Shooting postponed

Hopefully only until tomorrow.

I'm gonna do it, folks...

I build the second lightsabre and shoot the video tomorrow. Here, not at Woodbury. This will mean dubbing in the narration separately. I think that iMovie can handle that.

May the Force be with me.

OMG WTF BBQ-ed Thinkpad 600x....

Linux kernel hacker Alan Cox has always sworn by his ThinkPad 600x. I have one myself, and one 600e with a screwed up LCD that an acquaintance gave me from the pallet of ThinkPads he bought from the Enron bankruptcy auction.

However, all that love went up in smoke, quite literally, on September 22nd.

According to Alan Cox's wife, this was the scene she saw right after the explosion.

Alan was on the other side of the room from the laptop. I was elsewhere. He yelled out, I ambled towards the room in my own good time, and then I heard Fire! Real fire! Call the fire brigade, now! and I speeded up a bit.

From Alan subsequently, I gather there was an explosion and flying pieces of laptop, and a fireball, and a couple of fires started where (presumably) boiling battery landed, and one fragment smashed an LCD monitor. And then there was smoke and smell (there is still smell) and smoke alarm wailing and firemen and sirens and paramedics (happily unneeded) and police and a man with a notebook asking questions for the fire report.

Now I'm worried about BlueTank, (600x) TejanoAzul (ex-Enron 600e) and my former BlueTomato, another 600e now living with my friend Shelby. The older battery I have that I use with the Tank when hooked up to a power source is an authentic IBM battery. The newer battery is Hacked By Chinese and I'm not entirely sure I trust it now. Tejano Azul doesn't even have a battery...I gave its battery to SFVLUG prime mover Brian Ragazzi and it's now living in HIS 600e. Chad Page has a couple of 600 series laptops with batteries in various stages of health.

Perhaps there's going to be a recall of 600 series batteries? The 600 series had other battery problems, namely the fact that the AC subsystem in the 600 series tended to over charge and fry out batteries prematurely. Perhaps IBM isn't going to give a hoot because the 600 is way too old to care about. Who knows.

All I know is that these are ugly, ugly pix. And Alan Cox is one of the unsung heroes of Open Source. He doesn't deserve to have his pride and joy computer go Kablooey and to be even mildly injured in the process. Eep...

Another reason to hate IE.

Now that I'm on a sane computer with a sane browser available to me, I can get to this blog. IE seems to get confused between my old-school Blogger blogs and the beta, and drops me at my old-school Dashboard.

I wish Woodbury University would hurry up and deploy FireFox universally. They have it on some but not all machines. The Macs in particular need it desperately because, my apologies in advance to The Steve for this, SAFARI SUCKS HYENA PUDENDA.

Actually I think I'm ready to switch the rest of the blogs to the new setup. Please, Googleplex...hook a sista up, OK?

Right Hand sabre just about complete...

It's beautiful. It fits my hand. It hangs better on my belt. It's great.

Here are the pix!



Gotta give 'nuff respect to Ryan at Random Sabers. He made this possible.



I think I might try to greeble the control box a little, but the approach I used last time won't work. Control box is way too small for a SO-DIMM. I'm thinking ICs clipped off of a non-working circuit board.



This is sort of a before-and-after pic.



Now you can see the reason why people were talking about "wookiee sabres" with regard to v1.0, and how these are just more in scale with me. The drain-pipe sabres would be just fine for a taller person with bigger hands. These are more like it for me.

Of course, I'll be recording the build of the left handed sabre.

Naked sabres! Naked sabres!!! (SFW)

Yes, these pix are safe for work. Now you see what I will be working with with regard to the new Hardware Store Jedi hardware lightsabre tutorial. I'm redoing it because of a few things I was dissatisfied with in the original project.



The old and new sabres, for scale. Note how big and klunky the first version of the sabres turned out. The next version should be a lot more elegant.



The greebling job will be quite similar to the original, except there will be only 5 of the aircraft part nurnies at the top, and there will be no faucet handle pommel. Otherwise I will be attempting to get as close as possible to the look and feel of the original in a more streamlined version.



Look how graceful they are! The pics don't do the blades justice...they are translucent iMac Indigo blue. Sweet. Thanks, Random Sabers!!!

ABC and Disney deserve to lose.

The bastards did it. Looks like The Big Dog will sue soon.

Until then, have a laugh...at ABC/Disney's expense.





UPDATE: Read this Keith Olbermann essay. He's on fire tonight. Un-freakin'-believable. Send this to your friends.

Tomorrow is t3h k3wl w00dbury f4br1c 54l3!!!

The WU club formerly known as the Fashion Club is having a fabric sale...


(still from S.C.'s fanfilm "A Little Knowledge...click to see it in its full glory)

No, no, no, not THAT ONE!

It's the one now known as Common Threads, and they're made up of fashion design and fashion marketing students at Woodbury. Every semester they do a fabric sale, and it's usually quite amazing. I got some really nice unbleached linen that is woven in this amazing checkerboard texture last time, and I will be using that for the final inner tunic of the Jedi habit. And it was only $1/yard!!! What a find.

I'm looking forward to some serious fabric hunting tomorrow. I suspect I'll have to buy yet another plastic bin. Oh well...

Vault kicks, Ralphs sucks.

This is an actual message I sent to Ralphs Supermarkets, Inc., about an actual incident. There are many good reasons why people shouldn't shop at Ralphs. They pulled some evil shenanigans during the supermarket strike, for instance. But this was the last straw for us. There are not a hell of a lot of supermarket chains left in LA and even less that I will patronize. Now there is one less that I will shop at.

This evening I went to the Ralphs at Woodman and Sherman Way...I think it's considered Van Nuys there but maybe it's North Hollywood or possibly Arleta. In any event, I wanted to take advantage of the 5 12 pack for $11 deal Coca-Cola beverage deal advertised in your current flier.

I loaded up 5 12 packs of Vault Zero, which is a Coca-Cola product. The card price said "4 for $11" which was the same for all Coca-Cola products. The coupon mentioned "any Coca-Cola product" as qualifying.

However, when I tried to check out it was a completely different story. The grand total was almost $18 including CRV.

The manager was less-than-helpful and very rude. "The ad says Coca-Cola, Sprite, Diet Coke or Dr. Pepper. No Vault."

"Vault is a Coca-Cola product. The coupon says Coca-Cola products. It doesn't specify which Coca-Cola product."

"Yeah but the ad does."

No "Sorry about that." No "we apologize for the inconvenience." He treated us like we were something he scraped off his work boot.

"Fine! Be that way!" I said, and my husband and I left the store, and the 5 12 packs of Vault Zero.

Note well: my husband and I are never, *ever* going to darken the doors of a Ralphs again. End of story. We have never been treated so badly and we don't want to be treated that way again. We will be also contacting the local Coca-Cola bottler and telling them about your refusal to honor the deal on one of their less well known products.

To add injury to insult, the checker refused to surrender the coupon so that we could use it elsewhere. It makes me think only one thing: that the store intends to redeem the coupon regardless of whether it was properly used or not.

So there you have it: our sordid tale of abuse at the hands of a Ralphs manager. I hope this guy gets in a world of hurt with his higher-ups. Nobody treats me this way and gets away unscathed. Nobody.