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costumes, toys and tech.


Mar 26
2010

Ah blog, we need to spend more time together.

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!

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Oct 30
2009

So tonight I’ll be attending my first basketball game. I’ve never seen the sport played by professionals.

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.

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Jul 6
2009

So, life’s been busy for a while.

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…

rexedit20090704-1

I’ve also just about finished the Cody helmet.

photo

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.

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May 7
2009

After messing up the relationship between iPhoto and Flickr, I had to delete and re-upload all of my photos.

Which is done now.

But the link is different.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tk7602/collections/72157617744319183/

Tomorrow I go back to work, so that I can catch up on things what needed doing while I was gone.

Today, in an attempt to keep the streak going, we picked up some fresh, homemade pasta at the Italian shop a couple of blocks down the street from us. Homemade sauce too.

mmmm….

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May 7
2009

All of my photos from Italy are up.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tk7602/collections/72157617744319183/

Many of them, particularly the churches, are best when viewed at full size. You’ll have to move around the screen quite a bit since they will be waaaaay too big, but you can see some amazing details in the mosaics and sculptures.

Later today I’ll do some city by city posts with my thoughts on each.

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May 1
2009

We are now in Florence. Today was busy… we woke up in Perugia, went to Siena, then San Gimignano, then Florence.

We’re in our hotel for the night and have free wireless… I don’t know if the hotel is providing it or if it’s nearby, but it’s free. Not fast, but free.

A quick review so far… Jodi will be doing a much better version.

I can’t say that I loved Rome. It was… I don’t know… too generic city. Well, except for the ancient ruins all over. Not the best way to describe it, but it just wasn’t striking any chords. I had some great food though (this is a theme. Yes, I am eating my way through Italy. I’ll need a LOT of working out to make up for this!!!)

The Vatican was interesting… me, mr. agnostic/atheist depending on the day strolling around the home of Catholicism. Some amazing artwork there, but since we only had a couple of hours, we couldn’t see much. Yes, I broke the rules and took a couple of pics of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I didn’t use a flash though ;)

Assisi on the other hand I did love. It was my first medieval walled Italian city, and for that it will always be special. The basilica was stunning… again with the art, looking at some of the first works to really take a stab at perspective was inspiring. To think that, once upon a time, artists just started to say “you know, this doesn’t look right… these guys should be smaller if they are further back”. Yeah.

Perugia was very pretty, but there wasn’t a lot going on other than shopping, given how short a time we were there. It was more a layover than a destination. The hot chocolate was worth the trip though! Perugina chocolates used to be made there, but it’s the same stuff we can get right on Moody St., so no point in stocking up.

The hotel in Perugia was GREAT! I’d love to just pick it up and bring it with me on the rest of the trip. It was the first to have US outlets in addition to Italian, complete with 110/220 switches. All of our stuff runs on 110 or 220, so it doesn’t matter much, but the idea was good.

Siena was more fun than I had anticipated. Crowds were minimal, the place was very pretty, and our local guide was awesome. She talked mostly about the annual horse race that goes on in the square (Il Campo). This was really neat since I watched Quantum of Solace on the flight from Boston to London, and it opens in Siena during the race. She was around for the filming so she was able to point out shooting locations, talk about the filming, etc…

San Gimignano was too crowded for my taste, but once we broke out to some of the more distant spots it was gorgeous. Tip for the hill town travelers… as with all battles, seek the high ground. A good 1/2 of the tourists won’t want to climb the hills!

We haven’t been into the city proper yet in Florence, but the place we went for dinner was great. La Capponcina in Settignano. I had polpettone, something like a cross between meatballs and meatloaf. Yum!

Our hotel here is right on the Anno river, and a 10 minute walk to the downtown Florence area. The plan for tomorrow is to drive out to the Accademia in the morning, have a brief walking tour of the city, then spend the next 4-5 hours walking around. Dinner is at a monastery, which should be fun :)

The next major stop is Venice. While super cheesy, we are of course going to go on an over priced gondola ride. Best mis-spoken phrase of the week: Someone on the bus said “I can’t wait to get to Venice and ride a gladiator”. Yeah. That’s what she said.

After Venice comes Como. We finish up in Milan, but we arrive late and just spend the night before flying out, so I doubt we’ll get to see much.

I’ve posted up some additional pics to flickr. Same link, just a few more:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tk7602/sets/72157617519674576/

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Apr 30
2009

technical sidebar to the trip. if you have a CF card > 8 gig and a canon rebel xt, you CANNOT FORMAT THE CARD WITH THE CAMERA!!!!

it’s happy to use a 16 gig card. but it can only create a filesystem of 8gb or less.

if you format your 16 gig card in camera, you’ll lose 1/2 the storage!

it took a bit of googling, but i found this:

http://davidnaylor.org/blog/2008/04/problem-and-solution-16gb-compact-flash.html

i just did that (which was really my main motivator to want to get online so badly!) and now have my other 8 gigs back and usable.

shooting in raw mode that is almost 1000 pictures. seeing as i shot 860 in rome on the first day that actually matters ;)

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Apr 30
2009

So as Facebook users saw, iPhoto saw fit to upload a new Fett pic while I was playing with Italy photos.

Here are the first few I’ve put up:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tk7602/sets/72157617519674576/

It’s 10pm here, and Perugia isn’t exactly a hopping night spot. So we’re in the hotel catching up on the Real World a bit.

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Apr 30
2009

We have made it through Rome, and are now at our first relaxed evening where it was worth the 10 euros for internet access.

We’re in Perugia right now in a fantastic hotel… fancier I think than anywhere I’ve stayed before.

Hrm, what have we been up to? Sistine Chapel, Coleseum, St. Francis @ Assisi, food, food, food. Walking till our feet fall off.

I’ve taken many pictures so far. I’ll upload a few soon, but the next connection here isn’t so fast…

Tomorrow we head to Florence!

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Apr 27
2009

We leave for Logan in a couple of hours. I don’t know how much I’ll be online, but I would expect it to be relatively often, knowing me.

I’ll probably twitter about the trip here and there (@stormtrooperguy) and post pictures when I can.

See you all on May 7!

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