In lieu of an actual post, I’ll leave you with this link to the photo album. The pictures tell the story and at 1,000 words per image you can just imagine this is a 45,000 word epic post.

On a side note: I changed the underlying software of the site to not save my tweets as new posts. They’ve now moved to the sidebar to help reduce the clutter that is this page :)

You wanted to know where the heat sinks went? THIS is where the heat sinks went!

These heat sink pictures are some of my favorites. SO nice and orderly. Just LOOK at that brushed aluminum!

Heat sink city!

Badier is laying tile??? In a box? With a cardboard floor???? WHAT IS GOING ON???

Badier is thinking about the most amazing tile in the world...

Well folks… your wait is over… here is what we put our blood, sweat, and tears (in decending order of volume) into all this time….

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Our baby. Standing proud in the shop sans gearboxes and stage.

“What the hell?”

I can hear you say it now… Well let me explain: This device is a convention-ready representation of the product that Badier’s company is going to bring to market.

“… What the hell?”

Yeah, continuing on. It’s a solar collector. You see there are these new solar elements (think tiny solar panels) that are REALLY good at collecting energy but they’re also REALLY EXPENSIVE. One of the cool things about these elements is that they will turn an (almost) set percentage of any light energy that falls on them into electrical energy. So if you put it out in the sun you’ll get some juice; put it out in sun that’s twice as intense, you’ll get almost twice the juice.

Those clear “tiles” are actually Fresnel lenses that take all the solar energy that falls on them and condenses it down onto a TINY piece of the really-expensive-yet-awesome solar panel. This way you get to harness all the light energy that falls on that huge thing we’ve made and channel it into a few square inches of your awesome solar element. If it goes off as planned this device can be mass manufactured to be 20% cheaper (watt-for-watt) than traditional solar panels. Talk about cool!

So now you know. Following are a few more shots of us screwing around with our new creation and transporting it to San Diego for the Solar Power International 08 show.

We are ze proud papa!

If you stand back it magnifies the active element. Note: there are 30 in there. 6 of them make up the image you see in this shot...

Oh we're feeling goooooooood.

Damn Badier, lookin manly! I look like a squirrel with an overinflated ego... You have to understand that we haven't slept for over 24 hours at this point and are higher than kites on the adrenaline rush that comes with finishing off a large project.

We both hurt our backs putting this thing up. We are old men...

And now… the end of our long journey… we have to take the damn thing apart and bring it to San Diego…

Boxin' her up.... You wondered what that box in my living room was for (you and ALL my neighbors) well this is it! (Notice my sexy break-away walls that are ROCK solid after being assembled... mmmmm design)

The entire project ready to ship!

Driving 2 hours on 0 hours of sleep? San Diego here we come!!

As we pulled up we were surrounded by no fewer than six men on forklifts. They are the Forkmasters. You don't mess with them... It was like watching bees. Really big bees dancing with forklifts...

Our packages make it to the convention hall. Thank you Forkmasters!

Unpacking in the convention hall.

Our baby makes her debut at the solar show!

... shop is cleaned and we

Done! And still friends too! Notice it is dark out. This is the same day I previously mentioned that we hadn't slept before... We did catch an hour or two in the van. Only half an hour with the driver asleep...

Oh not only are we done we did such a good job we made it into CNET’s slide show! (The have 17 images from the entire SD Convention Center and our model was one of them! Hell yeah!)

And so it ends. It was a hell of a ride and some of the more extreme engineering I’ve done in a LONG time.

And after it’s all said and done I have but one thing to say:

Anyone else’s company need frackin’ amazing work done on insane time scheduals and is willing to pay through the nose for it? I know some guys who are really good…

<end autofellation>

PS. Unlike Fry in Futurama I finished my caffeine regimin (40 cups of coffee 24 diet cokes) and failed to run around the room in a blur fixing the ills of the world… I feel somehow cheated… Maybe next time if I hit 50 cups….

The following will do absolutely no justice to the topic. At all. Should it sound enjoyable and should you find yourself lacking a sense of self preservation/modesty/etc. I invite you to join us in 48 weeks when we really go to burning man.

As you may have figured from my previous post or the following comments, Donut and I went to Burning Man this year as part of a two-man scouting team. What we found will surely fill volumes and can’t be described in a blog post. If you’d like to hear stories put a few drinks in either of us (or both for the duo show. Our specialty!) and we’ll talk your ear off with madcap adventures.

For those of you haven’t seen us since (and thus still have your ears) burning man is best described as a post-apocalyptic-bacchanalian-art-festival-and-mass-survivalist-crash-course. You go to the desert and you survive in all the best ways possible. The playa (the “city” is built in a dried up lake bed) has the final word on all actions and you just ride out life for a week with 45,000 of your newest friends. Yeah, 45,000+ people make the trek to Reno Nevada and then head 75 miles north up a one lane service road to go survive the crap out of a week. Google may help me with the issue of describing scale: Yeah, it’s on google maps.

Other factoids:

• No money. You barter/trade/gift for everything that isn’t ice or coffee (sold at center camp)
• No water/food/anything. You want it, you pack it in.
• No trash. If you brought it in and it didn’t pass through your body (or at least make a decent stop in your stomach for a while) you’re packing it back out.
• Fire… it’s a big deal.
• Art…. that sound you just heard was the echo from my mind blowing.
• Oh just google it if you’re interested; It’s time for a few pictures.

These pictures and many more are available on Flickr but here’s a few I liked enough to post again:

This… this is a happy night…

The only thing I bought the entire week:

Sometimes you’ve just gotta ride with Jabba…

Fire Duck! The duck that runs of FIRE.

