June 2008 Archives

Back in January, I flunked out of platelet donation, when my veins were too skinny for the one-needle machine. I tried again this morning, dropping by the American Red Cross center behind Senora's. The staff was really nice, and we jumped through all the absurd medical hoops together: "Mister Young, sir, are you male or female?" the phlebotomist asked me during the computerized interview, looking as apologetic as I've ever seen a phlebotomist look (not very.) I looked startled, and almost dropped my Georgia O'Keeffe mug, which would have spilled Red Zinger all over my sensible shoes.

Anyhow, with all the questions out of the way, they put me on the two-arm machine, this time, and they gave me the Elite Phlebotomist Team, the ones with their own roll-y carts with their names on them: "Hazel's cart DO NOT TOUCH!", one Elite Phlebotomist per arm, and the whole thing went very smoothly this time. It was a lot harder than I remember it being, though -- I got pretty cold (though they were really nice with the blankets), and the anticoagulant made my lips tingle a lot (though they fed me Tums), but overall it was just... harder than I remember it being five years ago.

I did it on an empty stomach, though. I think I'll try ONE more time after some breakfast, and see if that helps. On the plus side, you get bandages on each forearm, which is a societally-approved way to get that hawt, hawt duelling armbands look.

 
The Ice Cream Tattoo Quest was a lot of fun. I have no idea how many people showed up, since the whole entire first hour was a blur of stencils and rubbing-alcohol fumes — and the second hour was a blur of roll-on mustache glue and shiny red glitter.

Thanks to Toren and Justin for being my two-man stencil-application team, and Pat and Mary for cleaning up all the overspray with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. I'm writing an article for MAKE magazine on how to set up your own airbrush-tattoo rig, and I'll be sure to list "find a funny, enthusiastic four-person team" as number one on the to-do list, just above "try not to blow yourself up with the nitrogen bottle." Of course, if one of your team is also a certified SCUBA tankmaster, as Toren is, then you're that much luckier.

Julie Gottesman, who did the photos for the Ultimate Water Gun Pontani Sisters shoot, came down to take pictures, and they are great. The one of Lexie, above, just slays me. But I stupidly neglected to pass out model releases, which means that I have a bunch more AWESOME photos that I shouldn't post or use. If you were at the tattoo crawl, and especially if you remember arm-wrestling for Julie, won't you please drop a comment? I'd love to use them!

Thanks to everyone that came out! I had a lot of fun, and can now write a magazine article on "how to be a local Tattoo Hero using parts from your basement welding shop" with a clear conscience.

Michael Dolan of Main Line Today just let me know that the July issue is out, with the "best of the Main Line" -- and this blog was picked as "best local blog." Wow, thanks very much indeed! I'm surprised and honored, and plan on getting a tattoo on my chest that says "BEST OF THE MAIN LINE 2008", so that I can get into a fight with whichever callow young upstart wins the title next year.

"Remember", I can hear my mom quoting my grandmother, "cobwebs grow fastest on laurels!"

So if you're coming here to see what this blog is about, I'll give you the bullet-point introduction:

ABOUT ME
I am a 37-year-old Chester County native; I grew up in what is now the Oaklands Corporate Center in Exton, went to school at Westtown, then Earlham College, then lived in NYC for about ten years before moving back here. I continued to work in NYC, commuting via Amtrak Keystone service five days a week(!!!) because of the chant that the Amtrak conductor would make at the top of Stairway Ten, deep under 32nd street:
"Amtrak's Keystone service to Philadelphia, Exton, Downingtown and Harrisburg! Fresh air, good food, clean living! All Abo-o-o-ard!"

I'm married to a wonderful woman who is both taller and smarter than me, and we have a four-year old daughter. We live in West Chester on the same street as two sets of our grandparents. Both the street and the setup are idyllic, and were the reason I commuted so far for so long. I freaking love Chester County.

ABOUT MY BUSINESS
In January of 2008, I opened my own interactive-development shop in West Chester. I build large websites for a living from my office in Wilmont Mews, next to the Bicentennial Garage. My company's website is at tikaro.net, but there's more to see at my LinkedIn profile.

ABOUT MY HOBBY PROJECTS
I got into the Internet early, and so have a string of goofy hobby projects you can read about. I'll link them here. Some are links to blog posts, some are links to external websites.





Anyhow, thanks for coming by! If you're reading this on Thursday, don't forget to come out to the Ice Cream Tattoo Quest this evening and get your ink done. See you there!

