The Comet didn’t show up early this morning, but I got a great shot of pre-dawn Seattle.
Writing one word at a time.
-
Oh forgotten blog, how are you?
I have renewed the blog, I should write something on it.
The covid-19 crises is still in the first part of it’s expansion. It’s increasingly becoming pretty clear that I will be spending quite a bit of time at home through 2020.
This little blog that keeps surviving, might be an excellent outlet for positive thoughts.
Keep Safe!
-
Working on Christmas Crafts today.
Getting there, getting there, one hand crafted journal at a time.
-
Working on some landscaping today
Trees look happier when they are trimmed.
-
WFTDA Championships
First Stop is Vancouver, Canada for us. We will watch the D1 Tournament this weekend. https://wftda.com/tournaments/2016/vancouver
I’m looking forward to seeing all the roller derby teams again. It’s such a powerful sport with very few fans willing to travel. If you get a chance, go.
-
Saved by Steve
I almost canceled this domain, Steve asked me to keep it.
-
Is this blog dead?
I don’t know. It’s not been a year since the last post. I’m still disappointed in the wordpress plug in that vomited all over my hosted account.
0.o
-
Shipping out Lore Bits Today!
I’m busy packaging up Lore Bits today for the Kickstarter rewards.
Zuffy Event Calendar died. I finally bit the bullet and killed of the events page. I had put a lot of time and effort into it. But it seems that no one was interested in advertising on it or helping out with the costs. So it had to die.
I also experienced quite a bit of technical problems with Time.ly’s event calendar. Hundreds/thousands of 404 pages. Google would not stop indexing it because Time.ly created so many virtural pages that google would index it 300,000 times in a week. Yah, you might be jelly of that indexing, however, what it does it create a huge hosting problem. With that many hits from robots, it was upgraded to a larger hosting package. Much more expensive than the basic hosting it had previously.
Do not recommend Time.ly.
I also took time to remove some of the directory pages. It cleaned up the website and will allow me to focus exclusively on the blog. The blog was the most neglected part of Zuffy Robot.
We’ve been enjoying sense8 on netflix. It’s much better than Jupitor Rising, so take a chance on it. I love space opera, so jupitor rising was a disappointment. It’s a lovely movie which can play in the background while I’m reading a book or playing games. The editing was poor and the story made no sense in spots. I felt as if I watching the perils of pauline at times. They pulled the initial release date and reshot scenes for months and re-edited it as well. I’m wondering if the initial edit was the best one. Example Sean Bean’s daughter is on for a micro second goes off for pizza then never returns. You could do a whole movie about her and what her reaction is when everyone disappears and the house/farm is trashed. Her father doesn’t even mention her in the rest of the movie.
It looks like finally in sense8, the wachowsky’s have time enough to tell their story. Statzinky(?), who produced/wrote babylon is also producing sense8. Perhaps, he had an influence on how it was edited. I hope they do more work together, it’s a good result.
We saw Howl’s flying castle last month. I highly recommend the anime classic. Highly romantic fairy tale. It stole my heart.
-
Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico
The Very Large Array in New Mexico is one of those surreal places that looks like a dream instead of a real place. Recently, we were able to travel to New Mexico. We were driving down the freeway to visit Trinity, which is only open to visitors twice a year. My guy noticed a sign that said:
Very Large Array VLA – Take this Exit
As soon as we got to the hotel that night; he googled it and was extremely excited to learn that we were so close to an icon. No one had mentioned this very cool thing that was right by Trinity and we had been planning the trip for a year.
The VLA is run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. It’s an internationally known observatory that has been around since the 1970’s. It has been featured in many movies and shows, including Contact, The Messenger and others. If it seems like there is more antennas in Contact, it’s because the filmmaker added more via photoshop.
The place itself was built on a former lake bed at an upper elevation in New Mexico. The antennas are about 95 feet tall, can be moved to form four primary formations, and incredibly huge to see in person.
This is the scale while you are standing next to them. Notice that you can also see the railroad tracks that they use to change the formations. They have specially designed vehicles that pick up the antennas and move them about.
The day that we visited; it was in the B position. The different antenna positions allow more flexibility in what they can view.
Since it is a radio telescope observatory; the data that is gathered is string of numbers. The numbers are then converted into usable data that astronomers use in their studies and papers.
Since we went on the same day that Trinity was opened, they had a large open house at the VLA. (They are about a two hour drive from each other.)
There were tours by astronomers, docents who explained the fancy sundial, and we got to go into the antenna control room. The operator explained that the telescopes are in operation 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.
We learned on the tour that anyone can make a proposal to have the VLA look at a specific item. It does need to meet some standards and I would suppose it would be helpful to have a basic knowledge of astronomy to make an effective pitch to the acceptance committee.
Here is a link to the process/forms that you need to fill out:
https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/vla/docs/manuals/propvla/obtaining
We also learned that astronomers also make poor tour guides. We were left behind by the tour guide in a maze of an office building. We walked through people’s offices, hallways and then ended up joining another tour, then blindly wandered outside. Turned a corner and our group was on a balcony overlooking the antennas. We caught up just in time to be sent out to a nearby antenna. Good Times.
Here is some more information about the location and budget friendly tours. I’d suggest packing snacks or a lunch because it is an isolated area. They request that you put all cellphones in airplane mode; because the cellphone activity messes with the telescopes. Plan for the tour to take a couple of hours. The tour guides can take you into the buildings and control room. The self guided tour does not have access to the buildings.
https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/vla
-
Kickstarter Lessons
Earlier this spring, I decided to do my own kickstarter. I had created some shiny game tokens called ‘Lore Bits’, and I wanted to share them with the world. Along the way, I learned a few things.
- Even Kickstarter experts can be wrong. No one can truly predict if your project will succeed or fail. Mathmatically, the Lore Bit’s kickstarter was going to fail from all the projections. However, towards the end; kickstarter sends out a 48 hour email. My email was pinging like crazy the last two days!
- Marketers like to contact you. A lot. Read any proposals, do they even mention your company? What about your kickstarter? I bet 90% are vague like ‘we like your project.’ Choose whether you think someone who can’t be bothered to mail merge your product name in to the email; will do a good job marketing it.
- Keep up with the updates. Honestly, I think my once a week updates contributed to the success at the end. I hadn’t abandoned the failing project. Kept them upbeat, told them about my other website where they could purchase them, and kept plugging along.
- Not once, did my project get put on the front page of Kickstarter. That is usually the kiss of death for most kickstarter projects. What? You can’t see the nearly 50% that are failing? Did you think that was a coincidence? Consider that possibility. How will you drag people to your project page? 🙂
- I should mention this: it’s not kickstarter’s job to make sure you are funded. Harsh truth, but a good number fail.
- Great pictures are helpful.
- Listen to people who send you emails and make comments. Most of them have funded a lot of projects or have their own projects. Set aside your ego and make necessary changes. Explain those changes in full in the FAQ or Comments section.
I might add more later. There is always something to be learned. 🙂
Have a Shiny Day!
Laura