This is the Fire Organ. Yes it plays music. You can see Prudence (the woman who shot Mal in Firefly) playing it in the background. She, and this Fire Organ are balls-out crazy.

How do you survive a sand storm? YOU BECOME THE SANDPEOPLE!! HUUUUA HAAA HUUUUUUAALRG!
(This is Donut and I showing off our survival gear… and being Sandpeople.)

Speaking of dust and sand: Your hair may take on an… elderly look while on the Playa.

Our intrepid crew. I would survive myself to death anywhere with these fine people.

The Man. He Burns. That’s over 200 feet of fire. When the final explosion went off it set up a 600′ tall mushroom cloud of awesome. It was physically warm where we were standing… over a quarter of a mile away.

Oh and if minds were not bent enough: check out this AMAZING spider walker that I snagged a video of. This thing has to be 12 feet tall and weigh a few tonns. It’s powered but a huge V8 and would take an AT-AT downTOWN any day of the week.

And so the sun sets on our adventure… (oh yeah, I went there.)

To set the scale: Those wings are made out of HUGE sheets of metal and the figure in the middle is a normal-sized human goddess dancer.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this rant: Nothing I can say in a blog post could come NEAR to describing what the Burning Man experience is other than yelling “EPIC” at the top of my lungs. (It is NOT a soCal hippy music fest. The next person who asks me “who’s playing” shall feel the full wrath of a blogger angered)

Should you care to push past my “EPIC!” outbursts, I’d be more than happy to share stories along with the never-ending pictures/video.

So all in all this year’s scouting mission went better than ever could have been expected. Next year: we’re doing this thing in full glory.

48 weeks till the Man burns!

]]> http://betaorbust.com/blog/2008/09/26/48-weeks-till-burning-man/feed/ 5 http://betaorbust.com/blog/2008/05/20/my-credit-crunch/ http://betaorbust.com/blog/2008/05/20/my-credit-crunch/#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 21:54:04 +0000 jfavreau http://betaorbust.com/blog/?p=45 I recently decided to get a new credit card.

I go home to Eugene a few times a year and if I can get a $50 companion ticket that the girlfriend can use as well as miles for ever dollar I spend I figured it would be worth it (and by “figured” I mean I made an excel sheet and used my spending trends from the last year to show that it’s worth it by a couple hundred bucks)

So I pop over to Alaska Airline’s site which promptly ships me to Bank of America to get my card.

As I have a trip coming up I hoped to get this process started as fast as possible and I thought that if I did it through the bank’s phone service then perhaps the process would be faster. Spying a “Can I apply online?” link I clicked it… and got SLAMMED with the screen shown below.

I know it’s just a random letter generator… and that I’ve got the credit record etc that will allow me to have this card… but DAMN if that’s not a bit… unsettling…

For the record: the one of the only things that makes this card “worth it” is if you’re willing to pay off the balance due every week or so. This card uses ADB to calculate what you owe them which is MUCH worse than AB for the card holder. Just a heads up. Make your own excel sheet or use mine to see if it’s worth it!

Have a good Memorial Day weekend!

Update:
Even with my priority code of “Faail” they deemed me worthy of this credit card.
In related news: I now have nobody to share the ticket with. Sigh… well guess that’s life.

I have seen the light. It was amazing. It never went over 88mph but that’s ok by me. I like it here in this time.

Now to explain the crazy…

Sooo Megan and I are driving back from dinner with Chris and his Megan last night when it happens. The following dialog is completely true and I can only hope to blame it on the immense surge of adrenaline and nerdenaline (yeah, what it sounds like) at the time…

Megan: ::talking while driving::
Jacques: ::looking out the window as 5 lbs of mexican food and a margarita slouch towards Bethlehem::
Jacques: OH MY GOD! CAR! THE CAR!
Megan: Should I turn around?
Jacques: U-turn. U-TURN!!!! BACK THE WAY WE CAME! U-TURN!
Megan: ::Hauls on the wheel. The car hurtles back up the street. ::
Jacques: THERE IT IS! 88 MILES AN HOUR! 88 MILES AN HOUR!!!!

I will now share with you the sight that apparently claimed my adrenal gland, my sense of self-preservation, and my ability to articulate my feelings in full sentences.

The images aren’t great, but you try to get a shot of something so amazing it rips the very fabric of time and metaphor… from a recklessly driven car… at night… with a phone… uphill both ways.

The car from the side. You can see the engine and fission core in the back. The blue glow is a nice touch. That’s right ladies and gents, we’re tailing the time machine from Back to the Future. And it’s amazing.

You can see my shaking hands in the mirror. While you can not tell it from these pictures, I am yelling. I don’t remember what. I’m sure it had 88 miles an hour in it.

I understand it’s hard to see but the little yellow squiggle that you can see through the windshield? Oh yeah, that’s a fully articulated flux capacitor. Streaming little lights and everything.

You can start to see the detail in this car. We followed this guy for 15 minutes. Waaay out of our way. It was totally worth it. This thing had it all. The reactor (old version, not the Mr. Fusion from II and III) the electronics (you could see the date box through the window for setting your “destination”) the blinking lights. It has it ALL.

While the movie car had “OUTATIME” for a license plate, you can’t actually register that as California only lets you have 7 characters. FLUXED is pretty damn good if you ask me. You can also see the fission reactor on the back.

The detail was truly amazing. We ended up losing him right next to universal studios so who knows if it was the real deal but it sure as hell made my night.

Megan and I went joyriding with Doc and Marty :)

88 MILES AN HOUR!

Edit: Sigh… yes, it’s a fission reactor.