• Sidecar sashimono banner: check!
• Ice-cream cone and fire tattoo stencils: check!
  (Lydia and I spent some time this morning cutting them up)
• Airbrush, compressor, and fresh tattoo ink: check
• Secret fifth mobile downtown ice-cream store: possible check!
• Brass double-barreled theatrical handheld flash paper cannon: check!

Everything is in readiness ready for the Ice Cream Tattoo Quest this evening. Meet at the outdoor patio of the Lincoln Room (formerly America's Cup) tonight at 6:30. I'll actually be there earlier setting up, if you want to hang out and get some extra practice tattoos, or possibly figure out the best way to guy up a sashimono.

We're gonna be rain or shine, except if it's really super ridiculously raining, in which case I imagine we'll still be doing tattoos, just inside. I'll leave comments on the event homepage to let you know if anything has changed.

See you there!

I've driven to and through Portsmouth, New Hampshire many times, and I've gone past a small sign saying "Albacore Museum", with a small picture of a submarine. If you peer over the grassy berm behind it, you can see the top sail of a sub a hundred yards up a side road. I've never taken the time to stop in and see what's to be seen until this weekend. Man, I wish I hadn't waited that long, because here's what you can't see from the road:

It's an X. WING. SUBMARINE. Here, let me say that again, backwards.
It's a SUBMARINE that has a X-WING TAIL SECTION:


After buying a ticket for five bucks, you can climb around inside the sub (I even squeezed into one of the bunks, which is just as cozy as you'd expect, if by "cozy" you mean "that steam pipe above you isn't technically touching your face."

The Albacore was a prototype of what we think of as "modern" submarines -- subs in WWII were basically surface boats that occasionally went under the water -- and modern submarine hulls are called "albacore hulls" as a result. It didn't carry any weapons because it was run through committee approval as a target for battleship sub-detecting operations. That was a neat piece of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand -- without stuffing the design committees with ordnance members, the designers were able to make a sub that was a giant failure as a target. Because it was so fast and maneuverable, the ships just couldn't find it. Of course, the SEKRIT PURPOSE was to give rise to a whole new class of subs, which it did.

You can read lots more about the Albacore at ussalbacore.org. I loved climbing through the sub -- I was the only one in there, and so got to spend as much time as I wanted sitting in the pilot's seat, twiddling the controls that were made in the days when a knurled dial was a KNURLED DIAL, man. I think Harold Ross would have a GREAT time photographing the inside. And I think Kenn Munk would have fun with the tail section.

The armchair marketer in me wants to go back out to the road -- the one with the demure "Albacore" sign, and put a giant neon arrow above it: "THIS WAY TO THE X-WING SUBMARINE!" Which would earn an Atomic Wedgie from submarine veterans, who are uniquely qualified to deliver an Atomic Wedgie. But still, man: wow! coo-o-o-ol! I highly recommend that you go check it out if you are driving up I-95 through New Hampshire to Maine.

UPDATE: I just noticed that Official Guerilla Drive-In Projectionist and ex-submariner Subewl has been adding really interesting notes to the Albacore shots. Check out the photoset and look for his notes on the photos. Say, current submariner N. T., are there still underwater backgammon boards on the mess tables?

My beloved cousin Sarah turned 50, and we drove up to Maine to be at her party, because Kate had a premonition of awesomeness.

Her premonition was entirely correct -- Max and Sarah had lured out some kind of INSANE CELLO WIZARD from California. Rushad Eggleston is an, um... Well, he's, uh...

Okay, frankly, he really is an insane cello wizard. Here's a couple of clips, both before and after he hung upside down from the rafters and stripped off his purple velour shirt. Last song is "Happy Birthday Sarah". Rushad's drummer was dressed as a pirate, and his bass player was dressed as a medieval headsman.

Man, I love Max and Sarah's parties.

Next Thursday the 26th, the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In is teaming up with West Chester Dish for the Ice Cream Tattoo Quest. Here's how it works:

1. At 6:30 PM, you arrive at Ice Cream Tattoo HQ and get a basic airbrush tattoo of an ice cream cone, along with a scorecard and map to local ice-cream shops
2. You (and your friends) visit the shops in any order. Four are easy to find: finding the fifth combines the torments of Tantalus with the elusiveness of Brigadoon. At each shop, you buy ice cream, share it, and compare notes.
3. Each shop will give a MAGIC STAR sticker to anyone with an ice-cream tattoo. Each shop has a different color.
4. Collect five stars in five colors, and you get to LEVEL UP your ice cream cone tattoo with an AWESOME MAGICAL FLAME BUFF.

