Writing
Rants, politics, chance encounters on mopeds, encounters in Austin Denver and it’s environs. Also bicycles and food. Occasionally some music too.
Rants, politics, chance encounters on mopeds, encounters in Austin Denver and it’s environs. Also bicycles and food. Occasionally some music too.
I think we will tell our children someday about how relevant blogs were at the start of internet. How citizen journalists actually had relevance before the media conglomerates figured out how brew the proper mix of pay-per-click, and social content narcotic. I’m under no illusions, that time has passed and the medium has been corpratized monetized and throughly fucked. I will begrudgingly except this sites lack of relevance and inability to rise above the likes of the social channels. That doesn’t mean however that i have any intention of shutting up shop. the motivation is different, the things i write here belong to me, are for my edification and should someone out in the big world of the internet besides the spam bots see it, good on them. This is content for content’s sake, nothing more.
We Are Mighty !!!!
/in trebuchet /by wadeferdWe have flung! And we didn’t break it. More to come !
Boxes of Bricks
/1 Comment/in General /by wadeferdWhen I was younger, (and to be honest even still now) when this time of year rolled around, I was only the interested in one thing under the tree. When you shook the box it sounded a couple of octaves lower than a box of broken glass. Legos. I had giant tubs full of the […]
Success ! Sort of…
/in trebuchet /by wadeferdWe started off well attaching the axel and throwing arm, shoring up the superstructure, and building a deck to support the weight while we mount it to the arm. Then we spent the next four hours wrestling the barrel of sand into place. That sucked. After out first attachment scheme failed, we had to reset […]
Absurd Weight
/in trebuchet /by wadeferdThis guy could be our un-doing. We filled the thing with sand, with tthe intent of adding water to make it even heavier. That’s probably going to be a little over the top. It’s about 600 pounds right now. That’s a lot of weight, maybe too much. We’re looking into plating up the throwing arm […]
The Sling
/2 Comments/in trebuchet /by wadeferdWe’ve been getting a lot of questions about how the payload is supposed to attach to our slightly questionable throwing arm. Unlike a catapult which relies on a basket affixed to an arm, the trebuchet uses a sling something like the picture over to the left that I ripped off of a university website (apparently […]
The Whole Earth
/in General /by wadeferdThis link is a map of where various Whole Eartherlings have ended up. It’s amazing to see how much the folks who work at this store get around. Proof positive that traveling is not based on how much money you have, but how much you want it. Nobody who works at there makes more than […]
Construction begins
/4 Comments/in trebuchet /by wadeferdWith the power of the chainsaw, we have managed to cobble together a working superstructure, a throwing arm, and an absurdly heavy counter weight. The whole thing has proved too be to heavy for us mere humans to move so we’re working on acquiring a flat bed trailer for hauling the thing down to the […]
Signs of the Times
/1 Comment/in General /by wadeferdYesterday Rigoberto Alpizar’s was shot by a Federal Air Marshall while boarding an American Airlines flight in Miami, because he claimed he was carrying a bomb. All the while his wife was trying to tell the air marshall that the man was mentally ill and off his medication. From cnn.com “She was chasing after him,” […]
“This is worse than a Star Trek convention.”
/in Uncategorized /by wadeferdA bunch of New York design snots flame it out over a fake MTA poster. “It’s Helvetica, bitches. “ Awesome.
Lists of lists of lists.
/in General /by wadeferdIt’s that time of year again. As we bid a happy farewell to this odd odd year, the ‘best of’ lists are cropping up all over the damn place. Here in Austin the Chronicle Best of 2005 awards both a readers and a critics poll (Don’t get me started on the crap restaurants that make […]