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 :)

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/2008/02/26/i-have-been-mocked-into-writing-this/ http://betaorbust.com/blog/2008/02/26/i-have-been-mocked-into-writing-this/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:53:01 +0000 jfavreau http://betaorbust.com/blog/?p=37 Apparently I have been mocked for my current dearth of witty informative blog entries. Not that this will be either of those things but here’s a blog entry:

Why have I forsaken my dear little blog? I’ll tell you why, because I’m cheating on it. That’s right. I have another place to write. And this one is better*

What and where is this amazing repository of wordsmithery you may ask? It’s over at Robots of Joy.

“Oh no, he’s making interactive sex-bots… again” I hear you say, but no! Not only will I never tinker in the gray triangle region between a roomba, prostitute, and God EVER again** but this project benefits sick kids (although depending on how you take the word “sick”… never mind I’m straying from my point.)

Here’s how it works (shamelessly copied from something I already wrote)

The Robots of Joy project was conceived in early 2008 as an all-around-everybody-wins mixture consisting of a scoop of the love of technology, a handful of engineering, and substantially more than a pinch of helping out others who could use a boost.

The plan falls into five parts:

Stage One: Design of the actual robot project. This stage is currently IN PROGRESS down to the Solidworks drawings, component choice, etc. For more on this check out this article.

Stage Two: We acquire the needed parts through donations (physical parts or money to buy parts) ad-based revenue from the website, and good old-fashioned out-of-pocket expenses. To add a bit of incentive each of the donors’ names will be laser etched into the side of the final project and recorded here on the site. (Have a blog or a website? That’ll also get face time here)

Stage Three: The build is on! Machining time has already been donated to the project and some of the operations code is already in the works. Admittedly this is the fun part :) Pictures of the build and how it progresses will go out on the website and in the newsletter. Hopefully we’ll really build some excitement for this stage and get a good rolling start into…

Stage Four! The whole project is sold to a lucky bidder on eBay. That’s right the whole thing will get packed up and shipped off. For this first project expect to see somebody’s computer room get a blast of very awesome. As soon as we find a home for our little creation it’s on to…

The BEST Stage: After out-of-pocket expenses are settled we’ll be giving %90 of the proceeds to the great guys over at the non-profit organization Child’s Play (childsplaycharity.org) who supply over 40 children’s hospitals with gifts, toys, and all manner of great things for children in long-term care. Read some of the letters these guys get and you’ll instantly understand the great service they provide to a lot of kids who really need a pick-me-up.

So where does that extra 10% go? It becomes the seed money for the next project allowing us to continue this cycle. We may change charities from project to project or year to year but the end goal will always be the same: to help fund amazing charities and do it all while developing some great open source projects.

So there you have it. That’s where the time has been going.

On the life side of things: Work is good but classified. Apartment is good but lacking dishwasher. Health is good but… EVERYTHING. Megan and I have bronchitis or some such nonsense and I’ve been missing the aforementioned work and dragging myself around the aforementioned apartment. Lotta WoW and sleeping. About the only things these here cough meds let me do. Well that and write this post…

And with that I’ll let this here robitusssin and delsyn fueled rant come to an end. Kelly consider yourself re-mocked…ed… mockeded… THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

* It may not be better and it’s not exclusively mine but it’s where my “writing time” has been going. Along with my “free time.”
** Not saying that I have, but damn if it doesn’t make for a good mental image in a blog post.

Why would we have done that? Why would we leave this life of heroic hunt-and-gather for a life of grinding heroic WoW instances?

I’ll tell you why. Cause it’s damn nice. And to top it off: I want some of that drudgery and sedation.

As those of you who know me (and let’s face it, you’re reading my post so you either know me pretty well or are just too creepy for words…) I generally like the outdoors, activity, the good feeling that accompanies true physical exhaustion, etc and normally do not write long drawn out paragraphs extolling the virtues of a sedentary existence. But that was before this last month….

I have moved (with Meg & Bird) to a total of four apartments in the the last month (one more coming up in a week or two) And I’m here to tell you why the nomads cashed in their sweeping migratory patterns and started short morning migrations to Starbucks: Moving. Sucks.

Hard.

The Full Story (a tribute):

Megan and I lived this summer in an apartment provided by Medtronic Diabetes (where I spend 50ish hours a week saving babies, grandmothers… and puppies) It was a nice place, but when my summer program ran out it all of a sudden became a $95/night place which is cool if you’re made of money in the exact fashion that I am not.

Sooooo we (meg) found a nice little apartment a few blocks away for a nice little rent. The actual apartment we were going to stay in was still being occupied so we saw the unit down the hall and were quite happy with it. Unfortunately we were not going to be able to move in until the current person moved out and they had time to paint and replace carpet etc

Dang internet cut out and I lost the rest of the post so here’s the short short version from here

• Our new apartment isn’t ready
• All of our belongings except one car load of stuff goes into storage.
• Friends Badier and Neel let us crash on their floor
• Apartment still not ready… continue to crash on the floor
• Still not ready
• FINALLY (2 weeks later) ready. Can finally stop living on the floor
• Not so fast… move one car load of stuff into the new apartment before making the decision that it smells too much to live in. Cigar+Cigarette+DEATH. Hence forth this dwelling will be referred to as the Apartment of Horror.
• It smelled so bad it made you close your eyes. I’m not even sure how this works, but ask Chris, it’s totally true.
• Dissolve lease on AoH (at least start the process)
• Find new (nicer) apartment (now referred to as teh Apartment of Joy)
• AoJ is not ready for another week or two
• Sleep on Chris and Megan’s couch for a night while sanity is restored.
• Go to Wired’s NextFEST with the Elder Donuts (Which was really really cool)
• Move everything out of AoH back into our cars
• Move everything out to Eagle Rock where Meg’s uncle has offered us a house for as long as we need it
• I hate being a nomad….
• No really I do…

So there it is. We’ve moved all over the valley and we’re going to have to move one more time before we’re done (hopefully)

As an overview here’s where we’ve been:

View Larger Map

The house we’re in right now is in the middle of a remodel and I just can’t wait for a real, everything works and doesn’t smell like the angle of death, place.

