red echo

Here we go: we had planned to leave tomorrow morning, but the rest of my caravan crew are packed up and ready, and would rather leave tonight. I'm racing through the last of my preparations; I had expected to have a few more hours, but I'm close enough that I can pull everything together.

Off to the desert again at last.

OH YEAH. My last few projects are coming together all at once. I'm working hard, switching between three different pieces: putting down the needle when my hand starts to cramp up, picking it back up while the glue dries... I'm glimpsing the completed effect as I near the finish, and it's making me very happy.

The bluelight waterpack sparkles, just as I'd hoped it would, and the s-curved arrangement of the LEDs gives it a sort of spiral effect inside. It's very bright. I ended up using 22 LEDs, 11 per side. There will be no losing track of me on a dark night.

The coat suddenly looks very cool. I haven't been sure whether this idea would actually work, but I have the outer fur stitched onto one of the cuffs now, and it looks great. I don't think I'll have time to put fur trim on the hood or lapels before I leave, but maybe I can do that in the car. There will be plenty of hours to kill on the road tomorrow!

It seems that I somehow packed all of my 9V batteries. All of them - leaving none behind for the project I'm still trying madly to finish. But while searching, I found.... sixteen more brand-new AAs.

Ah well: I can actually make this work with AAs if I just use some different resistors. It'll last longer between battery swaps that way, too; this bank of LEDs draws about 1.6 watts, which is rather a lot for a little 9V battery, even a pair of them in parallel (like I used for the LAVI pack).

Here we go! My gear is all sorted, packed, and loaded onto the second of the big trucks, which will leave sometime tomorrow. I'll follow it Saturday morning, cruising down with Adam, Janet, and Michael, and we should arrive midday Sunday.

My white-on-white waterpack chews through AAs quickly, so I made sure to buy plenty. Then, when I pulled my dusty bins from last year out of storage, I found a big heap of leftover batteries. So now I'm bringing four dozen AA batteries with me; I think that should be enough.

I took the day off work today, so I'd have time to run around and take care of all my last errands and wrap up my projects. Of course I didn't quite get all of the projects finished, and I'm sure there will be one or two I'll leave behind, but a day spent not having to try to balance work and planning was good for my peace of mind.

We met up at Heden after work to start packing one of our group's 26-foot trucks. It was great to see everyone sporting their new, outrageous, playa-ready hairstyles. I got to hand out a couple more Nomad Lounge pendants, and it was nice to see how enthusiastically they were received. I felt really good this evening: out there with a bunch of smart, creative, enthusiastic friends, getting ready for a big adventure we're all going to have together.

The Nomad Lounge is now packed up and ready to go. We just happened to have acres of cushy stuff, for the interior of the vehicle, so we were able to pad all the lattice, which should help keep it all from getting smashed up during the trip. I got the hair-raising job of driving the tractor up the approach ramp into the truck - it was frightening until I actually got under way, and then I was too busy paying attention to keeping the wheels lined up to really think about it.

Oh yes, the tractor: it no longer looks like a tractor, but some kind of furry black shark beast. We built a wire-mesh frame around it, completely covering the hood and wheels, and wrapped it in black, sparkly fun-fur. We mounted some new custom headlights, too: 150-watt halogen bulbs, on a dimmer even, so the driver can pick the exact amount of illumination that seems appropriate for the situation.

Life feels really good right now.

Burn burn burn burn burn! If you're tired of hearing about Burning Man, you should probably stop reading my site for the rest of the week, because this is the height of Burning Man prep season, and that's pretty much all I'm doing with my free time until I leave on Saturday morning.

Seized by some kind of fit, I have put together a totally outrageous dancing outfit, so completely over the top and unlike anything I have ever worn before that I can hardly believe I am actually going to take it out in public. Yet fabulous it is, and comfortable, and it's going to be terrific fun. It's all white and ice-blue, fun fur and lycra, with blue LEDs sewn into the hems of the pants and sleeves. It is going to go beautifully with my white-on-white waterpack. I am going to blind people if I ever step near a blacklight.

