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I went to the park today to do a test build of the shelter I plan to use for Burning Man. It’s pretty simple but I am using a design that is supposedly playa tested.

I started by pitching my tent as a base footprint, and then went on to building the three hoops that form the main body of the structure. Rebar is used to create the base, and the PVC goes over it.

Driving the First Rebar Anchor

3 Big Ribs

The tent takes up more of the area than I planned, but it’s also not quite at the back edge of the shelter footprint and the vestibule area created by the rain fly is sort of big. In reality the tent shouldn’t take up more than half of the area.

I then attached the sort of shadecloth you might see over a deck. I had a little trouble with uneven tension but I shouldn’t have any trouble dealing with that. I should probably tie down the ends of the cloth better and cable tie the two pieces together.

Shade Cloth Installation

Here’s the essentially finished project. It took about an hour and 15 minutes to set everything up, and 45 minutes to tear down and load back in my car. I plan to get some large pieces of more opaque cloth for additional shade and maybe shelter all the way to ground level.

I am Hot and Tired

Hopefully this works out. Only a few more things to get ready, including fun stuff like toys, gifts, liquor, and surprises. Woo.

steve :: Aug.17.2006 :: Fun and Games :: 71 Comments »

I bought a Mac Mini tonight. The Core Duo one with a gig of RAM. So far I don’t really know how much faster than my powerbook it really is in everyday use, but it is encoding video about ten times as fast as my powerbook can. Clearly it has more than just two cores at twice the clock speed going for it.

I dropped a grand on this thing, and I have a little bit of buyer’s remorse, but I had been saving about $250 a month for the past few months for a new mac. I thought about a MacBook but this seemed like a better fit for my normal use. I will keep the powerbook for portable awesome, because it is still A+ if a bit slow these days.

I now have a dual layer DVD burner, which is pretty cool. I’m running on an Intel chip and I can’t even tell. Sam was there when I opened up the package and she seemed very excited by the fantastic Apple packaging. Everything is so elegant.

Fun times, I hope this machine is awesome for a long time!

steve :: Aug.08.2006 :: Uncategorized :: 11 Comments »