The tattoo will last through Friday and the weekend, so you can make up all sorts of lies about how you stumbled on an underground costume-wearing ice-cream worshipping doomsday cult, and escaped with your life, the nifty tattoo, and the mystical passphrase "MOLA RAM BRAIN FREEZE"

Dave Moroz-Henry from Barking Dog Signs is working on making a sashimono banner for the sidecar. You can see a photoshop mockup of what I'm hoping it will look like on the right (the frame is real, the banner is photoshopped.)

The frame is made of 1" aluminum tube, a flagpole bracket, and some PVC elbows. I put wooden dowels in the ends of the aluminum tube to keep it from bending at the corners. It works okay right now, but it waggles and spins comically while I'm moving. I think I'll have to guy the top of the pole with some thin cables. Hopefully, it'll look like the world's smallest Feudal Japanese Pirate Ship!

Well, *I* think she looks cute in the helmet! But Lydia VIOLENTLY DISAGREES.

To promote the upcoming West Chester Dish/Guerilla Drive-In Ice Cream Tattoo Quest, I visited WCOJ 1420 AM this morning and sat in on Mary Bigham's show "Eat, Drink, and Meet Mary" to give J.T. the DJ a tattoo. Mary hadn't explained what we were going to do, so JT looked a little uncertain as I pulled a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves, a razor, and a bottle of alcohol out of my Pelican case.

We explained the rules of the upcoming event: you'll show up at the courthouse at 6:30 PM on Thursday the 26th, and get a basic ice-cream cone tattoo. Then you'll travel with your friends to all the local ice-cream shops, collecting a star for each one you visit. If you get all five, you can LEVEL UP your tattoo with an awesome RED FLAME BUFF. You can spend all weekend telling lies about the new ice-cream gang you've joined. Or the band of costumed mystics with a secret undeground temple that you narrowly escaped. It's totally up to you.

I don't have any ice-cream-cone stencils yet, so I gave JT the best, the awesomest, and the MOST BRUTAL tattoo I have. That's right, I went right for my "A" game (over J.T.'s objections), and gave him the MAGICAL SPARKLY UNICORN:


Take a moment to check out the Ice Cream Tattoo Quest page for all the details about where to be and when.

J.T. has a graduation party to go to later today. Thanks for being a good sport, hoss. Like I told you, that tattoo is gonna WORK for you.

A week or two ago, I brought the Guerilla Drive-In projector rig over to Harold's photography studio to take a beauty shot. I think it turned out AMAZING: kind of hyper-real, like the spaceships in 1970s science-fiction films that started out as actual models (rather than computer wireframes). Click on the image to zoom in (check out the metalflake tank!)

From a total layman's perspective, here's how Harold does it (once the bike has been rolled into his studio):

Harold positions the camera lens using a great big rolling boom and locks it into place. He uses a little camera-back thingy with an eyepeice on it to look through the lens to get the focus right, then he attaches a digital back to the lens. At the push of a button, the whole studio is plunged into darkness. Harold then picks up a big fiber-optic hose with bright light streaming out of one end, and pulls a trigger mounted to the hose. THere's a big SNICK! noise as a metal shutter in front of the camera opens, and Harold "paints" light from the wand directly onto the subject.

While the shutter is open, there's a measured "beep beep beep" sound, which Harold tells me is his metronome. He uses the beeps to keep track of how much light he's painted onto various parts of the subject.

There are also different attachments for the hose: a paddle, a long tube, a little dentist-sized curlique: the whole thing is like a marriage between a vacuum cleaner and a light saber. All in all, it's pretty DAMN cool to watch. Thanks for the image, Harold! I've already made it the "hero" of the GDI main page. Next step is to photograph nighttime backgrounds!

I've been having a great time bragging on West Chester since I stopped commuting to NYC in January. West Chester is filled with smart people who are really good at what they do. Yesterday, I bragged on Harold Ross. Today, I (almost literally) ran into another local luminary in the Pantheon of West Chester's Awesomeness, so I'm gonna take a moment to brag on her and her blog project.

I was riding my sidecar rig to Starbucks this morning to get some coffee for Kate and me*, and Mary Bigham of the West Chester Dish restaurant blog flagged me down. She was doing a radio remote for local AM-talk station WCOJ, and she had me answer a few questions about breakfast on air.If JT in the studio (and on the phone) guessed what my answer was going to be correctly three out of five times, I'd win circus tickets.

