting friends and family. They arrived early because they were passing around sickness and didn't want to infect some of the older folks at one of retirement communities that was their previous stop. It's tough being a kid and being sick, but they seemed to handle it pretty well. They're really sweet girls!

Yesterday I went to our new Colo and helped rack a bunch of our new servers. It was lots of fun. I really enjoy hands on stuff besides the programming that I do. It was also really cool and interesting to see all the parts of the Colo on the tour that I did. They have 9 generators that each generate 2.2 Mega Watts each. And there's a 50,000 gallon tank of diesel underneath the building. It's pretty crazy, indeed. I think that place could power a small city. I'll try to get some pictures up when I get them. They're trapped on a co-workers iPhone currently. Here's a tour of a Colo I found online - they're probably all the same.

Next up is trying frantically to finish up all the projects I want to do for Burning Man. We're leaving in 8 days and I'm going to be working for 5 of them. Tick Tock.

I finally got to start drinking my last brew batch last week. It's good. I'm happy with it.

sir cuss boot camp

We had a casual craft night tonight and I sewed the "backdrop" of our bm theme camp. I think it came out good. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but you can tell how wide it is. And it goes up into two points, but those parts were folded back.

I'm really excited about this year's burn. I think it's going to be fun and good.

I've had these really weird ridges in both of my thumb nails and they would grow out over time. They seemed to appear in the same frequency, every couple months or so. I think I figured out what they were. I was about to push my cuticles back a couple weeks ago and it occurred to me that this would be about the time that the ridge would start. So I didn't push my cuticles back at all at that time. And the last ridges are about to grow out. It's pretty weird and shocking to me that I was hurting myself so much and not noticing.

If only I'd known..

We recently discovered that there is, in fact, a pretty easy way to get across the bay after bart stops running. We tried it on Saturday night, and it was an astounding success.

There's a bus that runs around every hour, on the hour. It sweeps through the downtown market street corridor and heads across the bridge. Conveniently for us, it goes down telegraph and has a stop one block from our house. It's beautiful.

In other news, I finally got to meet Molly (and catch up with Kirsta and Bill). Molly is still "minus 2 weeks old." She was born almost 2 months early. Whoa. She's so cute and she looks great!

This weekend was busy, busy in a good way. I'm starting to notice the pressure for burning man preparations. I have lots of projects that I want to complete before then, but not so much time to really work on them. In the end, the most important will get finished and I won't even care that the rest got dropped. 34 days until the man burns, and about 27 before I pack and leave. Yikes.

Prototype Done

I finished it. I only have a really sore thumb and small spot bleeding on the tip of my finger. A small sacrifice for an led hoop.

Top picture is a 2 second time lapse of me hooping. The bottom one is without time lapse.

Burning Man and Back to Work

Punkinpie and I just got back from Burning Man. I had a good time even though the weather was bad. There were several really severe storms (60 mph winds! that lasted hours) and at one point it even rained. The last time I saw rain out there was in 2001.

Other than that, it was interesting to note how much of the novelty wore off. I got out and explored just as much as I wanted to, but it seemed like a lot less than past years. I suppose some of that could be caused by just how blazing hot it was out there. But at night I also wasn't as active as I remember being in the past too. I think part of that had to do with just how tired I was from my 'real' life. I basically arrived at bm with a sleep deficit, and I caught up out there. It was so nice to sleep, even it it was in a camping situation.

A couple things that I really love about bm is the creativity and do-it-yourself attitude out there. There are so many creative projects and art installations. It's really inspiring. I also really enjoy camping with a group. It's cool to see how everyone works together and make it all work.

We got home on Monday around 7am after leaving the event around 6pm the previous evening. It was slow getting out because of the backup at the gate (~2+ hours), and then the two lane road to interstate 80 is always really slow with the large amount of traffic. That took us another 2 or so hours. Then we stopped in Reno for dinner and were so tired driving through the pass that we pulled over and slept.

I really wish I had the time to stay through Monday or later like we used to. For one thing it's so much faster to get out because you don't have to deal with the thousands of people leaving, trying to make it to work. I guess on the other hand staying while everybody is packing gets old because there's so much extra dust in the air due to the cars driving around. This year was an especially dusty year with the storms and such.

Today at work was really nice because I was so much calmer. I had gotten away from a lot of the stress and had that just-back-from-a-vacation mellowness. I hope I can keep that going for a while. Lucky for me, the big gnarly project that we're in the midst of is doing well, and is completely on schedule for the launch next week. That's really nice too.

(They said the population at bm this year was over 48,000)

New Toys and One Hand Tied Behind My Back

That's my cat. Isn't she cute?
This picture was taken with the camera found in my new laptop.
I recently got a pretty nice MacBook Pro from work. It's a really nice computer. I decided on a mac because I really wanted to try one and I wasn't that committed to the development tools I use currently. I thought it would be cool to make a mac my primary platform and see what all the fuss was about.
Well, so far, I think the fuss is over nothing. Right now I prefer my pc. There's several reasons for this. The first is that I know all the shortcuts and tricks for getting done what I'm doing at any time on my pc. This is something I expect will fade into the distance as I get 'seasoned' with the mac. The second is that the interface is really slow on the mac. I think they do that on purpose. I know it's not the hardware, because this computer has 4 gigs of ram. Yes, it's crazy, true, and blew my knee high socks off when I figured it out. I guess ram just ain't as expensive as it used to be. Well, that's about it for now. It'll be pretty interesting to see what I say in several months when I'm finally used to this os. I have to say that I really like the fact that this is unix. I like that alot.
The picture above was taken with the camera in my laptop. How weird is that?

