I’ve been busy as usual. So busy in fact that I need to slow down a bit. I get crazily excited when I’m working on something new. I end up spending WAY to much time on it and driving myself (and Jodi!) nuts.

So what’s been going on since last we talked?

The vac table is finished and I’ve been retooling the molds for the clone armor accordingly. My originals were geared very much for the equipment I was using, and so on the new machine I’ve encountered some issues. Nothing big, but everything is getting a good sanding / filling session, then getting coated in a layer of polyester resin to help seal and protect the MDF base.

Last night Sean the Supah Troopah and I spent the evening making resin stuff. We perfected the art of a hollow barreled DC15-s with a hollow spot for electronics. VERY excited about that!!

I cast up a clone helmet to use as the base for Still More Revisions. I’m hoping this will be the last, but I wouldn’t swear to that!

The Deathwatch Mandalorian helmet is coming along nicely. I think it would have been easier to start from scratch than using a very accurate Boba as the base. I’ve been working to correct much of the “accuracy”, which comes in the form of asymmetry all around.

This morning I went out to Billerica before work to pick up the latest plastic order. So much of the stuff that the rear end of my truck compressed by a good 1 1/2″ – 2″ when the fork lift lowered it in.

This afternoon I got a call from one of my NEG-mates. I’m trading a CT member a clone suit for a lathe. He needed to get the lathe out of the house, so he sent it up today. I now have a lathe! I know nothing about using them, but thankfully my father-in-law is a reformed machinist, and has offered to school me in the thing. Woot! This is one of those “raising the bar on my own craftsmanship” type tools.

In between all of that, I’ve been working on a web project for the first time in ages.

I use flickr for my photo hosting and youtube for videos. That’s great and all, but I’d like the content to at least LOOK like it lives here.

Using the flickr API and the phpFlickr classes, I’m building my own wrapper for flickr. I’ve got a lot left to do, but the basic functionality is here:

http://www.stormtrooperguy.com/photos/

It’s not SEO friendly, and is mostly tables. But, I’ve done a decent job separating application functionality and styling. For the most part the PHP doesn’t spit out the HTML like I usually do. The exception being in cases like collectionSetsAsTable() which returns a table. Of sets. In a collection.

I’m picking up this awful camelCase habit too, which makes me sad.

Next will be the youtube version, then finally combining them into 1 section of the site.

A nice side effect of this is that flickr doesn’t provide bbcode sharing links in their UI, so I’ve had to take their HTML and convert it for forums. Since I’m writing the interface, I can make the bbcode.

Jodi’s going out for dinner tonight, so I’m on my own. I see plastic in my future!

Since no-one was making the armor at the time, I set about doing it myself.

It took about a year to finish the sculpt and get a prototype suit up and wearable.

Once it was done, we decided to do a big group project. At cost armor run! We kept the orders open on our garrison board for 2 weeks, and got 23 people! Way more than I was expecting!! Add to that 2 oddball kits that weren’t really part of the run, and we got a nice round 25 animated clones.

The idea was that we’d all chip in time, money, tools, food, etc… do it as a big team effort.

One member of the garrison, Mike Brunco, took on the project manager role. He took the orders, found the plastic supplier, ordered materials, etc… I did the easy part: make the bucks. I say that’s the easy part because by the time we started this, I was already 99% done!

The project kicked off officially on September 28, when we got a LOT of plastic!

My first thought on seeing that picture was: all that has to turn into armor?!?!?!

I admit, when I saw the pile, I cried. Just a bit. That’s a split of 0.125 HIPS for the trunk of the body and 0.080 HIPS for the limbs. Roughly 500 squares of it.

Today, Jan 17, we finished up the run!

Between then and now we had Halloween (where we built 2 full sized battle droids, Yoda, an Ewok village float and a bunch of Ewoks), Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and 20+ trooping events.

Meanwhile, along side the armor building, bucket-maker extraordinaire Sean made all those helmets, in addition to the runs he did here for other areas. It’s a good think that there is a Smooth-On retailer nearby! Needless to say they know us very well!