Tip: if you want a radio DJ to guess what you're gonna answer correctly, don't claim your favorite breakfast drink is "Tang" because of the astronaut connotations.

Anyhow, in my career as Internet Court Magician to big companies, they've often wanted to know what the New Generation of Bloggers will do with the Internet. "How will the Internet Natives use blogs for business?" ask a hundred hand-wringing Forrester reports.

The answer is "Very well, thank you!" Mary's food blog at WCDish.com looks great, is updated frequently, and has a friendly, clear, and enthusiastic editorial voice. It's done on a shoestring, mostly by Mary and her designer/programmer Jason Tremblay. That gives it a "let's put on a show in the barn!" vibe that makes established multinational interactive shops quake in their boots: "Wait, we just did a food site for a million dollars, and it doesn't have THAT. Or THAT..." For my developer friends, it's a highly-tweaked instance of WordPress, with clever mapping of tags to cuisines. It's a great use of the blog model as a content-management framework, pushing it past just "sequenced updates published in a stack."

Mary works her cross-channel marketing, too: she writes a column for the local paper, has a weekly radio show, and generally hustles like the scrappy newsboy from a Horatio Alger book. She just won "Business Woman of the Year" from the Women's Referral Network of Chester County. Besides being great news for her, it's a sign that new media has arrived. Now it's simply "media", and it's a normal part of the local business ecosystem. THIS is what the internet natives are doing; the same community stuff that folks have been doing all along. They're working hard, and making stuff that reeks of WIN.

Fortunately, I managed to win the circus tickets with the calculatedly-populist answers "Cold Pizza", "Brinner", and "I skipped it this morning". Phew! Mary then moved on to the next fellow walking down the street. Good luck winning circus tickets, friend! Don't answer "Tang!"

* Believe me, I know that driving a sidecar rig to Starbucks is a white-person train wreck. In 2002, while commuting daily to DC for work, I called in to a Baltimore hip-hop radio station for Wednesday morning "White People Check-in", but the call screener (the "Black Pather Princess") refused to believe that I was actually white. I sounded whiter, she said, than any white person actually sounds. Than it is POSSIBLE to sound. "Work on your imitation!" she said, and hung up.

UPDATE: In March 2009, Mary launched a bi-weekly supplement in the Daily Local News called "CC:", which is all about local restaurants, entertainment, and nightlife. You can check it out at dailylocal.com/cc. Mary has crossed the line from blogging into print, which is a tough trick -- but if anyone can pull it off, she can!

My friend and neighbor Harold Ross, who took the Guerilla Drive-In photos last Saturday, as well as the hyper-real picture of the MacGuffin and the awesome long exposure in the Northbrook Canoe Barn, just went to Hagley and took some long-exposure pictures, leaving the shutter open and "painting" the beautiful, massive, and WORKING machinery with an LED flashlight:

Now, I don't know much, but I do know how to get the Internet to look at pictures of machinery from the days when lathe operators wore leather trenchcoats, brass goggles, and fought magical Confederate golems by gaslight.

I submitted the story to uber-blog BoingBoing under the heading "STEAMPUNK! STEAMPUNK!! STEAMPUNK!!!" (I'm not kidding), and god bless Cory Doctorow's fondness for brass gears, they ran with it. And then awesome-design-bricollage blog notcot.org picked it up. So I'm very glad that these photos are getting some of the attention they deserve.

Hagley is a REALLY cool place, and I don't think I've ever seen photos that bring out the... the... BRASS BADASS-I-TUDE of these leather-strap-and-pulley machines before.

A week or two ago, I blogged breathlessly about seeing and LOVING the MOL "alligator carrying a shipping container" logo in the Port Elizabeth Intermodal Depot.

I CONTINUE to think this alligator is fantastic, so I made a needlepoint pattern from it in Pixen, which is a pixel-art editor for OS X that I totally recommend. Here's a low-res version (the 3600px original is available on Flickr):

The darker-value pixels make a 10x10 grid. When transferring the design to the canvas, I first marked every 10th thread intersection with a small blue dot, and then worked one grid "box" at a time, marking each thread intersection with a fine-point pigma pen.