To those who have let us crash with them: thank you so much.

The rest of you: it’s not over yet ;)

~J

<NERD STUFF>

So get this: I’m on stolen interwebz… it’s the neighbor’s but you know how some wireless connections are ‘secured’ so others can’t share in their bounty? This one was like that. It took me a day of running a program to get enough data to crack the encryption but it TOTALLY WORKED! I discovered their WEP key and I’m on the ‘secure’ network as I type :)

Honestly it’s been a LONG time since I’ve had this much fun with a computer and for those looking for a good place to jump off: http://www.remote-exploit.org/projects.html These guys know their stuff inside and out. Big shout out to Chris as we went through the process together…. such fun :)

</NERD STUFF>

My God, what a long post….

But here’s the problem: In the April 2007 issue they were wrong about technology. Not a mere slip or typo but a complete error in an article entitled The “Wii’s Wild Controller” part of a “How It Works” feature.

These types of articles usually interest me as I am a person who avidly disassembles and reassembles gadgets (the latter with a slightly lower success rate). I assume that the people who write them are similarly enthralled with the what the hell does that do? sort of fun that comes along with breaking things open.

Writer Lauren Aaronson promises to explain the inner workings of what the magazine cover calls an “amazing machine.” Sadly, when it came to one of the Wiimote’s crowning features, the screen pointer, Ms. Aaronson not only drops the ball, she lets it roll into the next county. And no one in magazine’s fact-checking department runs after it.

Here’s a scan of the article (with the offending portion blown up for emphasis.)

Aaronson claims that the Wiimote sends IR light to the sensor bar (like a normal remote) where it is picked up and translated into an exact location.

This, my friends, is bull.

I’m someone who has, in fact, taken apart a Wiimote. I’m guessing that Ms. Aaronson does not fall into this category. Perhaps she just read the name “sensor bar” on the package and guessed how the pointer function works. She has, in fact, exactly REVERSED its operation.

The “sensor bar” does not pick up anything. It’s nothing more than a couple of IR LEDs (fancy light bulbs for those of you who didn’t spend your childhood in a RadioShack.) The Wiimote actually has a sensor (think: small camera) in the front of the controller that detects the “sensor bar” position and figures out what the gamer is pointing at. That little camera is what makes it all work.

Not only do I know this, but I can prove it. Look at these two pictures:

Here is the Wiimote with the back off.* The red circle is the unit in question. Sure, it could just be the most advanced LED mount you could cram into the end of the thing, but this next image helps make it clear.

See that? 8 pins! LED’s use 2! Weeelll maybe they use some sort of 7 LED + common ground array (hardly, but whatever)… actually a much more likely story: Those leads connect a camera-like sensor to the Wiimote circuit board.

Even further than pin-counting, further than speculation about LED arrays, further than ill-informed marketing, comes the proof that Ms. Aaronson did not do her homework: You don’t need the so-called “sensor bar”

Yup, that’s right. Take that thing out. (If it were actually a sensor bar your pointer wouldn’t work without it.) Replace the bar with a couple of candles (or the USB powered array that I made for use on my desktop) and prest-o-change-o your Wiimote springs into pointing action!

Observe…

So, PopSci deconstructs something I know about–and they’re wrong? That’s a lot of nerd cred down the drain. Who knows? That “Most Advanced Jet Fighter” on page 48: Does it really run on pixie dust and genetically modified monkeys? Well maybe, but without publication integrity who cares?

Normally the lowest person in a publication chain gets the unfortunate job of fact-checking. But in an edition where the column “From the Editor:” bulges with some serious bragging about their “Wii Broke It” online deconstruction of a Wii, as well as Senior Editor Mike Haney’s great “How It Works” feature, I think the failure is at all levels.

From the Editor Mark Jannot:

Because even if I’m not thrilled that we destroyed a Wii to reveal and document its mechanisms, a am happy that we were motivated by a classically PopSci urge to know–and tell. and I think that you’ll agree that the intel in the How It Works package that Senior Editor Mike Haney and his team have delivered, beginning on page 47, is worth any number of disemboweled videogame consoles.

Well yeah, any number but zero…

If you work for PopSci:
If you want somebody to take things apart: I’m an engineer, graduating from an institution that stresses communication and writing, and I’m looking for a job.

*As I’m not home in CA and able to photograph my Wii at the moment, I snagged a couple of the images from http://www.sparkfun.com/ and added a few red circles for this post.

On the lighter side of things I saw a fire dancing troupe do a show tonight and was pleasantly surprised to note that almost all of their moves were ones that MDonut and I had used when we were teaching poi. The one really impressive thing was the absolute physicality of some of the performers. Luckily I was able to grab a quick video of their most impressive piece of the night and so without further noise from me, here’s the vid.

Damn kids and their interwebs and hip-hop lingo. I swear. When I was a kid we had to cut our life stories into rock. Rock I tell you! And not this yelling that they call music. I mean granite! You ever try to write about a good walk to school in the blizzzard that made a mountain that I had to walk up again on the way home into a piece of heat-treated dinosaur? NO! Damn kids…

~J