I spent a couple of hours working on the throbber circuit for the blue-sparkly waterpack and got nowhere. This circuit is ambitious, and I don't really have the skills yet that I would need to figure it out. Time is running short, so I started thinking about what else I could do with the pack that wouldn't involve such complex circuitry, and realized that I could pretty much just leave all the lights on all the time, and it would still look pretty cool. Just the fact that it's a light-up water bottle backpack is pretty novel and interesting, right? I tend to forget that. Besides, the LEDs I'm using have a very narrow beam, so they sort of sparkle as the pack moves around, and their area of focus comes in and out of view; also, the water inside the bottle bends the light as it moves, which causes its own kind of animation. In fact, the more I think about it, the more the throbber circuit feels like overkill. It certainly wouldn't be the first time I've completely overdesigned one of my projects. Anyway, I can always come back and add a throbber circuit later if I want to spend the time on it: but for now it's just going to be simple and pretty.

Band practice tonight. We tried out a new song, which we did pretty well at, then bodged our way through an increasingly rickety selection of our usual songs until the heat had pretty much wiped us out. We've definitely done better, but it was good to get together and play anyway. We're not going to play again til after Burning Man; Dawn isn't going this year, but both Greg and I are.

In other news, I had thick blue streaks put in my hair today.

Every Seattle-based trip to Burning Man involves one shopping spree at the big Fred Meyer in Ballard, and that was today. Perhaps “spree” is overstating it in this particular case, but I did buy a new (colossal) camping tent, and some plastic drawers to put in it, and some gas cans for the Nomad Lounge, and a foam pad, and a folding chair, and... um... the list went on for a while.

One week from today! I am excited. Between the people I'm going with, the project I've built, and my general state of mind lately, I think this is going to be my best burn yet.

I spent the evening recording keyboard parts with Chris from Raz Rez. It's always interesting to see how different bands work, and to look more closely at the way they construct their songs. It took me a while to work my way into the structure of this particular song; I kept wanting to fill with in a lot more than the song really needed. It all worked out eventually, though, and I felt pretty happy with it by the end.

After recording was over I headed up to Wallingford and met up with the Kaos crew, fresh from work on their art car, hanging out at Goldie's. We eventually headed back to Lane and Sean's place, were there was much roistering about and eventually a tournament poker game, and then it was five in the morning and wow, was I ever tired.

I wasn't feeling well today, and after a morning of minimal accomplishment I decided to take the afternoon off. I spent the time sitting on my couch, sewing.

I have a cheap camelbak knockoff I picked up at the last minute for last year's Burning Man. It worked, but wasn't very comfortable. After making the harnesses from scratch for my last couple of light-up waterpacks, I realized that I could probably use the same design to improve this pack. It seemed like a nice mindless activity for a quiet afternoon, so I got to it. I cut off the old skinny chest strap, which had been attached to the body of the pack, not to the shoulder straps where it might have actually done some good, and made a new one out of 1" webbing and a little adjustable buckle. Then I measured out some 2" webbing and some 6mm closed-cell foam, cut to shape, and sewed a new set of shoulder straps. The old straps had no padding at all, so this helps a lot.

By this point I was full of the sternum-strap religion, so I pulled out my old LAVI laser pack and waterpack #1 (red & blinky) and started improving their harnesses, too. I have always had trouble with these two: the backpacks are so short that the straps tend to chafe under my arms, especially after a couple hours of dancing. The new chest straps should keep the shoulder straps out of the way. This will be the... um... fourth time I've redesigned LAVI's harness, but at least the incremental change diminishes with each repetition...

We met at Dawn's house for band practice tonight. I was pretty tired, and Collin and Greg both forgot their song binders, so it was a shorter and less energetic session than usual. We did a lot of jamming, and played a few of the songs we know best.

We've considered dozens of ideas, but still don't have a name for our project. It'll come in time, I suppose...

I've finished waterpack 3, the white-on-white design. I took it out for a test last night, partly to feel out how the harness wears, and partly to see how long a set of batteries would last. It's power-hungry, alright; looks like I'll need to replace the batteries every three hours. That's OK, though, since it is really astonishingly bright. Nobody will have any trouble finding me in a crowd while I am wearing it. Adding to the effect, the harness and back pad glow furiously under blacklight.

