Apathetic Thursday

For the past eleven days I have been on Choir Tour. Those following me on Twitter have been receiving updates along the trip. For the purpose of creating an archive of events, I am here posting the whole of Choir Tour (at least in my perspective) in 140 character chuncklets.

I did a bit of cleanup on sections where I made mistakes with typing on my phone. I decided not to worry about punctuation and capitalization.

Friday, May 16

Choir Tour Leaves tomorrow @ 9:00am. I’m running@ about 1/8th my current tech setup. 7:43 PM

Saturday, May 17

Killing time till Choir leaves. Listening to Jonathan Coulton. Enjoying the lack of pressing work. 7:19 AM

Busses mostly packed. Gathering for pre-trip brief. 8:50 AM

On bus waiting to leave… 9:14 AM

Leaving Bethany Lutheran College! 9:27 AM

First rest stop. Windy and dusty. Played frisbee.11:18 AM

Lunch stop in Sioux City. 1 hour break. 12:55 PM

Watching Transformers. Screens are too small and the volume too low. Still good though. 3:32 PM

At the church, concert in 1 hour. 4:01 PM

Concert is starting now. Walking to the front. 5:28 PM

Concert went well, supper was excellent, 1.5 hour drive to hotel. 07:55 PM

Hotel goofed up, lost our reservation. Guess we are looking for a new place to stay. 09:50 PM

At a new hotel. Got an internet connection set up. Wireless and insecure, but I’m just checking in on Twitter. 10:31 PM

Sunday, May 18

Up early, breakfast and on bus to first concert. 06:59 AM

setting up at church, concert in 1 hour. 07:46 AM

Another amazing meal, now it is nap time. 10:42 AM

Looking for things to do in Branson, MO on Tuesday. Have the whole day free. Any suggestions? 12:49 PM

loading bus to go to second concert of the day. 04:47 PM

Being fed again! Yummy! 05:21 PM

This church is amazing meal and great sounding sanctuary. 06:35 PM

Monday, May 19

Breakfast time. Concert at Waco NE this morning. 07:39 AM

Just walked to Starbucks for a latte. Bus leaves in 45 min. 08:11 AM

Concert went well. Rest of the day: bus ride. 10:47 AM

still on bus. stopped for lunch at noon-thirty. still have a ways to go. 03:25 PM

bus ride feels unending… Another hour or two left… Back to playing with my ds. 05:55 PM

Finally arrived at Precious Moments Hotel. Woot! Done with driving, time for Frisbee or swimming or ANYTHING besides being on a bus. 06:47 PM

Supper is almost the same as lunch: peanut butter sandwich. With the addition of Pringles and a double cheese burger. 07:36 PM

I love the smell here in Carthage. Very nature-y. 08:22 PM

Tuesday, May 20

Up, showered, headed to breakfast. Bus leaves for Branson MO around/after 8:30. Sounds like a group is headed to the beach… 07:17 AM

Driving around Branson, MO. 10:50 AM

Walking to the dam at benson 03:02 PM

Walking to the Stone Hill Winery, them to find supper. 05:49 PM

just finished the winery tour. Time to find some dinner. 07:43 PM

Chinese for supper. 08:18 PM

Wednesday, May 21

Breakfast was the best yet. Two hours till departure. 07:57 AM

Loading the bus and heading to the Titanic museum. 10:07 AM

Just made it through the Titanic museum. I died. But I helped to save many others. 11:56 AM

lunch break. Saving money… No mcflurry… Sadness! 02:01 PM

Arriving at the next church. 05:11 PM

At hotel for night. Concert went well. My throat is scratchy… must not get sick! 09:24 PM

Off to bed for the night. Load time tomorrow is 9:30 (I think…) Desperately want my throat to not be sore tomorrow. 11:20 PM

Thursday, May 22

I’m up and headed down to breakfast. Roommates still sleeping, buss leaves at 9:30? 07:46 AM

Loading bus and leaving. Next stop: St. Louis. 09:39 AM

Walmart stop for lunch and cold medicine 11:24 AM

Arrived at Missouri History Museum. 01:25 PM

done at museum. 2 hours to next stop. Time for chips and salsa. 03:04 PM

at the next church. 05:14 PM

Amazing meal. Rhubarb pie. Nuf said. 06:10 PM

stupid hotel doesnt have free internet. Stupid hilton. 10:23 PM

Frisbee on top level me parking ramp. w00t! 11:17 PM

Friday, May 23

wandering around spring field. Lincoln-y stuff. 10:12 AM

Toured some Lincoln sites. Back to hotel for lunch. Roommates are still sleeping. 11:43 AM

