Work in Progress

[Bob]

Didn't have any suitable trees for the ship's stem, so I snuck one out of the woods and tarred the base.

[ygmir]

very nice Bob!!

[Foxfur]

I picked up 60 more t-shirts at Goodwill yesterday. Painting these things is tiring but addictive...

Introducing Foxfur's summer kids collection!

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I'm thinking of finding 2 more to bring the total up to 100...

[TinkerMom]

Holy Jesus Fuck, FoxFur!!

Now, I have to go get some kids clothes, too?
I gotta get one made for my godson, just to piss off his mama!!

[trilobyte]

Got all the rubber stamps done, woohoo!

[ygmir]

very nice Trilo! maybe a "stamp fest".....since the "stop posting so much" stamp has finally made it home.

[Elorrum]

very nice Trilo! maybe a "stamp fest".....since the "stop posting so much" stamp has finally made it home.

Whoopee!

[Foxfur]

Holy Jesus Fuck, FoxFur!!

I love it when you talk all spiritual like...

And Trilo?
You rawk.
Really hard.

[trilobyte]

Holy crap, it's been a busy day (both on and off the boards). We started early, I made a run to storage to sort some gear and then had to run off to the hardware joint. I needed some paint and supplies, as well as to grab the first couple dozen pieces of conduit for the new structures this year. I'll get those cut to length over the next few days, and then later in the week pick up the remaining pieces (the ones that won't need to get cut). I also got started on installing the electric assist upgrade on the first trike - it's a lot of work and a bit of a pain in the ass (the instructions all assume you run a bike shop and have already done this sort of thing a dozen times), but it'll be worth it. We also got the big camp signs knocked out…

The cat's not coming with us, but he's determined to help get 'er done!


More feline supervision…


Completed sign!

[capjbadger]

My projects and myself have arrived safely on playa. See ya'll soon!

-Badger

[trilobyte]

Fuck yeah, Badger, congrats!

I'm still digging my way through stuff on the list, but in the home stretch. Yesterday I picked up a couple dozen pieces of conduit, and today I cut them to size on the chop saw, then hit the ends with the grinder to smooth them over, and finally marked them with electrical tape so my campmates and I can easily tell which of the five structures they go to (the shade hardware and bins are already marked). We also knocked out a chunk of the food shop, and then it was back to painting duty as I worked on panels for the Lofty Thoughts Lounge space up top. Another long day.

[Kire]

Have more to do on my bike (clean and grease some stuff, new tires, adjustments) but here it is so far (5m of RGB LEDs with controller).

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I''m in the midst of covering with white monster fur. hopefully can get that done tonight or tomorrow.

[MikeGyver]

Almost done, just gotta sew the lid on.

[BoyScoutGirl]

I dig that hat!

[Foxfur]

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Going back down to the hobby shop for a model rocket nosecone with a longer ogive.

Stenciled the back, tire pressure, various chemical warfare warnings, more to come...

[ygmir]

the water cannon(monitor) has been relocated, so that I can actually set it, and aim by steering the truck, and fire!!
3/4" nozzle, up to 300 psi, it'll empty the water tank 500 gallons in a little less than a minute. 3"steel pipe water feed

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I had to raise my MIG on one of the forklifts to reach the roof to weld the bracing.

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[Bob]

Who the FUCK decided Burning Man servers were a good place to cache eplaya user images? Yo, radical self reliance?

[ygmir]

Who the FUCK decided Burning Man servers were a good place to cache eplaya user images? Yo, radical self reliance?

huh?

[trilobyte]

Bob, to the best of my knowledge, we've not used Burning Man's servers for cacheing user images or any other part of ePlaya for more than a year. We've been using Amazon's cloud services since mid-summer 2011.

Ygmir - Frankencamper's looking fantastic. Foxfur, kickass trailer. Pani and I have a hybrid camping approach. This year I'll have a number of 1 inch EMT conduit shade structures (angled side tarps, which should hopefully deflect the fiercest of winds instead of fight them) for campers as well as art and kitchen/shower, but she and I will be bunking in the van again. All sorts of cozy, plus sleeping on a mattress just rocks.

