It never ends up like the magazine photo

Posted by on December 15, 2010 Comments Off

I think that there is a truism in cooking that US media producers should keep in mind: It never ends up like the magazine photo. If you have ever done any amount of cooking you’ll know this fact, if not in those words. Even if the sum total of culinary creation you have indulged in extends as far as pressing buttons on a microwave you can not have failed to notice that the contents of the tray you pull out of the microwave has barely a passing resemblance to the “Serving Suggestion” pictured on the box. Attempts at real cooking with fancy ingredients inspired by the glossy pictures that face you down in the grocery store check out line only fare somewhat better, even if the flavor of the result hopefully knocks your socks off. The lesson learned fairly quickly from cooking is essentially that there are two kinds of recipes: The kind of recipe that makes something taste/feel a particular way, and the kind of recipe that makes something look a particular way. Unless it’s a photography magazine, generally the recipe is for how something tastes and that’s usually a good thing.

I think that begins to describe what happened with the BBC’s attempt at making a Top Gear series specifically for US audiences. In this case I think they had one of those recipes, but it appears to be the recipe (formula) from the photography magazine. You know, the one that says to use glue as the milk in cereal so that it looks right. Despite all the stories of kids eating glue in grade school, I never tried it more then once and while watching the episode “Cobra Attack” I was reminded why I never liked the taste of it very much.

There are definitely good things about the show but they seem to be largely mixed in with the bad. Adam Ferrara in particular embodied several of them. For example, his detailed deciphering of a Lamborghini model number was really useful information and was presented in a way that was interesting. On the other hand his interview of the legendary Buzz Aldrin was… not interesting. A full two minutes is given to the conversation between the two and as far as I can tell it was two minutes too long simply because the photography style recipe had been doggedly followed without any apparent understanding about why it works for Jeremy Clarkson. That formula must say that there should be some pleasant chit-chat and then the host eventually asks about the cars the guest has driven, followed by a softball along the lines of, “How did you like the track?” to move things along to the video replay of the celebrities attempt to drive quickly in a slow car.

I think one of the key reasons why it works for Mr Clarkson and not for Mr. Ferrara is that Clarkson at least looks like he is interested in the answers to the questions he is asking. For the first 40 seconds on the interview Adam seems to make an attempt to be genuinely interested in asking about Aldrin’s career and experience and then spends the remaining 1 min 20 seconds seemingly bored by asking rote “How about the blah blah?” from a list, even when Buzz at least tries to make those answers at least passably interesting. I would really be curious to see the rest of the footage from this section. Was there really nothing else more interesting to show the viewers?

In any case, the point of those questions is not to find out the details of what the guest has driven previously in any sort of detail, but instead it is to determine what kind of driver the guest is. Are they used to driving sports cars? Do they regularly drive at all? Are they a lead-foot or are they cautious? It gives information about the character of the guest which can be interesting. This recitation was not.

That kind of slavish copying of the style and rote of the original Top Gear series permeates the entire episode and are the key to the problems with the show. The main feature of this episode, and the source of the title, is a chase between a Dodge Viper and a Huey Cobra helicopter. Wow, I haven’t seen anything like that before. Oh, wait. A highlight of the next episode is a race against downhill skiers. Wait, not this one.

The flavor of the original Top Gear series is not attained by following that photographic formula to the letter. It is done by selecting the ingredients carefully and paying attention to what is happening in your pot while they cook. It doesn’t matter if the recipe says “high heat” if on your stove it starts to burn immediately. You turn the heat down! More apropos of this episode: a “pinch” of salt is a highly subjective measurement and should be adjusted to the taste of the audience.