Off to library and them capital. 12:32 PM

Off to cold stone for had cream. 06:38 PM

Going to see Prince Caspian. 06:56 PM

Saturday, May 24

load and leave at 7 am this morning. 06:46 AM

Stop at McDonalds I guess this is breakfast. 09:08 AM

stopping for lunch in madison wi. 11:58 AM

In West Salem for 4 o’clock concert. Supper to follow. 02:58 PM

concert done, food time. (i like singing before eating as opposed to singing after eating.) 05:36 PM

frisbee! 06:20 PM

back on bus. headed to hotel. 06:24 PM

Finally! A Hotel with good Internet! 07:15 PM

@boblmartens Okay, your right… it is kinda slow, but at least it doesn’t cost $10 a night! 07:55 PM

Just got done playing an hour of ultimate frisbee. SO excited! 10:11 PM

Sunday, May 25

Far too early to be up… Bus leaves at 6:45 06:30 AM

first service done, i need a nap before round 2 09:27 AM

second concert done. dead tired. food time. Legs cant support self. 11:58 AM

Loading bus and off to next stop: 12:49 PM

arriving in wisconsin dells 02:24 PM

No internet at this hotel. so, not only am i starving, but i cant use google maps to find food. 07:28 PM

Monday, May 26

beautiful morning today. great time to explore while choir mates sleep. 07:39 AM

at tanger outlet mall looking around, killing time. should really find some cheese curds. 10:33 AM

Got cheese curds. eating cheese curds. 11:06 AM

Heading to madison for a 4 o’clock concert. 01:26 PM

setting up at grace lutheran for the concert. 02:53 PM

fruit buffet for pre concert snack. Watermellon, grapes, cherries, oranges, apple slices. (My headache has slightly subsided). 03:31 PM

hottest concert yet, it was hot in there. 05:09 PM

done swimming for the night. Pool is closed. 09:01 PM

Tuesday, May 27

Lunch break. headed to dennys. 11:57 AM

Stopping to ride the ducks. 01:02 PM

finished the duck tour, headed to our final stop of the tour! 02:20 PM

Arriving in eau claire. Last stop before home. 04:39 PM

Brats for supper. Concert at 7. 05:32 PM

One more concert to go, home concert tomorrow at 7:00pm 08:23 PM

On the road back to mankato, mn 09:18 PM

Arriving in mankato. soon to unload busses and go to bed. 11:49 PM

Wednesday, May 28

Home Concert is at 7:00, choir meets to setup, warm-up and robe-up at 5:30. 05:07 PMConcert over. Packing up, heading home. Choir tour is done.

It occurred to me the other day that the entire saga of the musical chess set was not documented on Apathetic Thursday. The only story I could find was within the comments on the flickr photos. So I think it is time to remedy this problem.

How it All Started

My friend Jonas and I simultaneously reached a point in our lives where we came to a sudden and shocking realization. We had a friend, named Bob, who was about to get married. We were both really happy for Bob, but this whole wedding thing involved a lot of planning and thinking and somehow, a $10 t-shirt from Target which read “Game Over” just wasn’t going to cut it for a wedding gift.

We were in a bind, it was still August and the wedding was in December, but we needed to come up with something fast. I was going to school in Minnesota and Jonas was going to school in Wisconsin so work time would be limited to the last few weeks of summer break, Thanksgiving break, and maybe a day or two before the wedding.

We finally settled on building something, and quickly developed the concept of a musical chess set. Bob and his bride (Laura) are both into music and we figured this would be pretty close to perfect for them. Now all we had to do was build it.

We started off with some Google searches for notes and staffs, finding some we liked, we modified them to the correct size and printed them off for templates.

The wood we had to use was a bunch of butternut that my dad and I had cut down and planned into boards a few years back. We carefully traced out the initial pieces on our boards, which were about a quarter inch thick and began to cut.

Crafting the Pieces

We were cutting the pieces using my dad’s scroll saw. Sadly, the scroll saw was on it’s last legs and required a bit of encouragement to keep it running. Very shortly it reached a point where it wasn’t going to cut at all unless we attached a hand crank to the motor and moved it up and down on our own.

This was a slight setback, because we had only cut a few pieces and this was not something we could do by hand. Fortunately, my dad was ready to buy a new scroll saw and a day or so later we had a new one at our disposal. We quickly started up our cutting work only to cut a few pieces and discover that this saw was also broken.

So far the project wasn’t looking so great. We had been through 2 saws and we had hardly started.

A day or two later we had another new saw at our command and this one was not going to break on us. With it we were able to cut out the rest of our pieces.

The lineup for the pieces was as such:

Pawn: Eight Note, Rook : Sharp, Knight: Quarter Rest, Bishop: Half Note, Queen: Treble Cleft, King: Bass Cleft

At this point we had all the pieces cut out so they all created nice 3D block style musical notation. The only thing left was to cut the bases, which was done on a drill press in half inch butternut wood.

Each piece got stained appropriately and the pieces were fastened to the base via a dowel in the middle. Not every piece ended up with the exact same tilt, but overall it was pretty close. Besides, it was a homemade gift and there’s never going to be anything like it again. (Well… maybe…)

Jonas and I were pretty good a being paranoid so throughout the piece building phase we had every single scenario worked out for our chess set. We were prepared to find Bob selling this on ebay a few days later, we were prepared to hear that Laura had horrific childhood memories involving chess, we were even prepared for other wedding guests to give him the same thing. Although none of these events actually occurred, and all were extremely unlikely, it sure helped to pass the time while we worked.