In sadder news, my lemoncello batches finally reached the next stage today (well, they could probably have spent another week in phase one). Damned California citrus being so awesome that the lemony zestiness was so plentiful it took several additional weeks for the oils to be drawn out… Anyways, I figured today was the day, so I started the straining and filtering and dig up my sacred recipe from ye older interweb. FUCK, there's at least 40 more days to go after this. Once I finish all the filtering and add the sugar syrup infusion, it'll take another month and change to get right and be ready to start bottling up. Man, I'd really hoped to have that for the playa this year. Instead I'll buy a few bottles and have this for sometime after. And for next year, I'll have to start in the fall sometime, so I can give it all the time it needs and then have 6+ months after bottling for it to really get smooth. Ah well.

[trilobyte]

Beyond that, locking down more last minute plans with campmates and sent out the truck loading event invite. Had a talk with Pandorra about more sewing projects to chop - we've got plenty of fun things to wear, I'd rather that she was excited about finishing things and being in the home stretch than be trying to dig out from a big overhang of stuff we wanted to do. With what may prove to be a challenging year on-playa I think it's better to come out refreshed and ready to take it on rather than burnt out and exhausted from the start.



After a painful installation process, I also managed to get the electric assist upgrade kit installed on her trike. Woohoo for having that done, but fucking goddamn that bastard at the factory who said installation was a snap. Either he was thinking of a different kind of upgrade kit or he's delusional. The good news, she's ready to go (and while upgrading her, I also swapped her tires out for knobby dudes). The bad news, the throttle assembly on the other kit (for my trike) is defective, it'll take more than a miracle for them to be able to get that replaced in time for me to be able to have an electric assist on my trike in time for the event. Ah well, at least I've already got knobby tires - and the 3 speed trike is generally an easy ride.

I also finished painting all the sky panels for the Lofty Thoughts Lounge, they'll make up part of the railing for that upper deck shade structure. Tomorrow I go grab a few sheets of wood paneling and some stain, as well as the remaining conduit I'll need to cover our needs this year. Fortunately none of that should require cutting, just color-coding by structure so the advance team knows what goes where.

[Bob]

However it's done, attached images look and act stupid on this bbs compared to linked images (Flickr, Tumblr, etc.). Or I'm not getting why you made it a "feature".

[trilobyte]

Attached images have always looked stupid on the board (IMO) in comparison to something embedded via the IMG tag. That's just how PHPBB works. I'd talked about investigating and implementing an auto-resizer a few months back, because over-sized embeds & attaches 'broke' the way the board worked for a lot of users. Once I got the site's software upgraded to the current version, that was no longer necessary because now it handles oversized images without breaking how the site looks/works (if it gets too wide, it just truncates instead of covering the buttons/links on the right of the screen). The only configuration change I made was to create 600 pixel wide thumbnails for attached images over 600 pixels wide (it preserves the aspect ratio). None of it was intended to make attachments look better than embeds.

[littleflower]

In sadder news, my lemoncello batches finally reached the next stage today (well, they could probably have spent another week in phase one). Damned California citrus being so awesome that the lemony zestiness was so plentiful it took several additional weeks for the oils to be drawn out… Anyways, I figured today was the day, so I started the straining and filtering and dig up my sacred recipe from ye older interweb. FUCK, there's at least 40 more days to go after this. Once I finish all the filtering and add the sugar syrup infusion, it'll take another month and change to get right and be ready to start bottling up. Man, I'd really hoped to have that for the playa this year. Instead I'll buy a few bottles and have this for sometime after. And for next year, I'll have to start in the fall sometime, so I can give it all the time it needs and then have 6+ months after bottling for it to really get smooth. Ah well.

Trilo, i am bringing some homemade limoncello to the playa ... i would love it if you (and/or anyone else who feels like it) could come by 5 & D to try a little (or a lot), and discuss the process .... !!! i have some sour cherry stuff that's even better ,,,, and a few others ......

[trilobyte]

Oooh, sounds awesome littleflower! We'll also grab a couple bottles of store-bought stuff to bring along. I had been hoping to find some really good Sicilian stuff (made with meyer lemons) like I had last year, but no luck at the local haunts.

