The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for 2007
My good friend Coral is riding in the AIDS LifeCycle bicycle race in June. She is not a serious bike rider but she is putting herself to training hard to do the 7 day, 545 mile race! Go Coral!
It’s really something seeing the -hundreds- of web pages of other riders. Coral’s web page is http://www.aidslifecycle.org/4940. Try going to http://www.aidslifecycle.org/4941 or http://www.aidslifecycle.org/4437 or http://www.aidslifecycle.org/5438…
I used to live in Hackettstown, NJ. Hackettstown is the home of Andy Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia.org.
Mr. Schlafly got an interview on All Things Considered today. In the interview, Schlafly talks abou…. stupid things. The discussion starts with Conservapedia’s (lack of) coverage of Darwinism. The article on kangaroos, for instance, says this about their origins
According to the origins theory model used by creation scientists, modern kangaroos, like all modern animals, originated in the Middle East[1] and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah’s Ark prior to the Great Flood.
I suppose it wouldn’t be too terrible if they talked about creationism. I mean, some people believe in it, and it -is- an encyclopedia after all. My problem is that Wikipedia has articles on creationism and darwinism. Conservapedia only has articles on creationism. That’s doubleplusungood.
Friday:
Went for a run with Charlotte… which turned into a walk and mural tour of the Mission.
Went to Instructables Show and Tell. Met a guy and woman from Ames NASA,the head of a super secret company, the heads of http://instructables.com, some Make Magazine people, a woman that made a used-jeans quilt, a woman that made trans-genic photosensitive fish, a guy with these really cool musical gravitational ball things (http://www.art.net/~simran/GenerativeMusic/kepler.html) … and we had so much fun!
Saturday:
Charlotte taught while I vegged and stuff.
Sunday:
Charlotte went to a terrific belly dance workshop Rakkasah (http://www.rakkasah.com) and I went to a local gun show looking for flashlights, bike lights, little multi-tools with corkscrews and to trade my rifle for a handgun now that the SF handgun ban is a definite non-starter. We’re thinking about
Monday:
I went to a Quickbooks class at City College of San Francisco and found out “officially” that Quickbooks sucks for handling inventory. For example: If I purchase a box of 10 widgets for a total of 10.05 how do note the individual Cost of Goods Sold (which is $1.005)? Answer: round up to $1.01… which means that my accounts won’t reconcile to the penny any more.
Went out for a sushi dinner with some of Charlotte’s friends from college.
Last Friday:
Walked in the sun.
Went to the Art City gallery and met some artists
jumped across the Valencia River (a water main at 20th broke making a stream that looked like the one behind my house when I was a kid!)
Charlotte wore her new (supa’ hot) coveralls
Went to a pirate store (and saw a puffer fish in their fish theater)
Ate great Irish food at the Phoenix Pub
Had to bag on going to ANOTHER Irish pub to meet Fruitbat because we…
Smiled, laughed, passed out from food coma
Also recently I’ve completed:
Make short URLS work for FLG wiki. Dinner with Coral… she helped us with Quickbooks. Called Ubisense looking for location sensing tech. Tried (and failed) to get health insurance. Celebrated Swarm’s funding an volunteered to be the financial coordinator. Went to Burnal Equinox party. Been creating a “photo a day for a year” for my sister’s birthday.
What do you think of this as team colors for the orb swarm team?
We got the news today from Ladybee at Burning Man HQ. Yowie zowie, now we’ve got to build the crazy things!!!
Check it out. We’re going to make these:
I took this photo out my window on Feb 27th. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to snow here in the Mission.
On January 21st the Flaming Lotus Girls made a presentation to “MAG”, the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco. Olivia, Jordana and Charlotte made presentations and I helped out.
They spoke mostly about their personal experiences with the group and why they make art. It’s really quite a good talk. Skip to the end of the last section to see some fun fire art in the parking lot of the Fort Mason Center.
You can watch the whole presentation here
http://lee.org/flg/MAG
(flash video done with Flash Media Player)
I can now inundate you with sounds and videos from my vast repertoire thanks to the FLV Embed plugin. I found that WP-FLV had trouble when you’d try to edit an existing post with an flv in it. It would lose the tag due to an incompatibility between the flv tag and the graphical input method in WordPress 2.1.
To make an entry, I just write something like this:
(open square bracket)flv:http://lee.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/swarm.flv 360 270]
The theme for Burning Man this year is “The Green Man” which everyone keeps interpreting as “The Environmentally Sensitive Man” even though …. take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about the Green Man, you’ll notice that there is no mention of such.
Well, I overheard this email on the interweb (when your eyes glaze over, just look below):
Thanks for your email and inquiry: kudos to you for seeking out the best environmental option for your art piece. Our service is like public transportation: it takes less of an environmental toll when you have one vehicle mass transporting many things rather than many vehicles burning fuel inefficiently, also carrying many things. Our trucks are typically standard 53′ ones, and they do run on diesel, which is what all transport basically runs on as of now (although I’m pushing my company to look at potential biodiesel options–that’ll be sometime down the road, though). Our trucks are newer, so they have more efficient engines and lighter components than most other fleets. I absolutely care about limiting vehicular impact on the environment, and I believe this is the best option for mass transport to an event like this, even though trucks seem like huge consumers of fuel. I’m trying to get as many Burners on board for each given location: if we maximize the load in each truck trailer, that’s the most efficient (and cost effective) method of transport, so you could help out by talking with other locals about sharing a truck, thereby saving you money and limiting the environmental impact.
Just to give you an idea on shipping estimates from Oregon (let me know if this is an incorrect origination) to BRC would come to $1286.26 each way for 2000 lbs, or $1785.58 for 3000 lbs: this is for space on a truck, but I’m also working to get you a quote on a full truck as a comparison, so stay tuned for that. Are you bringing your artwork back, or will it be burned?
The estimates are based on distance traveled and weight–we also look at dimensions, but I just guess-timated since I don’t know your shipment dimensions. I’m not taking a margin (as a salesperson) because I don’t want to make money off burners–burners have done so much for me and it’s such a part of my community that that would be unconscionable to profit (besides–that’s against the ethic of the whole thing!). The company does have to recoup their costs, so that’s the lowest they’ll let me go on the LTL (or less-than-truckload) transport. I’ll actually be on the playa managing the unloading and reloading because the artwork is a really important part of it to me and I’ll ensure that your shipment arrives on time and intact.
Anyway–let me know what you think of the estimate, and I’ll get the full truck quote to you as soon as I have it.
Let me paraphrase the above treatise, “You’ve got a lot of stuff to move? For a price, we can put it on a truck and move it for you.“
I figure that this google sitemap generator can’t hurt my chances of being discovered as a rising budding star.
More interesting is that the sitemap (in the sidebar too) is pretty well human readable. This tool made that possible.