In some cases people went to his house and slush them with him acting as teacher and supervisor, and in others he made them himself.

Think about that. That’s a LOT of work. Hundreds of hours.

There’s still a lot to go… there are tons of kits that need assembly, and we still need to arm the troops! The pistols and DC15S rifles are ready for silicone, hopefully this week.

Here is is… the last pull of the run…

What a crazy, frustrating, exhausting and awesome project!

The reason I posted this here is to get people thinking about what is possible if people pool their efforts to work on things like this together. For the helmet and armor, these suits were under $200 each.

That was made possible by teams of people spending their nights and weekends together in a literal sweat shop (the forming shop was usually around 90 – 105 degrees after a few hours!). There were many nights where I was driving home from the shop at 1AM dreading the coming work day, but in the end it was worth it.

For me, this is the best part of the 501st… people of all walks of life, all experiences, all skill levels… coming together to do something that no one person could do alone.

Of course, as with all things I do, I’ll be seeing it through the dark tinted lenses of a clone trooper helmet.

Cartoon Network is doing a promotion at the game tonight for Clone Wars. I’ll be there along with several of my strikingly similar looking friends doing… whatever it is Cartoon Network wants us to do.

Should be a fun time. There’s a chance we may go out on the court at some point. It’s only standing in the middle of 20,000+ people… nothing to be nervous about, right?

I hear that there will be a green screen photo op area set up for kids to get pics with us.

In other news, the 501st was on the Today Show again this morning! I did not attend this event, mostly due to the previously mentioned Celtics game. Plus they already have a Rex, and it would have been too much work to whip up a plain white suit for the occasion.

at work i’ve been interviewing people for a helpdesk job. it’s going less than impressively thus far. i have 4 interviews this week i believe. yay. i’ve got high hopes for a couple of them. at some point, once i have someone, i’ll be doing a “how not to get a job in IT” post. for now, a sample:

• send the hiring manager your resume with no subject, text in the message or attached cover letter.
• send the manager an email asking how to get him/her a copy of your resume. you are applying for a tech job. if email attachments are beyond you…
• tell the manager that the job looks boring and beneath you, but times are hard and you’ll take what you can get.

on the nerd front, the clone army is going well. we’re at 9 completed kits (myself excluded, so 10 total if you count me), and we have 3 more that are more than 75% finished. the next armor session should finish those three up.

it takes about 3.5 – 4 hours per suit, so do the math

this is just the raw plastic. each person then has to put in the hours to trim / fit / assemble.

we are getting close to our big halloween parade, which is always fun. i’ve got a bit to do yet for it, but nothing big. i’ve got the minimums done for my own stuff, so anything new i make / do is gravy.

october 25, woburn ma. parade kicks off at 1. you should go. yes you. i know, it’s a long flight, but still… it’s fun. it’s worth it.

this time of year is always super trooping. i did a dk/lego promotion at the natick mall on saturday. this coming sunday is the boston autism walk. after that is the parade and a boston celtics game appearance (yes, mr. nosports will be trooping a celtics game!). i think there’s a week off, then it’s megafest in framingham. then it’s thanksgiving, with a parade that weekend.

oy. nerding is pretty hard core. you certainly don’t get bored…

Much like my Fett, it will be a long time before Rex is “done”, but I’m happy to have gotten as far with it as I have, and I’m proud to be helping to pave the way for future animated style clones.

Work has been very, very busy. Not stressful, just busy. I like it.

A couple of weeks ago I put in the order for a blade server cluster to run VMware on. We’re creating a virtual dev lab to improve the overall quality of life in the office. I’ve been having fun with p2v conversions (taking a real computer and making it a pretend one). I’m now turning a Red Hat Enterprise Linux VM into CentOS, so that we can be free of licensing / paid support.

We’ve started working on our Halloween floats already. We built the skeletons of the first 2 battle droids last weekend, and I spent one night this week tweaking them. That’s coming along really well.