It's been a punishing couple days for me. Thursday I managed to make the right combinations of calls and emails to make arrangements to have a new throttle sent out from the factory on Friday, with overnight ship for a Saturday delivery. The shipping was super spendy, but I figure it would give me a chance to try and get trike number two's electric assist kit going. It was something of a hail mary pass - I was self-diagnosing the problem with the kit and hoping I'd be able to get it all together in a reasonable amount of time. Thursday night I went to meet a friend for a drink, and that ended up turning into staying to close at two favorite bars, drinking shots, and then drinking wine from glass skulls on a foggy roof in the wee hours (it happens more often than most people realize). Social time was fun and hooray for making new friends, but man that left me wobbly on Friday.

Friday was a big supply run at the home despot. Normally I'd prefer to spend a few extra pennies to support the local indie builder's supply joint, but knowing they treat conduit and certain kinds of lumber as loss leaders, I happily allowed them to sell me that stuff at a loss.



Several dozen more pieces of conduit, plus a few sheets of wood paneling and some stain to make the back wall of the deli. I had a late start because of the wobbliness, and everything took longer, so I didn't get to do the actual staining. But I did get all the conduit poles color tagged by project and unloaded from the van into storage. Aside from the wobble factor, I also managed to fuck up my wrist yesterday. By the time I went to bed last night it was a little sore, and today it was painful and making noises it normally doesn't make when I tried moving it around. Not really the ideal time for a sprained wrist, but whatever. Got a brace for isolation and reinforcement, and got back to work. Today I knocked out the staining of all those wood panels.



It also made me smile to see burners doing test builds of shade structures in a parking lot near the house, and watching as some guys were loading up all the parts of what could only be a monkey hut at the despot joint. Coming up fast!

My replacement throttle had arrived on schedule, so once I was done with the crappy staining job I started on that. What the fucking fuck! You would have thought this shit would have been even remotely modular or somewhat compatible, but no. Oh hell no. And of course, no documentation of any kind. Fuck it, it's either make it go or admit defeat and deal with it after the burn. I went with the first one, took apart the assemblies, made my educated guesses on the wiring and gave it a test. Success! Of course, from there everything needed to be done up right, and all the pain in the ass installation stuff to get the parts onto the trike, and make sure I didn't screw something up along the way.

The view from the bridge of trilocycle 2.0


From there, I added the parts I'd made and painted for the basket.


I still have an LED lighting system that I need to wire and rig, but I'll end up doing that on-playa. Pandorra got a ton of organizational stuff done today (aside from general awesomeness, she's our kitchen lead). We also went over a list of things to cover with campmates at our last pre-event camp meeting tomorrow. Still lots to do, so little time...

[BoyScoutGirl]

Trilo, your (and your wife's) productivity amazes me.

[theCryptofishist]

Yeah, I think they have clones in the basement in chains doing some of this stuff...

Or maybe Trilo has an implant in his skull that allows him to monitor eplaya while he's working.

[trilobyte]

I wish I had clones! Or a basement…

[trilobyte]

It's been a busy weekend - got a lot done but wish I had the energy to get more knocked out. We had a final meeting with campmates before we load the truck on Wednesday night, since the camp grew a lot this year and most of the out-of town-ers (and out-of-country-ers) are in SF we figured it would be a good opportunity for people to meet and the veterans to offer last minute preparation advice for the newbies. Really good times, I can't wait to get out there and spend more time with everyone.

I had hoped that we'd get the chance to spray the chalkboard surface onto the standees before the meetup, but the weather didn't cooperate (the fog slept in for quite a while). So we gavve the trikes a successful test run, hit up the bike shop to grab more tires and dry lube for the chains, and then hit up costco to finish up 'the big shop'. Still a few things to pick up at the local market, but I've got all I'll need to start on the pre-cooking I do (the darling girl has already done a fair bit of that).

[ygmir]

yer a beautiful man, Trilo!!

[theCryptofishist]

I wish I had clones! Or a basement…

Nice piece of disinformation there, Trilo.