Many Bothans Died...

One of the final major decisions I had to make in the construction of my Astromech was pretty much made for me yesterday:  what material to use.  Not being able to put a door on the back of my droid if made from styrene, along with the fact that with plywood I can realistically make a 2-3-2 setup (an astromech that can stand on 2 or 3 legs interchangeably), was tipping me back to a plywood design.  Hearing back from a local plastic supplier that the shipping for the 2 initial sheets of styrene that I would need is more than just using plywood push it over the top.

I found that the Home Depot down the street has the grade and thickness of plywood I'd need "in stock", and that the price was reasonable for the amount of wood I'd need for the frame plus "some".   So today I brought the "Senna" blueprint plans over to Kinko's (I refuse to call it FedEx Office or whatever) and got it printed out.  Todd from the R2 Builder's club had offered to print them out for several of us, but I just felt uncomfortable with asking on the initial plans I'd need.

My goals for getting some time this weekend to work on the cuts seems reasonable at this point.  My thoughts are to get some less expensive (see thinner and cheaper) plywood to do some initial tests on with the tools before spending the money for the real materials.  Just getting started is exciting, though.

Workspace Completed

After making the decision that I really wanted to build a droid, there were three big starting points I had to deal with: Where I was going to do this work, what droid I'm building, and what materials I'm going to use. Today I got the first of these 3 mostly done, and should finish up one of the other two this week. My hope is to make the first cuts on the frame this weekend, if it's feasible.

That said, my workspace is mostly cleared off. I had a chance to go to Harbor Freight today and get the 1/4" router and other materials I knew I'd need. I put together the drill press I've had sitting around to make sure it worked (it does!) and then proceeded to put the parts away. I only spent about $76 on the additional tools I'd need, so I'm pretty happy with that.

The next big decisions is material. There are 3 main designs for the frame: Aluminum, Plywood, or High Impact Polystyrene. This is one of the biggest decisions I'm going to have to make, as the design I use will forever dominate this droid. Honestly, aluminum is out of the question, as the costs of the material are just too high for me in the making of my initial droid. That leaves Plywood, which is a more available product, but heavier, or Polystyrene which is lighter. I've been planning on a styrene build for a while now, but I think I'm starting to change my mind as I think about the lifecycle of the little guy. He'd be light with the styrene, but he wouldn't be very durable that way.

The last major decision is what astromech I'm building. I had decided that I didn't want to attempt R2-D2, as it would require more precision than I was going to be comfortable with, but I think I've figured out which one I'm going to do. The good thing is that painting is going to be so late in the project for me (frame and legs should take me until the end of the year, so it'll be when I start putting the outer layers on him that I'll be really painting). For right now, I'm focusing on making him as R4-P17, which is Obi-wan's droid in both Episode II and III. It should work out nicely, as it's still in continuity, but it's not the "most recognized" droid that way.

Droid Building

After going to Celebration V last week, I think I'm going to be inspired to do some more "hands on" work. I got to talk to some of the folks from the R2-D2 Builder's Club, and I wish I had spent more time in their area learning and seeing more. Since I only had a 1-day pass to the convention, I couldn't spend enough time in any one location to really do much.

This is going to be a very adventurous build for me, and definitely something that is going to tax me. Generally I like to "get things done", but this is a kind of project where you have to "enjoy the ride" much more than the final goal. From what I'm reading and seeing, I can do a lot of the build myself, saving a good chunk of money on the initial frame and legs. I have most of the parts I'd need for that. At best I can see this taking 6-12 months to get to a point where I'd start to do actual automation on it, which is a very long term type of project for me. Keeping the dedication and the drive for it would be challenging, but I think it would be a fun and very personally profitable project.

My goal is to slowly start up a section of my blog, if not a whole new blog, for the Droid build as I go. We'll see what develops.

Am I Spock?

I had a chance this morning to watch the 2009 self-titled Star Trek movie, which was in my opinion one of the most unique reboots in recent movies. With that, I got to pondering on the very basic facets of Kirk and Spock, the primal essence that defines the character.

The title of this post actually has history for me, much more than the ramblings that I'm typing out right now. Back in 1995 I had a unique chance to go to the first ever Sci-Fi convention inside of the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney world. While this was not the first convention of this ilk that I had gone to, hosting it in the newly revamped "TomorrowLand" made it unique. I was able to listen to many famous actors and writers talk about their experiences, and the most unique of these was Leonard Nimoy.

He was there promoting his new book at the time: I am Spock. He talked about the parts of the character that were also parts of himself. After watching his performance alongside the new Spock and Kirk in the film, it begets a very interesting thought process for me: How much do my peers establish their personality based on the heroes written on screen during their youth? Kirk, Spock, Luke, Han, Indiana (even if it was the dog's name): These are the heroes of my youth, and the archetypes of the strong leader that I dreamed about at night.