The Board

The Board was tough, because our planner is only 13 inches, we had to do the board in two sections. This worked pretty well and we simply glued the two half together carefully and we were good to go.

To separate the squares on the board it was decided that we would router a small trough between them. With the help of my dad, who is much more knowledgeable in this area, we were able to achieve this relatively easily. The big thing my dad did to help us was just get it started. Both Jonas and I were deathly afraid of ruining this amazing thing we were trying to create and the big push we needed was to just start working.

Final Stages

Once we had everything made we could stain it. The butternut was nice and light so we chose a nice dark stain and made half the pieces and half the board quite a bit darker.

By now we are talking Thanksgiving break time. I had managed to get home a few weekends to work here and there, but come Thanksgiving we had the majority of the work done, unfortunately we didn’t have a box yet.

My father, aware of our deadline began crafting a box for us out of some black cherry we had recently acquired. Thanks to his help a few days before the wedding everything was done.

The final few touches included lining the inside of the box with felt to keep the pieces snug inside and also felting the bottom of all the pieces themselves. We had some double-backed adhesive which we attached to the felt and die-cut out circles which could then be stuck nicely to the bottom of each piece.

The only thing left after this was a small set of instructions which were written up and printed off. We then soaked the paper in coffee for a set amount of time to age it and burned off the edges for an authentic look and feel.

I believe this was actually the day of the wedding. In fact, when I stopped at a gas station to pick up a lighter to burn the page edges I ran into Bob there who was, I guess, getting gas.

Finally though, we had finished.

Overall the project was tons of fun. I hold this chess set as one of the coolest things I have ever built.

I’m in an experimental stage with integrating all my personal feeds. I think it would be nice to have one spot where all my blog posts show up, all my Flickr photos show up, all my Tweets show up and all my YouTube videos show up. My difficulty is that I would like my blog to remain clean of the clutter and chaos that all of these different things will throw at it. I think I finally have a solution which is mostly implement right now.

This all started when I signed up for Tumblr, which I was thinking about using for this purpose, but it just didn’t feel right with what I wanted to do. So after scouring the internet today I came across “SimplePie” which, I must say, has the most beautiful website, so much so that it doesn’t feel like the software should be free. Anyway, using SimplePie to create a few WordPress Pages, and suddenly I have this:

http://apatheticthursday.net/twitter-feed/ and

http://apatheticthursday.net/flickr-feed/

Which finally pulls everything together onto one site. My next step may be to try some more integration and set this up to work with a few other services that I use online, but I have to think over the interface I want to achieve before I jump in with any code.

Yes. Your girlfriend’s laptop only has 256MB of RAM. Yes. More RAM would make it faster. No. RAM is not an acceptable valentines gift.

I have decided I don’t like my twitter feed showing up on my blog homepage. If you want to follow my twitter feed, you can find me here: http://twitter.com/mr_bob_dobolina I just don’t like the idea of having a large blob of short twitter posts on the front page of my blog. I think it makes things look messy. 

I am an information parasite. I thrive on information. I sit and absorb as much info as my curious little ears can take in. It’s not all relevant. It’s not all useful. This doesn’t matter though, it’s information and thats what I need.  I don’t always even remember the info I take in, but the important part was that for an instant, if only an instant, I had that knowledge.

I came to this conclusion today while walking back to my dorm room. Last semester I finished up my math minor, but I had not taken Linear Algebra yet. If I took Linear Algebra this semester I would have to pay extra because I would be in “credit overload” with 20 or 21 credits. It would also give me a lot of homework to work on. Going into this semester I saw that I was going to have a bit more free time on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and have already told myself I want to use this time to improve my photography, writing skills, website design and other projects I wanted to get done.

So I decided to audit the class. So basically I’m taking Linear Algebra without paying for the credits, doing any homework or taking any tests/quizzes. (Although I do foresee myself participating in this class since it’s a small class of eight people and the information is interesting.)

The big thing that struck me though, is my motivation for taking this class is almost purely curiosity. I’m not getting any credits for it and I can’t get credits for it if I would change my mind. I’m not entirely sure if I know what this means, if it means anything at all, or if this is worth thinking over in more depth.

I’m thinking that it comes down to a love of learning. I love to learn new things, I like hearing about new technologies, I find it interesting to look into things I know nothing about. The downfall to this is that I find myself knowing a very little about a very lot of stuff, which then becomes muddled in my mind and I end up knowing nothing about a lot, but I do remember that I knew something at one time.

This may require some rethinking.

I officially declare "DeChaos" a success! Just went through 324 photos in under a half an hour!

DeChaos-ing my photos.

I have forgotten how much fun it is to program.

Just Rewrote my photo software, much faster now.