One thought in fairness though, is that I have only seen episodes of the UK series after it had a chance to mature. I only have access to Season 6 and later easily, and so that is primarily what I have seen. Given enough time it is feasible that this lame copy could find it’s own voice. I suppose I just don’t trust that will happen. In that vein I asked people for good examples of UK media properties that had been remade in the US. The only examples that had come to mind for me had been the highly unfortunate “Coupling” by NBC. On balance there are several good examples including “Antiques Roadshow” (which I had thought was originally from the US), “American Idol”, and “The Office”. Now, I don’t particularly like either incarnation of those last two but that doesn’t make them bad shows in either form and I don’t think it’s fair to simply lump this attempt into something that could just be a popular misconception.

So is the US version of Top Gear a travesty? Heck no. The aforementioned bit explaining Lamborghini model numbers is a good example of when it really works. Similarly the graphic overlay of the guest’s position on the track while watching the lap is a nice touch, though using some transparency effects to make it slightly less prominent would be nice. Those kinds of little touches show that there is something there but unfortunately I think that by following the wrong formula a little too well makes the entirety end up tasting just like the paper those magazine photos are printed on.

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A playlist: A Male Experience

Posted by on October 30, 2010 Comments Off

For those who do not know the details, my living situation is slightly non-standard. I live with my female partner (Generally referred to as “J”), J’s female partner Sigrid, and their two kids M and K. (I borrowed the naming system from Sig since it is simple and elegant.) Mostly my interactions with the kids are limited to a slightly ill-defined sort of live-in uncle relationship as I am not one of their parents. Primarily I only say something about their behavior when it’s really egregious and J and Sig aren’t close enough to do anything about it quickly, but I also get to corrupt their young minds with all sorts of silly ideas as long as I think it won’t get the three of us in trouble.

Anyway, as with most people, music is played while driving. J has an interesting but somewhat limited palette for music but Sig tends to be a bit more catholic in her tastes (note the small ‘c’) and so exposes the kids to all sorts of stuff over time. The other day the Talking Heads “Once In A Lifetime” was heard and the kids really liked it. Now Sig doesn’t have a lot of Talking Heads, and other then that and maybe a couple of other tracks isn’t particularly interesting in looking much more into them so she asked me if I had a copy that I could burn to a disc for the kids so they could listen to it in the playroom. Oh, and maybe some other stuff too if I wanted while I was at it. Maybe some male stuff. Sort of. The conversation was both simpler and more complex then that as it was between two people who have been friends for years and living in the same space for just over a year.

As with just about everything that I enjoy, I am primarily a dilettante when it comes to The Talking Heads. I have a more then passing familiarity with their album catalog, as well as some enthusiasm for portions of it but without a lot of significant interesting in keeping up with the minutia. Translation: I’ve got the “Sand In the Vaseline” greatest hits compilation and one other album and that’s about it which was more then enough to get started with the request and it didn’t take me too long for the idea to catch and be interesting enough to ensure it got done quickly.

Starting with “Once In a Lifetime” presents quite a bit of opportunity to go in any number of directions, but the one that really caught my attention was the aspects of dealing with modern masculinity and social roles for men and after spending a little time digging through my music collection it was pretty clear that it’s a pretty universal sort of theme.

  1. Once In a Lifetime – Talking Heads – Popular Favorites: 1976-1992/Sand In the Vaseline
  2. On The Air – Girlyman – Little Star
  3. All Kinds of Time – Fountains of Wayne – Welcome Interstate Managers
  4. Jump Through the Hoops – Mighty Mighty Bosstones – Question the Answers
  5. Harder Better Faster Stronger – Daft Punk – Discovery
  6. Pushing Me Away – Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory
  7. Losing My Religion – R.E.M. – Out of Time
  8. My Country – Midnight Oil – Earth and Sun and Moon
  9. Chicago – Sufjan Stevens – Illinoise
  10. What Do You Want From Me – Pink Floyd – The Division Bell
  11. Shout – Tears for Fears – Songs From the Big Chair
  12. Let’s Go Crazy (LP Version) – Prince – Purple Rain
  13. I Wanna Be a Cowboy – Boys Don’t Cry – Retro Lunchbox: Squeeze the Cheese
  14. Army – Ben Folds Five – The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner
  15. ’64 AKA Go – Lemon Jelly – ’64-’95
  16. Blue Boat Home – Peter Mayer – Earth Town Square

The initial version of the playlist was about four hours long, but I was able to cut it down to under an hour and a half pretty quickly by stripping it down to one track per artist. After a few arrangements for flow and tempo a narrative started to develop, and eventually ended up in this order.

