red echo

Adam, Janet, Michael, and I spent all day building and test-driving the completed Nomad Lounge. We packed all the pieces up last night, so we were ready to roll first thing this morning, and off we went to set up shop in the UW parking lot north of the stadium.

The frame went together in a jiffy - we've done this part before, so we didn't have to go through all the measuring and figuring again. Things slowed down when we put the floor panels together: our joint system just wasn't stiff enough for our newly widened frame, so Adam and Janet made a quick hardware store trip to pick up some more bolts. The new bolted system is much stronger - we have no doubts about it at all.

The walls, though every bit as pretty as we'd hoped, turned out to need some reinforcement; deck screws just didn't do the trick. We'll add bolts there too, and Lars suggested a neat bracing system that sounds promising. For today, we just told people not to lean against the walls.

We had guests dropping by all day, both to help out and to watch. People seemed to be impressed: over and over we heard comments like “I had no idea it was going to be so big.” We've put a lot of work into this machine, and it was satisfying to be able to show it off.

It was also nice to see how well the mechanical components held up. The new hitch system is totally bombproof, and with the new casters the platform turns as easily as we could have hoped. What's more, the tractor's braking ability is far better than we'd estimated: on damp asphalt, we were able to bring the entire fully-loaded vehicle to a stop in about ten feet. It isn't something you'd want to do often, but it's nice to know we have that safety margin. The one problem we discovered was that the tractor tends to spin its wheels when getting started. It has all kinds of pulling power, but there's not enough weight on its rear wheels to give it traction. Perhaps a sandbag will help.

The lounge really is huge. It's one thing to do the math and imagine how it's all going to work, and quite another to see it all built up. The trailer has as much floor space as my entire living room - but instead of furniture, we're simply covering the floor with pillows and blankets, so we can use every square inch for seating. We brought along an entire car-load of fluffy interior stuff, and the lounge just ate it up; I think we're going to need twice as much to do the job properly. But *oh*, is it comfortable.

The Space Virgins party was a blast. I arrived just after midnight and stayed til they kicked us out, dancing most of the time. It was good to see so many friends out enjoying themselves. They had two DJ stages running most of the night, a big (and crowded) chill-dome, and a really interesting blindfold room. Definitely a worthy send-off for the soon-to-be-defunct Conworks.

I showed up at Heden last night, with dancing shoes on and my laser backpack in hand, ready to go find a warehouse party Adam had heard about somewhere. This turned out to be the cover story for a surprise party: as I rounded the corner into the dining room, there was a crowd of people and a table laid out with snacks and drinks. Whee! What fun! Several hours of drinking, socializing, and fooling around with dangerously powerful lasers followed.

The party was starting to wind down around two, but I still felt like dancing, so I gathered up everyone who felt energetic and we set off for Conworks. Novatron and DJ Shapeshifter were playing, and we danced until they shut down.

It's another year gone, and a milestone year at that. This was probably the best birthday party I've ever had, and I was very happy to have so many of my friends there to celebrate.

IT IS SO HOT I AM GOING TO DIE.

I don't think the temperature even dropped below 80 last night.

The Nomad Lounge is intensely blue. We finished building the walls yesterday and spent the afternoon today painting them. We went through just over two gallons of ultramarine blue, and “ultra” is a good way to describe the color.

We also redid the wheels yesterday, and worked out a solid hitch design. The hitch is the only real piece of engineering work left, and we expect to have it done by next weekend. Then... well... that's pretty much it. We'll have to pick up some pillows, cushions, lights, and such, but I feel pretty good about being done with construction six weeks before playa time.

We shipped REALbasic 2006r3 about a week ago, and it already feels like old hat. I finished my part of the biggest, splashiest feature for the next version before r3 went out the door, and will spend my time during the r4 development cycle working on a feature which probably won't show up in all its full splendor until r5. In this job, I seem to spend a lot of time in the future.

There are always a few days between the end of one version cycle and the beginning of the next where we get to goof off a bit. It's a chance to implement minor items on our personal wish-lists and experiment with interesting parts of the code base before the organized development schedule gets under way. My projects tend to be minor language features and internal clean-ups - when there's no time pressure, diving into messy piles of old, built-up code and straightening them out is a lot of fun.