The harness worked OK, but the shoulder straps pinched a bit - a problem I've had with each of the packs I've built so far. Chest strap placement seems to be critical. I picked the strap off and re-stitched it lower down, and that seems to have improved the fit. I also added pads to the shoulder straps, using the same design I worked out for the still-unfinished waterpack 2. Sewing went much more quickly this time.

I have all the parts I need to start on the throbber circuit for waterpack 2, but I'm a little intimidated. It's not the most complex circuit I've ever put together, but it's up there somewhere, and fitting the system into the very limited available space available will take some ingenuity.

I'm nearly done with light-up water bottle backpack number three. This one is based on a translucent rectangular bottle, instead of a transparent cylindrical one, and is lit up with a CCFT backlight panel instead of LEDs. It doesn't move or change at all, but the light diffuses throughout the bottle, so the whole thing glows like the bottle itself is a light bulb. It's a simple effect, but dramatic, I think, because it's so unusual.

I've had second thoughts about making my new light-up water bottle sound-reactive. I had wanted to make a whole fleet of them, a dozen or so, all lighting up in proportion to the volume of the sound, and then get a group together to walk around in the desert with them. The effect would be not so much the individual water bottles themselves, but the collective visualization of sound in space. Of course I don't have anything like the time I'd need to make a dozen or even half a dozen such packs, and I think that making just one wouldn't really be interesting enough to be worth it.

New plan: I'll mount the LEDs in two strips, one on each side of the bottle, just like I'd originally planned, but I'll use a pair of throbber circuits (like the sleep light on a PowerBook) to drive them. I'll set these just out of sync so the light pulses beat in and out over time. This is a little different from previous projects in that it doesn't respond to its environment, but that's OK; I think it will be soothing and pretty.

Well, that's not so good: I got a call today from someone at the Black Rock City Department of Mutant Vehicles, wanting to discuss some concerns about the Nomad Lounge. It seems they like the trailer, but are not at all keen on the tractor we're using to pull it. It's OK that it *is* a tractor, but even though it's a small part of the overall project, they don't want it to *look* like one. Ok, time for a design change. It's a good thing we got the project done early!

Life is beautiful.

I went to the Mojito Hut party out at Bear Creek Studio last night. It was an interesting crowd: lots of musicians. I struck up a few conversations, and ended up getting invited to sit in on a practice session later this week. Well, that should be interesting.

It was a nice party. Ryan's dad lit up a huge bonfire, assisted by what appeared to be most of a 5-gallon can of diesel, and later set fire to a scarecrow packed with roman candles, named “Bernie Flambeau.” This was particularly exciting after the string holding the roman candles in place burned through and the shots started angling closer and closer to horizontal, though it ended without disaster. Many mojitos were served and consumed, and at one point I jumped inside the bar, got Michael to show me the procedure, and started serving drinks myself. I lost count somewhere around two dozen - it was fun. We all wound up around 2 AM roasting marshmallows around a smaller bonfire, wrapping up in blankets and sleeping bags, and crashing in the studio. I've been moving a bit slowly today, but it was worth it.

This afternoon I am building another in my series of light-up playa backpacks. After dancing all night in my red-blinky-motion-activated-water-bottle pack at the Space Virgins party a week or two ago, certain deficiencies in its design made themselves clearly known: chief among them the fact that I had somehow managed to fry the motion-detector circuit. I'm also unhappy with the arrangement of the shoulder straps, and the way I attached the drinking-hose to the bottle cap could use some improvement (it's hard to refill the bottle). Onward, then, to a new design. This one will use blue LEDs and a sound-activated blinker circuit; it should be both brighter and livelier than the last project.

Band practice was interesting tonight. Dawn finally got her drum kit, so this was our first time playing along with real, rather than improvised, drums. It certainly makes a difference. For one thing, we suddenly got a lot louder, and for another, we can't really ignore Dawn's tempo decisions anymore, as we have sometimes been known to do...

Here we go: I bought my plane ticket this morning, and I'm going to spend December travelling with my sister Melissa in North Africa. Hello, Sahara!

I've just posted a gallery of photos from last Sunday's Nomad Lounge test drive.

Band practice went well tonight. The last few practices have lagged a bit; maybe it was just the heat, but we weren't really hitting it. Tonight, though, we played well, worked out a rough spot in one of our songs, tried some new variations, and generally had a really good time.