The Bar 2014 Edition

[trilobyte]

Another crazy and hectic day, but hooray for getting most of my errands done (including stocking up the bar), and getting the chance to test some equipment and to tinker around with some render tests I've been working on. They were all pretty much crap, but are leading me down the path of figuring out something that will do what I want. I'm committing the current crop of nonsense to a test render, I've got a pair of machines working on it all night and hopefully by tomorrow morning I'll see some great results.

Meanwhile it's off to figure out some dinner and enjoy a cocktail or three. Cheers!

[MyDearFriend]

*clinks glasses with Trilo*

Great work! I would be proud to get half as much done.

*pours another drink*

[Savannah]

*CLINK*

[ygmir]

*shuffles in, makes tea*
Well, what a difference cough syrup with real codeine makes!
Doc gave me that and antibiotics so, I think it'll be better from here out.....he did mention I probably pushed it way too far before coming in, after I explained some of what went on over the last few days. But, IPBA!!

*heads for one more day of isolation*

[trilobyte]

Grumble grumble grumble... damned render test is still chugging away - each frame is taking 20-30 minutes to get through.

Ah well, today should be action-packed and full of excitement.

[unjonharley]

Screw these fancy cars... Can't get a good battery cable connection... The battery is a pick and pull.. So I had to super clean the post.. BMW's Will not close tight enough..
So I put a #10 flattened copper wire as a shim.. Worked great.. Until this cold spell...
It taken a hell of a kick to start.. I'll get it going and take it to "my" battery geru.. Let him fix it..

[theCryptofishist]

9 hours without a post...

I think we need Yggy... or something.

Give me a Pago-Pago Octopus when you get here.

[trilobyte]

My sympathies, unjon - our old cargo van isn't fancy but the battery is a pain in the ass to connect jumper cables to..but we don't have bitter cold weather to contend with.

In non-playa news, it's been a frustrating day. That render test I started last night and expected to be done by morning is still chugging away. Peeking at some of the individual frames I'm liking the results a lot, but damn... after 24 hours it's only about a quarter of the way through. And murphy's law, some other project I'm working on got crazy today, and some of the stuff I need to do needs the render to be done so I can reboot. *shakes fist*

But hooray, the DGS was less painful than last year, and my sweetie's home from work at a decent hour.

[burner von braun]

Hey all,

I've been, and continue to be up to my ears with work. It pays the bills though.

Hopefully people here who have been sick recently are feeling better.

@msj Good to hear you have recovered from a bout of pneumonia, I was thinking we hadn't seen your good cheer here for some time.

@Trilo Good job on the DGS today by the way!

*slides vodka down the bar*

And cheers to all of you successful ticket buyers! Woohoo!

[ygmir]

*looks up from Isolation booth*
wow, cough syrup with codeine...........this is good!

HI BVB!!!!
Trilo: the world you describe, of renders and "other world" builds and such.............I sorta just don't even get it........but would love to see it sometime.

[magicmarty]

Hi Fishy, BVB, Trilo. Glad to hear you're recovering, YG! I don't understand what Trilo's doing either. Got to see that one day, Trilo. Hugs to Pandora

Nite, Kiddies

(((LF)))

[VultureChow]

SNOW DAY!!!!!!

Office is officially closed. I could make a point by going in for a bit, but you know what? Fuck it! I'm going to sew el wire onto my coat and drink fortified cocoa. And answer emails.

/I'll go in on Monday instead.

[Simon of the Playa]

meh...

officially in rochester it has to be 25 below zero and over 2 feet of snow to declare a school snow day.






maybe thats why i am the way i am.

[VultureChow]

Yep. Our property in buffalo doesn't close unless the police physically close the roads. Which almost never happens. I think it requires a minimum of 24 inches.

[Dr. Pyro]

I think it requires a minimum of 24 inches.

< raises hand >

[Elliot]

As a trucker, I once left Buffalo (Tonawanda) on a clear afternoon with a load that was in a great hurry. By the time I got well into Ohio, I heard on the radio that Buffalo had two feet of snow and it was still coming down heavily. This, in just a handful hours. I avoided our Tonawanda terminal in winter after that. You folks are stronger people than I!

Yay codeine, Ygmir!

To me, rendering is the disposal of dead livestock.
Or sketching.
I've been sketching a "Turkish bazaar" type facade for my camp. Seven sheets of plywood. Just might happen, if I start now.

[VultureChow]

Lake Effect Snow FTW!

