01.08.03

A fun thing

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:57 pm by lael

I’ve been building Carousel for Mandy. It’s sort of a perambulating unit set. The major items are a stylized dune and an L-shaped set of low steps.
dune
The dune is essentially a pile of 4×8 platforms, and one triangular 4×6 platform. The pile is stacked up at an angle so that the silhouette looks like a dune. As you can imagine it’s a heavy mother. As you can also imagine, we want it stable while people are climbing all over it. So I built a castored lever lift system. One foot raises and lowers the thing onto it’s castors. It’s been a few years since I built anything this substantial.

This is a view from the end. There will be skirting that covers the supports underneath. You can glimpse the lifting levers attached to the castors underneath. It’s a fairly straightforward design but I’m obscenely pleased with how well it works.

Pictured is my friend Matt Reed who is one of many who helped build the thing. Matt’s a Wichita State student and graduate from Amanda’s program at the High School.

01.07.03

MacWorld Keynote Speech

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:55 pm by lael

Steve Jobs was up to his usual form today.

Forgot to tune in at the correct time. Came into the middle of the streaming rebroadcast. Didn’t watch it all. Did download the new “Safari” web browser. I’m doing this update through “Safari.” Based on a quick look, it does less mis-rendering than Opera. It also doesn’t let form pulldowns be part of the tab-order, as MSIE does.

– Disgruntled that I don’t get to play with “presenter” for less than 100 bucks.

– Pleased and yet somehow disappointed that the new iProducts are being sold as a CD set, “iLife.”