The narrative can be divided pretty loosely into Consciousness (Tracks 1-4), Rising Bitterness (Tracks 4-8), Self Discovery (Tracks 7-10), Anger (Tracks 10-12), What Next? (Tracks 13-16).

Consciousness is the point where the nebulous character of the narrative, let’s just call him John (for “John Doe”), finally takes notice of his surrounding. It’s not something that happens to everyone early in life and from my own personal experience seems to happen periodically even, or perhaps especially, after you think you have everything figured out. Maybe it’s the first time John has noticed how the world expects him to be and how he feels about that. Maybe it’s the 10th time. It’s pretty much the same every time since it inevitably turns into…

Rising Bitterness, or maybe Growing Resentment, describes the internal dichotomy that represents the urge to follow on with what’s going on because it seems relatively stable and trying to make that fit with the knowledge that you don’t like what you are doing or who you have become, but you continue to strive because “that’s what guys do”. Right? At a certain point John decides that the problem can’t possibly be him, so he starts acting out against his loved ones (“Pushing Me Away”) and his habitual institutions (“Loosing My Religion”). I really wanted to put “Harder Better Faster Stronger” before “Jump Through the Hoops” since it fits the narrative flow better, but the the guitar intro to “Jump” just makes more sense after “All Kinds of Time”.

Self Discovery happens two ways: The habitual institutions are cutting it anymore (Religion = God, sex, beer, money, whatever); Someone finally says something to piss him off enough to snap (“My Country”). The little intro at the front of “Chicago” just felt like a light bulb going off in John’s head and the lyrics of the song are all about trying to remake oneself while still not quite over his previous life. Not having developed tools for real self actualization we end up with the despair and pain present in “What Do You Want From Me?” as we start with the shouty bit.

Anger is something that humans deal with, and some days I wonder if it isn’t something that males deal with more. Blame it on the testosterone or whatever, but my experience lived and observed indicates that women don’t as often have the spark of pure rage to battle when even the littlest thing goes wrong. This is a different kind of anger then the bitterness though, since it’s harder to externalize. John has finally figured out that he’s the problem and uses the power of the anger to drive him to finally try and figure things out.

Initially, the answer to “What Next?” is something infantile. If John is in his mid-40′s this likely involves a small, fast, red vehicle and/or a new sex partner half his age or younger. While I doubt we all wanted to be cowboys when we were young the basic form is pretty common. (I wanted to be an astronaut.) Or maybe he could just run away from it all? Join the military! After thinking through the possible consequences of that move and what is likely to come of it John finally somes to terms with the urge to just do something different (“’64 AKA Go”).

Peter Mayer’s “Blue Boat Home” isn’t quite the right ending for this narrative, but it’s mostly there because I know both M and K love the song and I wanted to make sure I anchored the disc with something else that they knew especially after something as long-winded as the preceding Lemon Jelly track. I’m not entirely happy with other bits of the order either. “Let’s Go Crazy” should probably be in Rising Bitterness. “What Do You Want From Me” probably the same. I wanted to be sure that there were a couple of peaks in the mix though. The Pink Floyd tracks makes for a really good low spot in the energy of the mix just about the in the middle of the disc then ramping back up to a peak at “Army” and a slow wind down to the end.

Anyway, I used the Bing music search to link to most of the songs and then linked the artists to the best info I could find for each of them. For those of you with Zune Passes, the Bing link has the advantage of letting you listen to most of the tracks. For those of you without it’s got iTunes and Amazon links as well.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on the mix or the narrative or both. I don’t often have something that’s quite this cohesive, so it made sense to try and have it written down somewhere.