[ygmir]

*wanders in*
*makes tea*
Hi gang!
yeah Elliot! this codeine syrup is great, I pretty much can choose when to cough, and how much!! lungs are slowly loosening, so, plenty of coughing to do. It's just nice to sorta be able to chose.

As for your turkish bazaar, I have a 90' diameter parachute............it's camouflage though.
you'd be welcome to borrow it and see how it works.

[Elliot]

Appreciate that, Ygmir, but I think I am going for a "stage set" facade of plywood. And shade I have. (Come to think of it, I gifted a parachute to somebody here a few years ago. Was it you?)

[trilobyte]

I've been in a couple of those foot-an-hour blizzards on I-90 in the stretch between Erie and Buffalo in the 90's, that is some seriously crazy stuff. You don't really understand what it means to be at the ass end of a lake until you've been through a winter in Buffalo, I tell ya. I don't miss the cold and the snow one bit.

Yggy, it's all dorky and geeky stuff I tell ya. Second Life is kind of like a video game, but instead of having a plot (like killing bad guys or saving the princess or whatever), it's just people socializing and being creative. They get around a million people a month, and at any given time there are 30-50K people logged in. You can make art, buildings, vehicles, clothes (that your character can wear), etc... You can also buy that stuff, or sell what you make. Pandorra and I make stuff, and we have a shop where we sell clothes. We also gift stuff to people (in SL they call 'em freebies). As for the rendering stuff, that's also 3D design, but much fancier. It's the same kind of tools that are used for visual effects in tv shows and movies. It's something I've been learning to do and trying to get better at doing over the last few years, but half the time I feel like I'm just banging my head up against a wall.

Basically, "modeling" refers to making the shapes, and "texturing" means creating the materials (fabrics, metals, woods, dirt, skin, etc) that go onto the shapes. Then there's also lighting, setting up cameras, setting up animation if you want things to move, and then "rendering" is taking all those things and turning them into images and movies. There are lots of different settings and options that affect how things will look, or how long it will take to render each individual image (or frame of a movie), and it requires lots and lots of computer horsepower.

[^Rhino!]

As a trucker, I once left Buffalo (Tonawanda) on a clear afternoon with a load that was in a great hurry. By the time I got well into Ohio, I heard on the radio that Buffalo had two feet of snow and it was still coming down heavily. This, in just a handful hours. I avoided our Tonawanda terminal in winter after that. You folks are stronger people than I!

Yay codeine, Ygmir!

To me, rendering is the disposal of dead livestock.
Or sketching.
I've been sketching a "Turkish bazaar" type facade for my camp. Seven sheets of plywood. Just might happen, if I start now.

Elliot, the last time I was in New York I was attending a meeting of the a group addressing abandoned underground mines. New York DOT had set it up, and it was a great meeting with field trip to the old Akzo-Nobel salt mine near Gennessee. We saw the effects of a major surface collapse (a bridge, the road, and two embankments sank 70 feet literally overnight), but my greatest memory of that trip was the bar after the meeting. At the same time the group met, the Rochester Jazz festival was going on, and Etta James came down and did a set with the band at the hotel. Friggin' awesome!

Thank you for bringing up the good memory. We flew over Buffalo on the way out, and saw Niagara Falls from the air. Awesome!

Anybody heard about the sinkhole yesterday at the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky? The Western Kentucky University Dept. of Engineering sent a drone INTO the sinkhole that has VIDEO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkEDwOidW_Q

Absolutely amazing stuff. There are 8 Chey Corvettes at the bottom of the pit, which now are 'expensive fill dirt'.

[VultureChow]

You went into the mine? That's awesome. I pass the various salt works on my way up to Buffalo all the time. Our winter salt delivery is like half the cost of any of our other properties.

I saw the drone video and the security footage of the sinkhole opening up. Sinkholes scare the crap out of me. Especially urban ones caused by broken sewer pipes. The thought that one can open up beneath you even if you aren't in the right natural geologic formations for it... *shudder*

I'm going to watch this video again next time I complain about how expensive it is to trench at the Buff property. Bedrock is only 18 inches down in some places.

[burner von braun]

Yeah ^Rhino!, that whole area of Kentucky, as I'm sure you know, is karst limestone formation. The Corvette museum is not really all that far from Mammoth Cave. It is stunning how, with all that surrounding land, and museum space for that matter, this sinkhole opening up right under the premiere showroom. Believe me, there were some mother beautiful Corvettes in that room, including the nicest one I've ever seen.

