Monthly Archives: July 2009

Sunday night – old friends


Greetings from Poughkeepsie NY. I’m down here for a couple of days of work meetings and a meet up with Diane and Max in NYC tomorrow  night or Tuesday.   Diane and I spent a good portion of the day working with Homer, Mike David and Chris on assembling the first wheel of the time cycle. After a couple of hours of grinding and banging we managed to get the whole thing to slip together. Homer has done an amazing job of designing this wheel.. it’s a thing of beauty. Around 3:30 we’d managed ot gt the struts on, the rims locked in and the spokes tightened to the point that the thing was pretty tight. David got the forklift and we all held our breath as he hoisted the thing up to vertical

Once it was up we tightened the spokes on the bottom sde of the wheel and voila.. it was tall and true !

Here’s a picture to give you a sense of the size.. (we chose dinae because that even makes it look taller 🙂

It was a good weekends work.. now on to wheel number 2, the clockwork, the drive and the lighting.. It’s goign to be a busy 3 weeks !

Once the wheel was standing it began to rain a bit.. so I decided it was time to start heading south. The drive down to NY flew by.. I had some great phone convrsations with old friends.. my brother, my friend kevin, cousin mark, then.. I decided to call my old high school friend Phillip.   We last spoke in 1976 (I think).. but had recently reconnected by Facebook. I thin we spoke for about an hour.. It was just so great catching up on each others families both happy and tragic, our passions, our current life situations.. etc. We had a great time taking about all the geeky stuff we did as kids including blowing stuff up (over the towns fire station) , getting caught hacking phones, drinking hot sauce, camping in new mexico, making up  making up new languages and swimming (unintentionally ) in sewage laden storm runoff.    We made a date to talk at least once more in the next 33 years just to stay in touch.. no seriously.. I hpe to find phil in person next time I’m on the west coast..

Around 9 I made it to the homes of more old friends Bruce and Mary Beth.. We went out for a late dinner and talked about family, eating rats and work.. not too much about work… but engouhg. Bruce has always been oe of my best work mentors..

Yikes it’s late.. time for sleep.. More tomorrow. Nite folks. Nite Sam !
-me

Saturday night – spoke too soon

Busy day today..  woke around 8 .. then Diane and I took the dogs for a walk with Tim and his dogs. As we came down to the pond we spotted this magnificent blue heron.  When we finally spooked it too much it flew away on it’s huge wings It looked positively prehistoric.

We dropped the girls off then headed out to David D’s for a whole day of workign on the Time Cycle vehicle for burning man.. We hd a steady stream of people there today to help. Our goal was to get one of the 20 foot wheels assembled.. we got that about half done today.. so tomorrows another all day work days.   Here’s the 4 inch pipe we had bent to make the wheels.

Everyone had a job.. Here’s duane grinding down the inserts that hold the wheel segments together.

Here’s Jerry G. doing the same.

Diane and I worked on cutting the slots out of the spokes. We had some technical difficulties.. but finally mastered it enough to finish nearly  20 spokes from 2″ pipe.

Around  12:30 qwe took a break for lunch on David’s porch which leans out over the New Haven river.. Diane andJen had brought yummy snack food. ! (thanks !)

Next task was to drill 3/4″ holes in the massive hubs.. it was hard going !

Then came the tricky part of starting to assemble the rims, hubs, struts and spokes into the huge wheel. It was hard to get everything to align… Here’s Duane, Homer and Chris scratching their collective heads abotu making things fit ..

Finally, we had a whole half a wheel.. and a whole lot of ideas on how to make the next one easier. We’ll finish this one up tomorrow.

We packed up abotu 6 then headed over to wish Mason a happy 21st.. then off to verizon to pick up a new phone.. My current blackberry needs another replacement. this one will be my 4th !.. They say I must use them hard.. guess I do..  After the phone shop, we made a quick, fun visit to Tom and Bets’. They were having a party for the GIV counselors who’d been staying with them this summer.   They showed us the cool things they’d built including solar cells, solar hot water/shower and a wind generator.Cool projects, cool kids !  Sounded just like The Colony !

That’s about it for the day.. We got some pictured from Gabe’s trip by way of Sue P. here’s Mt Hood, where Gabe’s been snowboarding this week..

..and here’s a cool bus they saw on the way..

Speaking of Sam… I was takign a bath yesterday when th exhaust fan in the bathroom clicked on once, then turned off,… then turned on again.. tehn off again.. then stayed off the entire night.. while the switch was firmly off the whole time.. Just Sam saying “hi” ..

I’ll say ‘gnite”.. gnite all ! gnite Sam
-me

Friday night – trickling in

It’s been an interesting day. I have been on the phone with work calls from 8AM until 6PM with only one 30 minute break.. Nearly every one of those conversations began with a someone making a comment about The Colony. The good thing is most folks I talk to seem to have liked the first episode of the show.. the maybe not so good part is that nearly everyone wants to talk about my shower scene. I’m guessing that’s going to be with me for a very long time 🙂 

As much as I’m kinda shy and embarrassed about that part of the show, I am pretty jazzed that people seem to like at least the first installment. I particularly like hearing that some folks are learning something from the show. The blogs have quite a few comments about the water filter we built.. several people said that they are  glad to know how to build such a thing. In that spirit I thinks will really like some of the builds that we take on later in the show. I also like seeing that we’re challenging peoples preconceptions about our professions.. I’m hoping that the three of us that are engineers (Me, Morgan. Vlad) are hopefully going to come off as more than one dimensional dilbert clones. . As one blogger put it.
  

Thursday night – naked santa claus

Oh man.. was today funny. I got so much good natured ribbing today about the last scene in the Colony first episode. To hear people talk you’d think that they never considered standing naked in front of 1.7 million TV sets (which is what I believe our audience was on Tuesday). I was… actually I still am… wondering if I put anyone off by doing that. I honestly didn’t think that scene would ever make it to TV  . I was so disgustingly dirty that day that when the rain started.. I didn’t even think twice.. I ran to the door,  threw off my clothes , peeled off my mike and ran outside.. I didn’t see the cameras until I turned around…. I quickly grabbed a sheet of plastic and continued to let the water cut through the grime. I was a little embarrassed..but I have to tell you .. it was worth it.. It was the first time I’d been clean in 4 days of heat, dust and LA river water.  I’ve never had a shower feel that good before….

One funny side effect of my impromptu  strip show is that I started getting called ‘naked santa claus guy’ in the forum about the show.  I really like that name !

Hmmmm.. not much else new to report tonight .. it was a nice quite day.. I really like that, too.. More tomorrow. Nite folks, nite Sam…

-me

ps. Heard a cool Sam story today. A friend of a friend of ours was recently visitng San Diego. He was walking down the street wearing his Sam shirt, A car pulled up and roled down his window and asked ‘is that a sam cohn shirt ?;.. the guy said yes.. the driver gave a big thumbs up and took off !  That boy gets around ..!