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Comment Subscription Test

Posted by on June 28, 2010 6 comments

This post is just to test some new functionality I’m trying to get in place for another blog. If you want to test email subscriptions to comments, please post a comment below and make sure to select the checkbox at the bottom marked “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”.

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A few words about exercise

Posted by on June 6, 2010 Comments Off

Last fall I sold my duplex and moved in with my partner, her partner, and their kids. It’s a small house but in a very nice neighborhood and while I miss many of the things about living alone it is really nice to be living with family again.

One of the downsides of moving into a very small house with four other humans, three dogs (at the time: the eldest, Toby, unfortunately died a week and a half ago), many rodents, and assorted insects and arthropods is that there is not much room for one’s existing very nice recumbent exercise bike. We finally did find a space for it sometime around February but I have yet to get it out of storage and move it into the dark and cramped basement to find out if that space will work or not.

The reason the exercise bike exists in my life at all is that during my divorce I knew I needed to do something to stay active and I fondly remembered my high school days when I would go out and spend time by myself biking 10-30 miles around the countryside so I got the aforementioned recumbent. That first winter and the five subsequent years it was a simple reminder and easy task to just get on and do 15-30min with easy access to watching TV or even playing Xbox from it. Two years ago I borrowed my dad’s mountain bike to test the theory that if I had a real bike I might make use of it to even get around town and while the experiment was not an unqualified success it did essentially show that Have Bike, Will Travel. With finances showing more positive aspects than they had in years, April was the time to finally invest in the results of that experiment.

I knew from the borrowing experiment that a mountain bike was not what I needed. While the front shocks would sometimes be nice, more often I found I was too mushy a ride and absorbed too much energy. Likewise when I replaced the knobby tires with decent road tires half way through that summer the effort required to bike to work was reduced immensely and the reduced vibration in the handlebars improved ride comfort in the handlebars by a frankly immeasurable quantity. So I knew I didn’t need a mountain bike or really just about any of it’s features except for a nice wide handlebar. I also knew from past experience that the head down posture of a road bike was a sentence to back torture so it was time to head out and look into cruisers and hybrid styles.

I stopped first at the Roseville location of Erik’s Bike Shops and after looking through the racks and getting the attention of a really very friendly and helpful sales person pretty much ignored the cruisers and went straight for the hybrids. The Giant Cypress was a good start but felt a bit too much like the mountain bike, albeit with more grace and more trim profile. The Cannondale Quick series seemed to be about the best match of price and features but still didn’t quite feel right. A third option that I don’t remember the make or model had a really nice gearing system internal to the rear axle but didn’t really seem to be worth the $200 price premium. Having done enough car shopping with my parents in my youth it was time to get a quote for a Quick 1 and head out to my next stop to see what else was available.

The plan had been to move on to a local independent and then over to REI as a final stop, but my search ended at that local independent. The Bicycle Chain at Larpenteur and Lexington in Roseville (in the same strip mall as Key’s) turned out to not only have exactly what I was looking for as well as having a really top notch staff, but also to have everything cheaper then Erik’s and the prices at REI that I had checked online. It’s not a big store but they make good use of their space to carry a pair of wheels for just about everyone and everything, and even have some unicycles for the daring. I rode a different model of Giant that I found as unimpressive as the Cypress and then tried a closeout 2009 Specialized Sirrus Elite and fell in love. It’s light. It’s smooth. More importantly it’s fiendishly comfortable even when cranking really hard up the long hills endemic to my new neighborhood. Better yet I spent the same amount on this bike with a huge slew of accessories and upgrades (new pedals with ultra-smooth bearings, fancy computer, bright lights, and a car rack) as that quote from Erik’s that was summarily recycled when I got home.

