No Longer Being A Bum

As of today, I am among the ranks of the employed, at a fruit stand in Cupertino.  Two months of doing little but watching Top Gear and playing Xbox games was enough to melt off the last school year of stress and send my mind into hibernation.  I’m going to be doing software development for the forseeable future, but that is about as specific as I can get.
The Bay Area is a strange transition from Pittsburgh or southern Connecticut.  The grocery stores are devoid of italian bread and red potatoes, apparently, and nobody jaywalks.  The sunny skies and In-N-Out Burgers balance it out though.
Work is going to be taking up most of my time, but I’ll finally be able to afford parts for the projects I’ve been stewing on.  A list, with no timelines attached, of what I want to do:
  • Build a laser projector to augment a cloudy night sky.  The plan here was to laser project stars, satellites, and other heavenly bodies onto the clouds in Pittsburgh, since nobody would be able to see them otherwise.  I don’t think the weather will work for that in the Bay Area, but I could still project onto a ceiling or something.
  • Implement a pretty basic portion of Johnny C. Lee’s thesis.
  • Add Windows support to the camera module in Pygame.  Linux support for webcams is finally being released with Pygame 1.9 fairly soon.  Werner Laurensse is working on an OS X implementation for 1.9.1.  It would be a bit strange to leave out perhaps the largest portion of Pygame’s audience.
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Star Wars Uncut: Scene 437 in Stop Motion Photography

This is what happens (best case) when geeks have too much free time.  My friend John Martin and I decided to take part in Star Wars Uncut, an experiment to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope in a series of several hundred 15 second chunks, each created by random people across the internet.  I chose a scene with a pleasant blend of dialog and pyrotechnics.

John has an inordinate quantity of Star Wars merchandise, so we went with stop motion animation for the scene, something neither of us was familiar with.  We found the actual action figures for almost every part of the 15 seconds, and really only had to improvise on the explosions, as we would rather not blow up collectibles.

With assistance from Peter Martin and Meg Blake, we fabricated Y-wings out of soda bottles, cardboard tubes, cardboard, and spray paint.  We filled each with a mixture of half potassium nitrate and half sugar, lit it with a fuse, and dragged it with a string as we took pictures.  As you can see by the video above, the results are reasonable for an afternoon of filming and a $0 budget.

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