Burning man is 7 days away exactly. Right now next week, we should be driving away towards Black Rock City, or at least finishing up packing, I hope.

Four Post Cage

After work on Friday I met my honey pot at the ramp with another friend and had a drink.
Afterwards I spent the rest of my evening hanging around the house. I can't even think of what I did exactly.
Saturday we went out to breakfast and then ran some Burning Man errands. We only have this next weekend to prepare. Tick tock.
Later on we went to our friends going away BBQ at her parents house. I'm pretty sure that they purchased the house brand new and it was very large. They mentioned how the birds were less frequently around there as the developments were being built further down the canyon. My honey pot mentioned how it was so similar to Southern California. There was a hill brown with dryness and the sun was hot and bright.
Today we had a burning man meeting and organized ourselves. I really like that our camp this year doesn't include any new burners, and that there aren't any crazy projects. I say this because it means our camp is so simple. Everybody knows what needs to be done to get there easily and be well prepared, and there aren't any crazy projects consuming tons of time.
After the meeting we went juggling, and I passed with a group of 7 people together! I didn't last very long, but it was pretty fun. I burned out playing pretty quickly because the throws I was receiving were so much harder to catch than the great ones my honey pot throws. I think when I get more comfortable with clubs, I'll try passing with the group again.
Afterwards, yar came over and we hung out. We played some games and brainstormed bm projects. There's a lot of creativity flowing right now. Tis the season.
I'm having a hard time imagining getting done the amount of work that needs to happen in this next week. It's downright scary. It'll be really good to have this vacation after this coming week and a couple days. Our project demos on the 30th. Yikes!

Kitty Food and Natural Gas Cars

I just got my new car!
It's so exciting, I can't even describe it.

A friend of mine bought it brand new two years ago, and she's leasing it to me for the next year while they live in another country. The car is a 2005 Honda Civic that runs on natural gas. It can go about 200 miles on a full tank. Besides not using gas, I can also drive over the Bay Bridge without paying the $4 toll, and I can even drive in the car pool lane without having anybody else in the car. As somebody who commutes across that bridge everyday, and usually sits in the backed up traffic, this is pretty special. I'm really glad that I have the opportunity to check out this natural gas car. Maybe I'll go ahead and buy one myself in a year.

The other exciting thing about this car is that it's so new and nice inside. Ooooh La La. I've been driving beaters, or at least old cars, my entire life. For example, take my current car. It's a 1986 VW Jetta Diesel that has over 250,000 miles on it. Yes, that's a quarter of a million miles. Since I've moved to this area I've had 5 windows and 4 stereos stolen. Currently, I just have a hole where the stereo should be, and a bunch of wires hanging out.

We were driving to dinner tonight to celebrate and I was playing this great cd. I noticed that the music moved from one side of the car to the other, and I mentioned it to my honey pot. He made some comment about stereo music. I was listening to stereo music in my car with quality speakers!! How exciting! Yes, I've never had a car with stereo, or at least speakers good enough that you would notice such a thing. I'm so looking forward to rocking out with loud music in this car, my car for now. I'm going to sing at the top of my lungs.

The other exciting and mystifying thing that happened is that Stella seems to love her new food. She's a rather finicky cat, and we recently ran out of her cat food. The one she's been eating for 6 1/2 years. It's good food, made well, with good ingredients. That normally isn't such an issue because I would normally go out and get more. Not this time. The company discontinued making it. I immediately started envisioning my cat, near death, all waif like, refusing to eat because of her missing favorite cat food. Stella needed food, so I bought a random bag of other good food and worried about the future. But when I opened the bag, she seemed excited by it. So I put a scoop in her bowl next to what was left of her old food and went to work. When I got home, she had picked out the new food and left the old food cold and alone in the bowl. Stella seems to love the new food even better than the old! I'm so glad that this was a smooth transition. It could have been really difficult.

In other news, my honey pot and I leave in 14 days for Burning Man! I can't believe how little we've prepared so far. I have done nothing except realize last Sunday that I hadn't even thought about it. Usually by now my honey pot would be so into his projects that I wouldn't have seen him for 4 weeks already. But this is our year of no projects. I like it better this way. We'll be out there a little under 6 days. I was describing it to a co-worker and I felt myself begin to get really excited. It's been slow coming because of the large project we're in the midst of at work right now. I almost feel like I shouldn't be going because it'll be in the absolute worst time for this project. But I can't move this event. If I was going on a vacation that I could change the dates of, I probably would. But I can't. So it is what it is and I'm going.