Now that it’s home I have been pretty uneven about actually using it. Commuting to work from here in anything but a car is completely different kind of exercise: In frustration and fear of life and limb. 16 miles isn’t really so far except when it’s through some of the most bike un-friendly portions of this otherwise very bike accommodating metropolis. Sure I could add another 15 miles onto that trip and do it in great comfort along a whole series of trails but, like the mass transit system around here, if you are going anywhere but one of the downtowns you are screwed and 31 miles in one direction to get to work is a bit much. Thankfully my partner came up with a better idea for more exercise.

She and her partner have been sending their kids to classes at Circus Juventus since the kids have been old enough to do so. Seeing them learn the circus arts has been amazing and incredibly fun so when J suggested that we sign up for the summer session of the Circus Arts for Adults class, I thought about it a bit and said yes anyway.

Three classes into our 8 class session I can say that I am thankful they are honest in the print description of the class in saying that pretty much everyone is accommodated no matter experience or ability. I am not precisely the most agile or dexterous person I know and I never learned to do such basic physical tricks as climbing a rope or doing a cartwheel. But for all that I am having a blast. So far we have done Triple Trapeze, German Wheel, Globes, Tumble Track, Tumbling/Acrobatics, Mini-Tramp/Vault, Spanish Web, Low Wire, Pyramid, Trampoline, and Low Casting. Of those I have found that flips and rolls are the easiest, which I’m partially thanking early experience playing goal in soccer and later experience with Aikido, while just about anything involving the use of my arms is the hardest. I have also probably done more push-ups and crunches/sit-ups/whatever they’re called these days in the last three weeks then over the course of my entire lifetime. It’s hard. It’s incredibly exhausting. I can not always raise my arms above my shoulders afterwards. It is worth every penny and very highly recommended.

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An Artist In Search of an Editor

Posted by on April 28, 2010 Comments Off

Of the changes that have occurred in my life in the past year, one of them gives me the opportunity to make the drive between the Twin Cities and Madison every month or so. While the trip is by no means short I do look forward to it in part because it gives me a chance to be by myself and really listen to music which is something that the rest of my excessive number of hobbies do not always allow much time for.

This past weekend I bought BT’s new album “These Hopeful Machines” and listened to it almost exclusively on both legs of the trip. I’ve been listening to his music for nearly a decade after a friend had recommended a couple of particular tracks from one of his earlier albums to me and it has been interesting to hear the slow change of style and technique over that time. The All Music Guide calls his early style “Epic House” and I would be hard pressed to argue with that particularly apt description, but as they note after his early albums things began to change. Instead of the huge, contiguous slabs of sound the music began to become ever more jagged and full of surprising textures that were both challenging to the casual listener but left enough harmonic accessibility for even a modicum of attention to pay off with grandiose sonic landscapes. At this point it appears that “This Binary Universe” was the apogee of that trend with it’s glitch ridden orchestra of sounds providing a seemingly endless tapestry of deep introspection.

“These Hopeful Machines” is an interesting work in that it feels like a blending of those first epic sounds in “IMA” or “ESCM” with the rhythmic sensibility of Universe’s more successful pieces. This is undeniably an album made to sound good to the ears of the dance floor set while leaving more than enough depth for those of us who listen in less active ways and there is a lot here to listen to with a run time over two CDs of nearly two solid hours and a relatively well put together through-line between tracks. (I found it particularly telling that the version available for purchase through Microsoft’s Zune music store was just two tracks, one for each disc.) I personally found most of the music to be very good with the only thorough disappointment being the final track which is a mediocre and, frankly, over-produced cover of The Psychadelic Furs’ “The Ghost In You”. From the abrupt and powerful entrance of “Suddenly” to the blippy fun of “The Rose of Jericho” to the epic pop drive of “The Unbreakable” this is excellent music with typically enveloping emotional depth.

As much as I have been enjoying the album there are definitely elements that take away from the experience and make me wonder if this isn’t a good view of the back side of a particularly tall mountain of a career even aside from the aforementioned final track. With the rare exception of the occasional nice turn of phrase BT’s impenetrably feeler-y lyrics have never been something to really write home about and none of those exceptions show up here. The lyrics in the chorus of “Suddenly” are particularly baffling though I’m certain that several people will have very good and entirely contradictory explanations about what “And I love it when you fall… to me! Suddenly.” actually means. The sudden chorus in “Forget Me” sung by his young daughter also comes across as simply odd rather than any possible intention I can think of.