Am I Spock? No, I would never characterize myself that way. In fact, I would state much more clearly that I would identify with Kirk as an archetype - Leap then Look, run with emotion, and settle the details later. It is not all of who I am, but reconciling my personality and how I view myself has to be a large part of determining who I am going to be.

Maybe one of these days I'm going to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up.

Complication Frustration

It seems like, at least for me, the older I get the less I want to deal with frustations that come from complexity. Things that take me from my drone-like motion through the day seem to really agitate me anymore.

Like today - Brighthouse was supposed to be coming out to install Digital Phone for the house, since my current voip provider is closing it's doors sometime this month. Thing is, I really don't have a cable jack in the house, and was willing to spend their $20 on having someone else do it. The guy comes out to do the install today, and tells my wife that it's "Impossible" to do, I'd have to get an electrician or something.

That tells me it's not "impossible", but it's going to require more work than he's willing to do, or can charge back to Brighthouse for. So now I have a new hassle of running the cable myself and dealing with all the quirkiness of doing the cable run.

Personally, I think it's a matter of "boulders, rocks, pebbles and sand in the jar" type of deal. I already know I've got more than I can do, and how I fill my available time with things to do is a big part of that. Frustration comes in when I can't spend the time they way I want to, which is constantly. Seems that whenever one thing that I really need to get taken care of is done, I have 15 other things that crop up.

On that thought, I really should get an email out about the flooring upstairs, see what I'm going to do with that frustration.

Cisco LIVE!

Last week I got exposed to the big, gigantic bowl of Kool Aide known as "Cisco Live!". This is the rebranding of their "Networkers" convention that they've done now 19 times. After feeling like I've been drinking from a firehose, I will say I came away with more of an idea of the vision from Cisco than I think I've ever had from the company. Maybe it's just bad local representation (as in Sales force) or just great representation by their competition down here, but I've had a very jaded view of Cisco for a very long time. Three distinct things caught my attention during the week though -

• Cross Market Leadership: They aren't just the "best of breed" in one thing - they are competitive in so many different areas that they really interconnect and intersect their IP. That's not saying that the product in the end is the best, and I'm still turned off on the "one stop shop" since the old days of Lucent/Nortel beating folks up. That said, it's still impressive that they have leading market share (top 2/3) in over 20 products.
  
  
• Trying new ideas on themselves first: John Chamber's keynote talked at length about how Cisco has evolved over the last 8 years to bring about a new corporate structure that is based on collaboration instead of hierachy. Granted some of the hierachy still exists, but from the presentation given a lot of the middle management is distributed. Think "Bit Torrent vs FTP" in design structure, and while the metaphor might break down shortly after that, the mental image seems to be similar.
  
  
• IPv6 - they seem to have put a lot of effort into implementing IPv6 today. They show where and why folks will be moving to it, and the concept of the issues that Cable MSO's are having is probably the first place where wide-spread IPv6 will be needed. All the work that's been done on tunneling v6 through v4 is going to be important very soon, too.

That said, I came away with a lot of brain food for the next few months. I need to start trying to blog more, and actually do blogs during events instead of afterwards, to try to get more of my thoughts down to review later.. but that will come with modivation and time.

Why Metallica STILL sucks

In July of 2003, the Orlando Weekly posted an article about Why Metallica Still Sucks. It was a really well done piece of journalism, with a jade against Metallica. A band that was literally on top of the world in 1992, now personally I consider them a joke. They probably have some of the most recognizable metal in the business, and inspired a generation of bands. Thing is - their trademark vocal sounds have been lost to aging, and their trademark is now to be anti-fan.

They used to be the band that encouraged folks to tape their live performances and share it with their fans, now they ask journalists to not report on how bad their new album is. I found the following the most disturbing, though:

Metallica's management and PR team knew who the (anonymous) writer of the piece was, as they invited him; if they chose to do so, they could probably make his livelihood more difficult to earn in the future.

That is beyond disturbing - the fact that a company was pressured by "you'll never work in the business again" in the age of the Internet is still a sad, sick reality is just preposterous. There was no NDA signed, and the product was obviously not ready to be commented on per se. This turned from a possible win PR-wise by Metallica into what should be a complete nightmare.

After the flop of that "St. Anger" was, I don't know how much more "music" (if you can call what St. Anger was really music) we'll see from them. They shouldn't have to produce more music, they keep whoring out the old hits to their fans over and over again. At least they have that pension plan to blow on booze and whores.