[Elliot]

.
*sits at bar, noodling on a notepad*

I think I can do this! It's just seven sheets of plywood, attached to existing shade structure, and some paint.
It is a blatant knockoff of KazBus, but I'm not too proud to use something that works well.

[^Rhino!]

You went into the mine? That's awesome. I pass the various salt works on my way up to Buffalo all the time. Our winter salt delivery is like half the cost of any of our other properties.

I saw the drone video and the security footage of the sinkhole opening up. Sinkholes scare the crap out of me. Especially urban ones caused by broken sewer pipes. The thought that one can open up beneath you even if you aren't in the right natural geologic formations for it... *shudder*

I'm going to watch this video again next time I complain about how expensive it is to trench at the Buff property. Bedrock is only 18 inches down in some places.

Vulture Chow, we didn't go INTO that mine, it had already collapsed totally. They now get the salt from a surface desalinization plant, which they spent $3 million and installed after the collapse since the salt was causing a lot of wells in the area to go saline.

And don't be afraid of sudden ground subsidence. The sewer/ water pipe sinkholes are caused by a desperately overaged underground infrastructure system. It'll take $2.1 TRILLION today to get things up to par, but a lot of cities and municipalities are now participating in what's called 'asset management', taking the worst and fixing them, while keeping up the rest of the system. It prioritizes things to get fixed while keeping up what's already there and OK.

It's why I am a HUGE advocate of 'trenchless technology', where you can go into existing underground utility pipes and repair or upgrade them by a variety of methods. It not only covers shallow horizontal boring for the installation of utility pipe, but things like relining sewers, renewing manholes, or inspection of pipe with CCTV, among a whole lot of other methods. It's also greenhouse gas friendly, decreasing the amount of fuel used by a crew by 85-90%. Decreasing the inflow/infiltration of the storm sewers into the sanitary sewers by moving away from a combined system is just the start.

As a postscript, I DID go into the old Breckenridge Mine near O'Fallon, Missouri after it had begun its collapse. THAT was scary, but we had a team of 8 of us...myself and 7 firefighters, and we'd all had the training to do such a thing, plus we had a court order to go. We carried everything.....mobile gas detectors, rope, oxygen, the whole kit for mine rescue. It turned out the collapse was only at the entrance of the mine, and caused by freeze-thaw. We did manage to prove, however, that the mine DIDN'T go under I-70, and place a major traffic artery at risk. So, the whole outing was a success. The main success, though, is the number one success I shoot for EVERY day.....every man who went in came out that evening and went home to family and friends.

For your enjoyment, here's a pic of the base of the scree pile near the entrance of that one:


We have fun when we go underground.

[^Rhino!]

Yeah ^Rhino!, that whole area of Kentucky, as I'm sure you know, is karst limestone formation. The Corvette museum is not really all that far from Mammoth Cave. It is stunning how, with all that surrounding land, and museum space for that matter, this sinkhole opening up right under the premiere showroom. Believe me, there were some mother beautiful Corvettes in that room, including the nicest one I've ever seen.

The Mammoth Cave area has some other features that 'bridge' cavities, like a sandstone caprock that allows water to attack the limestone below while keeping the surface relatively pristine. I suspect that the caprock under the Corvette Museum finally was unable to hold the weight placed upon it, gave way, and turned the Corvettes sitting on top of it into some very expensive sinkhole fill.

That area sits astride the geological Cinncinnati Arch, a broad anticlinal fold that extends from Ohio down to Alabama. The fold was caused during the Appalachian orogeny by continents slamming into each other as Pangaea was building. The arch is breached by the Nashville Dome, a structural dome that finds surface expression as a topographic basin. I went to undergrad school (majoring in geology) 30 miles south of Nashville, so I know more than a little about it. Stuff on the surface is Pennsylvanian (sandstone) in age over Mississippian limestone (Fort Payne Limestone, a siliceous limestone with its type section in Alabama) It's not as siliceous in Kentucky as it is further south, and subject to quite a bit of dissolution.

[MyDearFriend]

.
*sits at bar, noodling on a notepad*

I think I can do this! It's just seven sheets of plywood, attached to existing shade structure, and some paint.
It is a blatant knockoff of KazBus, but I'm not too proud to use something that works well.

Elliot, this looks awesome!!! I hope you can pull it off, because I would really love to see that.

[Elliot]

I have already cleared the back yard so I can set it all up and work on it there.

[fernley1]

Elliot, thats going to look great!

[Elliot]

High bleepin' time I step up my game a little!