However the most striking failing that is present all through the album is the one I alluded to in the title for this post: BT has gotten to the point in his career that he obviously doesn’t see the need to allow an editor of any sort meddle in his art and the result is the poorer for it. I feel a bit awkward saying that with the evidence of my own bellicose text and the knowledge that some of my favorite pieces of music are long winded ramblings through sound that by any other measure are the most egoistical of embellishments in the Ambient, Trance, or Contemporary Orchestral genres. The comparison that keeps coming to mind is with Sufjan Stevens’ recent “The BQE” which I had a chance to listen to in some depth on a similar Madison trip last fall. Stevens’ has never been known for having an economical notion about his music but where he succeeded in “The BQE” with his just so movements, BT manages to overstay his welcome more than once and in the particular case of “Every Other Way”, and to a lesser extent “The Light In Things”, he makes the middle of the first album turn into several opportunities to wonder why he didn’t just cut out the five or six decent fragments of ideas and just keep them in a box until he had time to fully develop them into something worth listening to. The biggest disappointment is that the core of “Every Other Way” could be one of the better tracks if not for all the tacked on aural wankery.

All in all “These Hopeful Machines” is hardly an unheralded triumph but it is certainly a great work by a mature master of electronic music and I will always remember driving through the rolling hills of west-central Wisconsin and watching the sun peek out behind the rain clouds and slowly flood the land with the same radiance that was peaking at about the 1:30 mark of “The Emergency” and spurred my way home with it’s intrinsic feeling of good and connectedness.

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Care for a good game?

Posted by on September 19, 2009 Comments Off

As part of my moving effort I am culling things like books and clothes, but I also need to trim down my game collection. If you would like any of the following games, please contact me before 9/25/2009. I am not willing to ship and you must be willing to pick up in South Minneapolis. Thanks!

The Awful Green Things from Outer Space
Sagarian
Cathedral
Mama Mia
Mancala
Bean Trader
Settlers of the Stone Age
Wiz-War
Warhamster Rally
Starship Troopers
Ork and Squat Warlords (Warhammer Epic 40k set)
How to Host a Murder: The Class of ’54

Update: Awful Green Things, Bean Trader, and Cathedral have been spoken for.

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Thoughts on testing “Bantown”

Posted by on April 13, 2009 Comments Off

After reading a theory about how #amazonfail might have happened it is a bit tempting to try and test the theory directly. If the theory is valid and Amazon has not changed their alleged feedback/delisting mechanism then it should be a fairly simple test to run.

I think it would be pretty tempting to initially target something that was similar on the other side of the political spectrum. In the #amazonfail debacle GLBT oriented works seemed to be the primary focus and the obvious knee jerk response would be to target something like ex-gay manuals or other strongly christian or right-leaning publications. I think this would be exactly the wrong target however for some pretty simple reasons.

The first and most obvious is that we don’t know if the theory is actually valid or not. It certainly sounds reasonable but there is no actual proof that I’ve seen yet and several people who seem to think there is evidence against it.

The second and best reason though is that there is no way to currently know who to go after. Flailing about at random targets is only really likely to reinforce any existing persecution complexes that seem to be so common on the other side of the fence. Any authors that might be randomly targeted because they wrote a book you don’t like may be in the exact same position as several of the people impacted by the alleged Bantown that happened with #amazonfail and would really just be censorship on a different group.

I think instead the ideal test target would be for volunteers to publish something via Amazon’s print-on-demand division CreateSpace. One of the options on that service is that for a 40% share of the list price Amazon will list the item in the main directory. Having a volunteer submit a target is really the only way to ensure that someone is not a victim of virtual mob violence. Next step is to get a small number of people to purchase the item thus ensuring that the item gets into the sales ranking system. I don’t know how many would be needed but one would guess that somewhere between 10-100 would be a good starting number. Since this would involve actual purchases I would think that donating the remaining %60 of the price to a charitable organization (The ACLU, EFF, EPIC, or CBLDF would be ideal recipients) would be a reasonable action.

