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Blogging has just taken a back seat lately to actually doing the things I might blog about :-)

When Charlotte was here, we went non-stop… From the 13th til the 22nd. I was -going- to chronicle it all for you my gentle reader but what do you care? So I’ll just blather about it randomly (isn’t that so much better?)

Shopped at Rainbow Grocery for like 2 hours for a fantastic Chobunnpeggelly Easter/Ostara lunch. Had fun frustration with all the fun things to buy… such that we needed to rest on that bench near the cosmetics.

Astounding Chobunnpeggelly lunch with 6 people in my tiny place (Crism, AJ, Vickie, Charlotte, Ion, and myself) with toys and eating too much chocolate and tremendous amounts of cheer and smiles and mimosas.

Tango at The Metronome, Tango at Cell Space… Drove around including Fort Funston… umm, what else.

This Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I showed up at The Box Shop (the home studio of the Flaming Lotus Girls and other groups). This was the first Wednesday I got around to showing up since Jessica Rabbit had invited me at Decompression last year. Wednesday was mostly talk about what’s going to happen and how work is being divvied up. I showed up Thursday because a team was meeting to make the flaming teeth of this 170′ serpent thing they’re making. Fire, fire, heh heh, fire! We played with propane and plasma cutting but didn’t get too far. I showed up Friday because that’s when the spine crew was meeting. Turned out that… umm, I think I was the only newbie that showed up. And after some time helping out I (foolishly?) committed to becoming a good enough MIG weldor to help put together the 116 or so 24 gauge sheet steel formed pieces into vertebrae!

Saturday I went to a Giants vs Diamondbacks game at Telephone Company Park with Barry and… oh my, I don’t know the relation… brother-in-law? and brother-in-law? It was a whole day and evening affair :-)

Sunday morning I went back to The Box Shop for MIG welding lessons but I could only stay til 2. I had an Improv class at BATS in Fort Mason. I spent much of the rest of the afternoon on the phone and catching up with little details like writing blog entries.

(via my good friend Eric’s TGIF Humor list)

Sandia’s Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.

The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.

Sweet. But doesn’t.. err that imply that larger fusion plants already exist?

(check out the associated photo. It’s hella-cool.)

I present this to you without comment

—-/ The Tentacle List /———————————————–

Power Tool Drag Races Wants YOU!

Have an idea in the back of your brain? Do you go into shiny-thing vapor-lock at the hardware store? Do you have niggling fears that the truth about the relative size and capacity of your reproductive organs will come out in a sordid manner if you do not prove their worthiness?

Well friends, worry no more, because do *I* ever have an outlet for *you*!!!

Build a Power Tool Drag Racer!

Increase your mojo! Impress the opposite sex! Get smelly, sunburnt people to buy you beer! Yes, building a power tool racer will provide you with all of these things and MORE!!

What’s a power tool drag racer, I hear you cry? My goodness people, crawl out from under the rock and visit http://
www.powertooldragraces.com! See the legacy of stunning and
wonderous creations from the finest in redneck engineering! Watch them career down our patented* 75-foot track to the applause and screams of children and adults scattering to get out of harm’s way!

It all happens SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY May 7th, 2006, from high noon til we’re done!

Details on tickets, and Most Importantly, on HOW TO REGISTER YOUR RACER are at http://www.powertooldragraces.com

Have you built a racer before? Have you ever complained that you didn’t know who was racing next? Could you not hear the pit runner over the screamingly loud noises emanating from the end of the track? Did you piss and moan because we forfeited you because you were out back getting wasted with Ed because you had given up on ever knowing what was going on, race-wise, ever again?

Well my friends, this is our solution. Our registration software,
Buildersdb, is run by a punk kid in his bedroom out in New Orleans, and it pretty much makes all the pain of race day go away.
YES! Not only will you ACTUALLY KNOW WHEN YOU ARE RACING, but you will even know WHO WON and WHAT THEIR TIME WAS. As an added bonus, Simone gets to skip her yearly aneurysm, you won’t get yelled at by Dave if you breathe wrong and the announcers will actually know what to say next. Hell, they might even be accurate.

And ALL THIS from ONE five-minute session of tippy-tappying away on your little keyboard.

So, ALL of you enthusiastic builders out there, REGISTER FOR THE RACES.

Seriously, it takes five minutes and it’s super easy. If you Don’t Register, you don’t get to complain, so here’s your opportunity!

Visit http://www.powertooldragraces.com to get started! ]

Visit http://www.powertooldragraces.com/rules for all the rules for building a racer you’ll ever need in your life.

Holy smokes kids, sometimes it’s *almost* like we know what we are doing.

“Time is short so get to building….. I can build a Power Tool Drag Racing machine in one day….. Can you?”
–Steven Nelson, Seventeen-time PTDR participant and Token Redneck

Once more, questions, complaints, love letters and small bills can be directed to simone at qbox dot org.

*not really

—-/ Contact Info /—————————————————-

Simone Davalos
simone@qbox.org
415 307 3482
www.powertooldragraces.com

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Continue reading ‘Power Tool Drag Races Wants YOU!’ »

Everything happens on Wednesday!

Tonight I have

The Be Nice Party
cleanup apartment for Frau’s visit
Building Big Art at The Box Shop
Tango Class at Vima
Cell Space Alternitive Milonga
Writing a biz plan for a solar rebates program
Write up and send some stuff to Crism

I think I’m only going to get to #2 and #6 and hopefully #7.

Sunday night I saw White Comanche at The Dark Room at Bad Movie Night. I laughed so hard, I walked out with a limp.

