Testing Tape Duck

Hey Folks, So Red Bull is hosting a Soap Box Derby race over at the Red Rocks Amphitheater. Red Rocks is over at the base of the front range here so there is a pretty good hill out there. A friend of mine from work has done this type of event in the past so I am helping him build a car. We are pretty much done. So we took her out for some hill testing. The theme for the car is "Tape Duck". So we built the car to look like a rubber ducky and covered it in Duck brand tape. We met up with "The Power of Cheese" and set up a little informal head to head racing. If you get sound in the video it's pretty obvious why we lost every race, that and their car has 50-100 pounds on us. It's been fun and the car handles really well. In the video you'll go on an inboard ride as the "co-pilot" racing "The Power of Cheese". Then at the end you get a good look at the duck 90% done. Hope you enjoy it!

We had a pretty good weekend!

First off, Emily is doing better. She's getting dressed on her own. Next step is tying her own shoes. She told me today that "it feels normal, except that it's in a sling." So that is good news. My Buddy Dave flew into town this weekend. So we immediately got started on a project! At one point it looked like this:

Can't you tell what it is going to be? Several hours and multiple trips to hardware stores and computer stores, and I think we got Dave his first Fish Taco from Whaoo's Fish Taco in there as well. It finally looked like this. It's just a proof of concept. All I was trying to do here is to figure out if I can take an old laptop with a bad battery and make a digital picture frame.


I think I've at least proved out the idea. So, next step is to slim down the package and put a nice trim around the outside of it. It is about 13" diagonal. My plan is to hook it up wirelessly so that I can access it from the desktop with all the pictures on it. Then I don't have to mess with it to put new images on it. I'm trying to find an optical sensor that will turn it on only when people are around, or maybe the dog to.

Just hours after getting this prototype put together Emily, Me, Jason, Dave, Hillary and James went to the Weezer Show. It was AWESOME! We had a great time considering we stood for like 5 hours. Not every rock show you go to does the front man tell stories about taking his kids on water slides in Kerney Nebraska. But I've been rocking out to some Weezer since I was 15 so to finally see them on stage all live and stuff was pretty fun. Everybody said they had a good time so I'm glad I talked them all into going! Here is a shot of Rivers Cuomo from the show!


I've been super busy at work this week, got the big whigs coming into town tomorrow so gotta get everything ready, I even used chemicals to clean off my desk, not just picking up. Emily hasn't been so busy since she's only got one good arm. But I think this Tuesday night we are both looking forward to next weekend.

I was at the station for Crew Monday night and we did some Training. In the picture at the bottom we are flowing a deck gun off the top of the engine at roughly 1000 gallons a minute. We were getting a bit of spray back cause we were aiming into the wind. Probationary Fire Fighter Underwood is manning the deck gun, Chief Clemenson is instructing, Paramedic Eaton is looking on and Fire Fighter Stark is working the pump panel and getting some of her Job Performance Requirements for an Engineer done.