Once the test item has established itself in the ranking system the next step would be to then have a staged attempt to remove the item through the feedback system. While it would be simple to just have everyone hit it at the same time, it might be more interesting to set up a simple ticketing system like a website where people enter an email address and when the test is ready a randomly selected set of the participants would be notified to go submit feedback and then notify the ticketing system that they have done so. Once some amount of time has passed the item’s status could be checked to see if the total number of feedback attempts has delisted it yet or not. If not, run the next batch. Heck, you could even use Mechanical Turk to source the feedback attempts. )For some reason I find it perversely funny to use Amazon’s own systems to test other parts of their infrastructure.)

The obvious downside would be that Amazon would still be making money from the initial purchases of the test item. Good research costs money though and the result might be worth the attempt.

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An epic Micropolis module idea

Posted by on April 6, 2009 Comments Off

I scored big at a garage sale yesterday. Matt, a fellow TwinLUG member, had mentioned there was a huge number of sets available at a garage sale in New Brighton and that there had still been many left when he went back on Sunday. Since it was pretty close to J’s house I figured I’d take a few minutes and take a look. I came away with a large tub full of mostly LEGO monorail parts for not nearly as much money as it should have cost.

I was thinking of things I could do with my newly acquired monorail parts and ran some interesting calculations. At Micropolis scale the Vehicle Assembly Building is 58 bricks and 1 plate tall, 99.5 studs long, and 69 studs wide. The Crawler is 2 bricks to 3 bricks high (can raise and lower a bit), 17.5 studs long, and 15.2 studs wide. The tracks are 1 stud wide, and there are four pairs of tracks at the four corners of the vehicle with the motor for that corner between the pair. The Mobile Launch Platform which sits on top of the crawler is 2 bricks and 2 plates high, 21 studs long and 18 studs wide.

I’m wondering about the feasibility of putting together an oversized module with the VAB and a length of monorail track that runs a Crawler vehicle out to a launch gantry. I think if I took some liberties with the crawler design I could disguise the monorail motor as a rocket on top of the Crawler.

I think I am going to have to work on this virtually initially just to get an idea of how many parts I’m going to need for the VAB, since while I have a lot of parts these days I don’t have that many actual bricks and those will be needed most for that building. That and an awful lot of plates for the rest of the module.

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Before I forget…

Posted by on April 3, 2009 Comments Off

Had been intending to post this for awhile, but I’ll just clip down a bit and get this chunk out there at least.

In the last big snowstorm I ended up with a pretty hefty ding and honestly had a great experience with Progressive getting it repaired. The whole thing was fast, easy, and relatively cheap. Bonus: due to the nature of the ding it didn’t even mess with my insurance rates.

The only downside of the insurance thing was that I had a 2008 Pontiac G6 GT for 6 days while my car was in the shop. I think the most positive thing that I can say about that thing was that it sure did go fast in a straight line. Otherwise the controls were just all around bad, especially seat adjustment. Badly placed, bad quality (felt like I was going to break the seat height adjustment just touching it), and just over all irritating. I also just couldn’t get comfortable in the thing. The seating felt like it was designed to have me lying on my back the whole time and resisted any effort to sit otherwise. Don’t even get me started on the enormous blindspot caused by the front right pillar.

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Micropolis modules on MOCPages

Posted by on January 26, 2009 Comments Off

I’m playing around with the recently massively upgraded MOCPages site and with the exception of the total lack of RSS or Atom support have found it relatively useful. This past weekend I re-photographed a number of my Micropolis modules and posted them. If you want to see more, take a look at:

At some point hopefully the feed support will come so I can just have new entries over there automatically picked up over here.

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