Ask A Ninja

I tried out to be one of four Rod Serlings in The Twilight Zone at The Dark Room next month. Though it wasn’t side splitting like the stuff above, I really enjoyed the lesson/audition that Jim Fourniadis gave. I was reminded that acting is a very precise art. I was turned down for the part (phew! I was really concerned about playing such a key, tempo-setting role my first time out!) but the audition was great fun and rewarding!

I have a role onstage for the first week’s episodes of Twilight Zone in May! This is the first time I’ve been onstage since… well, there was the final project in front of my Drama 010 class as a junior in college. I did a Cyrano de Bergerac monologue that I deftly turned into a dialogue because I couldn’t remember all the lines after 3 full nights of rehearsing at home. :-(

Before that, in high school, I played Dan in Cheaper by the Dozen. I had 4 lines and a gaff with a toga. I fondly recall the horror of changing into my toga one scene too soon on the second night of the show. That caused me to miss my cue by about 15 seconds and the gaff was ruined. But the lead, played by Kevin Someoneoranother was excellent. He stalled perfectly and then played right through it, finishing smoothly with, “And excellent, you’re already wearing the right outfit. I’ll see you [in two scenes].”

Another year in high school I played Dr. Fasbender in Revenge of the Pink Panther played with, if I remember correctly, some horrid German-ish accent. But it was mercifully only like 2 lines.

And before that… ummm… oh yes, I oiled the Tin Man in a grade school production of The Wizard of Oz. My one line was something like, “We’ll lube you up real nice” while I oiled his joints.

And there was a magic and talent show in Lynn Briggs garage performed for a rapt audience of parents when I was 9 or so. Unless I’m forgetting something, that’s about it, you have read my entire acting resume. But now……

Now, coming back from a long hiatus, I’ll be onstage May 4, 5 & 6 doing a “commercial” during the Twilight Zone show. I’ll be performing a dramatic reading of the back of a moist towelette package!

Seriously.

My folks are visiting SF at the beginning of June (!!!). Do any of the high quality chain-ish hotels at Fisherman’s Wharf stand out?

Currently looking at Raddison, Sheraton, Hilton… It’s gotta have a bar or be very close to one.

One of my headlights went out last week. I went to Kragen Auto Parts and got new bulbs. I paid a little extra and got Sylvania XtraVision headlamps. I had bought Silverstar headlamps but I found out that they only have an average life of 1 year in a car. $60 a year on automotive lighting… blah.

The XtraVision are marketed as having “up to 20% more illumination” (source). After pulling out my 8 year old bulbs and installing them, I came to realize that “up to 20%” includes “only barely noticeable”. :-(

Oh well. At least I had fun figuring out how to change the headlamps in a 1998 Chrysler Sebring LX Convertible. The first one took half an hour of fiddling. The second took 3 minutes. :-)

I was unfortunately unable to change the direction they point. I found the controls but I think they had aged and wouldn’t move properly.

Does it bug anyone else that Sylvania is using shortened life span as a sort of “planned obsolescence” money maker? They can easily make them last 3,000 hours for almost no extra cost but they choose to make them last 850 hours. Halogens last that long as a matter of course; that’s what the halogen is for. I think they need some healthy competition in the marketplace. Anyone want to start an automotive lighting company?

My company’s product, TVTonic will be featured on Rocketboom tomorow, Monday April 10, 2006.

(Rocketboom Archive)

If you don’t watch Rocketboom, well you should.

A few weeks ago an acquaintance I met… I think her name is Ruth, while walking in Glen Canyon Park told me that I might find people flying RC airplanes at Fort Funston. Not only are there model airplanes but there is steady wind and a cliff, making for a perfect hang gliding spot. The sky was full of hang gliders. And littered around under bushes out of the wind were slope soaring planes. Once the hang gliders landed, two guys put their planes up, a gentle soarer and a tiny little hotliner that was more hot than tiny! It’s very hard to gauge how was it was…. 120MPH? Both planes had their charms, that’s for sure. When Brandon, Larry and myself got to talking about flying, they said how there were better places to fly just to the south. Brandon pointed toward Pacifica and mentioned at least 3 good places to fly: near the public dump, on top of the mountain (but you need to be able to land in about a 10’x10′ area!) and down near the water.

So after taking in the incredibly break taking views at Fort Funston, watching the hang gliding and and RC soaring, and playing a little football catch with the guys, I went down to Pacifica.

I went down near the dump and quickly found them. It’s funny, when you’re looking for soaring planes, you have to scan the horizon and look for flying objects. Once you’ve found one, you have to watch it closely to determine what it is. If it moves relative to the ground, it’s not a kite. Then it might be a plane or might be a bird. It often takes me several seconds to figure out which it is. I love that. I love that we are flying artificial birds. With motorized planes, it’s easy to tell because birds flap their wings while (of course) planes don’t. But with soaring… at a distance, it can be quite hard to tell the difference!

I found about 6 guys flying flying wings on an incredibly beautiful hill. The flowers at my feet, the crevices of the hill, the gentle but constant wind, the sound of the surf a few hundred feet below, the 180 degree panorama of the coast and of the town nestled just inland, the setting sun partially obscured by roughly defined clouds, the glistening of the light off the water… I could go on, really I could.

They were having some playful combat and doing some soaring. Sometimes two planes would collide and as they were falling out of the sky there’d be hooting and laughter. Sometimes the pilots would recover and sometimes they’d have to climb down the hill a ways to fetch their plane, only to briefly examine it and toss it silently into the air again.

A mere smiley face does not suffice!

And I should’a brought a camera.

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