Now that the first round of droids is out of the way it’s back to clone sculpting. I’ve got to get back to the chest and finally knock it out.

Tonight is Star Wars minis night. Yay nerding! I’ve got some shiny new mouse droids to take for a walk. They don’t sound like much, but they’ve got it where it counts

What else? Trooping of course. 2 baseball games and a library in recent times. I’ve definitely got to get some less wholesome events in fast. Come on fall convention season!

You just can’t get those sandtroopers clean!!

Let’s go back in time to June 17, the last substantial update I made.

I took some time off between jobs to hang out, relax, and get refreshed. I did a ton of work on Clone and Fett stuff. The sculpt for the codpiece and butt plate are almost done, the Cody/Fox visor is done, and my Fett gauntlets are done.

On the gauntlet note, I negotiated a deal with a prominent machinist to let me recast his gauntlet rocket, which will allow me to make complete gauntlet kits.

Starting at the new job was, of course, a Big Deal. My first few days I just soaked in information. By the end of week 1 I started to feel more well oriented.

The long weekend at the end of the first week was nice. I ate WAY too much on the 4th, resulting in spending the 5th in crippling stomach pain. I got a lot of reading done.

Today I felt good, but had the sense to not go to the gym. I was pretty dehydrated and ate less than 1 meal on the 5th, so no working out first thing in the morning. Tomorrow I should be on track there. Did I mention the free gym at my new office?

I got the shins finished for my Rex suit, and put the whole contraption on for some photos…

I’ve also just about finished the Cody helmet.

Related to all of that, I finally set up the Watch City Armory web site (which is just stormtrooperguy.com, but whatever )

I also made a silly little movie about weathering armor:

It’s cheesy, but fun. Doing something like that with a real video camera would be good… that was recorded with my iPhone.

What else have I been up to?

I made some kick-ass coffee ice cream for Jodi’s birthday.

I haven’t seen Transformers 2 yet, but despite the terrible reviews, I’m going on Friday. Big Robots and Megan Fox. It can’t be worse than Megashark vs. Giant Octopus.

I’ve got tickets to see Alegria in August.

I’m going camping this weekend. In a friend’s back yard. Should be fun

Trooping on the 18th (maybe) and the 26th (definitely). Both baseball games. I don’t even like baseball.

I got sidetracked by finding a good multiple file upload extension for MediaWiki. I ended up going with MultiUpload. Simple install and easily configurable… what more could I ask for?

With that in place, it was much easier to upload my images. MediaWiki REALLY likes the images to be locally managed, and I tend to agree — Having all of your images contained within MediaWiki will help prevent dead links.

So one extension later and the Boba Fett section has content! Not much, but it’s a start.

Fun site… I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth repeating:

http://artofmanliness.com/

I’ve gotten a bunch of recruiter calls today. Spring is in the air?

I went back to Weight Watchers officially. Over the last year I gained back an upsetting amount of weight… almost 20 pounds. Still down a LOT from my worst, but not a good trend.

The “new” online tool optimized for men is interesting. First off, it set me at 6 points a day higher than I used to be at the same weight. They must have decided that guys need more food than women. It’s funny that paying $16 a month is enough motivation to make me stick to eating well, vs. my own free self discipline, which was a failure.

I also don’t recall them allowing you to bank activity points for a whole week… a workout today could yield an ice cream tomorrow. Seeing as I get 2-3 activity points a day just going to work, that’s not a bad change

What else is going on? Got a ton of molds to make… Fett gauntlets, jacket for the Fett helmet, Ahsoka headpiece (I wonder if it will fit zanylikethat?), another clone bucket, new Rex pistols. And I have to get cracking on my clone shins.

4:08. One hour to go today. Will tonight see motivation and energy, or Heroes watching on the sofa?

Speaking of Heroes. Star Trek. SO GOOD! I loved it. I’m not a huge Trek fan… I’ve seen my share of episodes and movies, but there are no gole velour Fleet shirts in my closet. But seriously good!