Marking canvases is HARD WORK, man. Stitching is nothing but fun after that. Well, picking the colors is tricky; two skeins will look totally different in the hand, but then on the canvases they'll turn out to have totally the same value, and you can't tell them apart. Kate, with her practiced eye for color, has been really helpful. Lydia, on the other hand, wants me to do it in purple. And pink. And instead of an alligator, have a flower and a butterfly.

You'll notice that the alligator has an anchor tattoo, which is what made me want to include the sailor's anchor tat in the booth last weekend.

AFTER we packed up the tattoo booth on Saturday, I rode home and switched the sidecar's Tattoo Booth Module for the Film Projector Module. There was a brief montage involving loud music, showers of sparks, and steaming volcanos, and then I drove the rig out to Tee it Up Golf on 202 to show Caddyshack for the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In.

The movie's title and location had been a secret; only those who had previously found the AM transmitter hidden somewhere in West Chester knew what and where the movie was going to be. Fortunately, finding the MacGuffin is fun and easy. When you find it and get your Permanent and Sequential Guerilla Drive-In Member Number, a disembodied voice booms from the sky "LEVEL UP!" and glowing plus signs float all around your body. So, you know, you should do it! It's a PIPIN' HOT GOOD TIME.

We had about 35 people out to see Spaulding shout "Double Turds!", and I had a great time. Whe showed the un-edited version, which is NOT the one you see on TV; I'd forgotten how much screen time Lacy Underall DOESN'T usually get!

I gave a can of soup as the prize for best (worst) golf outfit, and that prize was claimed by dashing clothes-horse Jerzy W., pictured here. In addition to this outfit's many other fine qualities, he's actually wearing a wooly tam-'o-shanter with a pom-pom on top. WINNER:

As an additional prize, Jerzy (and several others) each got to DRIVE THE ARMORED BALL CART out on the range while moviegoers hit balls at them. Jerzy had nerves of steel: he drove along at low, low speed, only twenty feet from the hitting decks. It was like watching some weird analogue of a pirate movie, where the privateer cruises slowly past the man-o-war, defiantly taking fire from each gunport in turn. "Fire as yer (PING!) guns bear, boys! (CLANG!) Scupper this (BANG!) furry-footed turf dog!"

Each ball-cart driver had their own style: GDI member number 003 Nicole V. drove slow figure-eights, talking trash, while her husband, GDI#004 Dave R. fired off humming drives that went RIGHT over the roof. GDI#033 Sallie R. actually paused to TAKE PICTURES from inside the cart, the flash from the cage punctuating our shame as we sliced the balls wide.

The photo of Jerzy was taken under very difficult lighting conditions by GDI#006 Harold Ross, who used a long exposure and a flashlight(!) to make it look like the Weirdest Ever Catalog Shot. Harold also took the picture of the MacGuffin that's on the GDI Updates page, as well as the photo of Meatballs in the Northbrook Canoe barn. You can see more of Harold's stuff on his new Flickr photostream.

I stayed out late in the garage Friday night, fabricating a one-legged, coffin-shaped counter that integrates with the sidecar, using the lower half of the Guerilla Drive-In projector mount.

It POURED rain on Saturday morning and early afternoon. But, you know, if you wanna be a carnie, you can't let some rain stop you. You just have to shrug, spit your chaw, and say something like "I ain't made 'a sugar, I ain't gonna melt." So Matt and I got the tattoo booth set up under a tent. And we pretty much had the whole block to ourselves: it was just us, the inflatable moon bounce about twenty feed away, and a couple of neighborhood kids. In other words, it was PERFECT for practicing on them and each other.

We had a great time tattooing the neighborhood kids. I learned that it's fairly hard to get both the ink mixture and the pressure on the airbrush right. We're using self-adhesive stencils, which are more forgiving than the kind you just hold up, but even so I'm having some problems with the ink dripping. Hopefully, all that's needed is practice, though. Luckily, all the ones we did on the kids seemed to turn out pretty well, my mistakes were mostly confined to Matt's neck.

Here's Matt during a break in the rain, making a carnie face:


Here are some assorted pictures of the tattoos we did, both airbrush and glitter. The second from the right is my favorite, it's Kate's new glittery anchor peeking out from under her polo shirt. YES, is all I can say about that triple-threat combination of tough stevedore, carnival glitter, and the Official Preppy Handbook. HELL, YES.

Click each photo to see it on Flickr, or you can see the whole set!

         

After we packed the booth up, I switched the sidecar's tattoo module for the 16MM projector module, and we had a Guerilla Drive-In Showing of Caddyshack at Tee it Up Golf on 202. More on that later!