Learning, it would seem, almost nothing from the last couple weeks of hiking, I got up at 7:30 this morning - yielding a total of some four hours of sleep - loaded my pack, and hit the road. We were at the almost-deserted Annette Lake trailhead before 9 AM and had a nice steady walk up the creek valley to the lake. It was definitely a less challenging hike than the climbs I've been doing lately, but it felt good. It was definitely a good idea to go early; the air was noticeably warmer on the way back, and the crowds of people we passed suggested that it would be a busy, noisy afternoon on the lake.

Adam and I spent the afternoon working on the Nomad Lounge. We built three more of the eight-foot wall sections, which gives us a complete back wall and two-thirds of the left and right sides. It felt good to make so much progress, but I think we both felt a bit wistful, as the end of the project is rapidly approaching. Two or three more evenings will wrap up the carpentry. We will still have plenty of decoration to do after that, but the time-pressure ends once the structure itself is finished.

This evening was Barry's birthday party. The theme was “Barry U” - after the barbecue and general lounging around, people took turns demonstrating various skills and teaching Barry about them. Kevin's turn was most memorable: he brought over his oxyacetylene rig, showed Barry how to operate the torch, and set him loose cutting and welding bits of metal while we all watched and cheered.

I bailed out a little after midnight, despite the body-painting operation in progress, and headed over to the Re-Bar for “KRAKT”. This is a monthly electronica event, which I've managed to miss every time up til now despite its rave reviews, so I was determined to finally check it out. Unfortunately I really wasn't in the right mood for the minimalist techno they were playing. After chatting a bit with Craig, Scott, and Caroline, I headed back to ATC for the last hour of Barry's party, which mostly involved downtempo music and some very complex microcontroller-driven light-up juggling balls.

All together, a very good evening.

I fell asleep worrying that I was going to miss my alarm this morning. It went off at 4:30 as planned, and I was drinking coffee at Heden by 5 AM. Mez, Leo, Amy, Kevin, and I got our stuff together, piled into Amy's Suburban, and hit the road just before six. A couple of hours later we were at Paradise, ready for another climb up to Camp Muir.

The extent of the snowmelt surprised me. At our last trip to Rainier, the snow came down to the edge of the parking lot and stretched practically unbroken to the summit. This time the mountain was visibly patchy and the fields of rocks had grown dramatically. The alpine meadows are beginning to bloom - beautiful! - along crackling little runoff streams. We saw several waterfalls.

I had a tough time with this hike. I had a very active weekend and the five hours of sleep I got last night were not really enough to recover from it all. On top of that I was carrying extra water and ten or fifteen pounds of mountaineering gear (crampons, ice-axe, harness, etc.) that I don't usually have. I was breathing hard almost from the beginning and had some difficulty keeping up with the rest of the group. Something similar happened last week, on Granite Mountain. Lesson learned: if I'm going to have one of those push-it-to-the-limit weekends, I need to start with the hiking.

We stopped at the first reasonable snow slope and spent an hour or so practicing self-arrests. We hurled ourselves down the snowbank feet-first, head-first, on our backs, left side, right side; braking with the ice-axe and then digging in with the crampons. It was exhilarating and sometimes scary, but all the repetition definitely built confidence. After we felt sufficiently comfortable with self-arrests we set up a Z-pulley system, used to rescue someone who has fallen into a crevasse and become incapacitated. It took a fair bit of messing around with ropes, pickets, and prussik knots, but Leo and Mez eventually got it worked out, and then I hung limp on the rope while they retrieved me. It was an involved and difficult process, and I wouldn't want to have to try it under emergency conditions, but it was good to get some practice with it.

We continued up the Muir Snowfield, watching the weather uncomfortably. The big lenticular cloud that Rainier produces was coming and going, like it does, but we got worried when it merged into an even bigger cloud that spread over the mountain from the northeast and pulled the fog level down to Camp Muir. Then we saw what looked like a thunderhead off in the distance, and heard some thunder, and that was that. We were at 8600 feet, still a good 1500 from our destination, and decided to head back. We weren't the only ones scared off by the weather: a dozen or so climbers on one of the guided RMI trips came hurrying down behind us, a few minutes later. As it turned out, the cloud lifted up a few hundred feet and left Camp Muir clear, and the threat of lightning never materialized, but we all felt that it was the right decision to make.

We became doubly confident in this decision when we looked at the time and realized that we would be back in Seattle in time for Independence Day barbecues and fireworks. If we'd gone on to the finish, we wouldn't have arrived home til eleven or midnight, but this way we made it over to Dana & Corinna's place by eight. We never did get around to the fireworks, but the barbecue was a lot of fun with some good conversation.