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Long time no blog.  I’ve been busy as usual.  I flew to Ireland for a family wedding in April, then drove to Scotland for a day, then flew home via Iceland!  Iceland is a neat place but it’s still winter in April.  Oh well, I met some great people, did some fun hiking, and enjoyed Reykjavík.

Most of the doors in my apartment suck.  Why are North American doors so bad?  Doors in most of Europe are much better designed and always latch solidly and seal well.  I’m always impressed by the door when I go to the bathroom in Europe.  Do you know what it’s like being impressed every time you go to the bathroom?  I told you this blog post would be random.

What else? So much else, but it’s Caturday and I have awesome people to see! Here’s a present you’ll enjoy if you love timelapses or Montréal as much as I do.

Timelapse – The City Limits from Dominic on Vimeo.

I’m planning on going to PDF (Playa del Fuego) this spring… if you’re curious about Burning Man but can’t justify the expense or the week+ away from work, you should consider joining me. It’s May 26-30 this year, in Delaware.

PDF is what’s called a “regional burn” – it operates on the same principles as Burning Man and attracts the same awesome people but it’s smaller (limited to 1000 people) and shorter (4 days.) The big advantages are it’s cheaper ($50 tickets) and closer (9 hours driving, so feasible in a day.)

There’s a whole pile of information here – way too much if this is the first time you’ve heard of PDF so don’t worry about reading it all :) The important things are the Ten Principles of Burning Man, which are followed at PDF as well.  These are the main things that set burns apart from all the other summer festivals – that and lots of fire.

I’m going, and if there are at least 5 of us interested I’ll bring the fryer and do Midnight Poutine. I’m going to drive down in my van, so I can take whatever gear anyone wants plus 1 passenger. My plan is to leave on Thursday morning (to get there Thursday evening) and drive back on Monday.

It’s also possible to fly, if you have more money than time (as I did in 2009.) The site is about a 1h drive from PHL, the US Air hub. There are about 5 direct flights every day from YUL and it takes about 1.5 hours. So: fly out of Montréal on Friday afternoon/evening, go to PDF for the weekend, then fly back as early as you dare on Monday morning.

Tickets go on sale on March 26, so think fast :) Ask me if you have any questions – I’d love to talk your ear off about PDF, Burning Man, Midnight Poutine, or any related things :)

Hey, here are some photos! In case you haven’t guessed, I’m sorting through my backlog of digital photos. Enjoy!

• Ireland 2008
• Bangkok 2008
• San Francisco 2007 (with Mélanie, my first trip ever)
• Christmas 2007 (probably only interesting to my family)
• More San Francisco 2007 (a shorter trip, in the fall)
• Montagne d’Argent 2007 (climbing, slacklining)
• Halloween 2008: party at M&M’s and this:

This is what a few of us worked on in the early evening: putting red LED eyes on statues around town! (Don’t worry, the LEDs that weren’t stolen were all collected the next day.)

Last weekend was "Cold Compress", the Toronto Decompression, which is a Burning Man afterparty. I took the train to Toronto for the weekend, arriving in time to go to a small Friday night gathering of mostly Burners hosted by Ted. The real gathering was on Saturday :)

On Saturday I slept in, then headed to the venue to install Double Dazzle. After that I visited Eric at Hacklab for a couple of hours, then went back to the venue to help others prepare their stuff. At 8 I did a short "greeter" shift checking wristbands at the entrance, and then at 9 I joined the party. It still wasn’t all that full, which is a bit strange to me. Why don’t more people show up at 9 (or earlier) to have more time for fun??

Anyway, it was a great party. Any party that includes awesome people, great costumes, a bouncy castle, an icosahedron you could play in [*], etc. has got to be fun! Shortly before 4, I took down Double Dazzle and headed home with Amira, my host.

So, what was Double Dazzle? Unfortunately it was mostly a learning experience… the idea was to test concepts for Double Rainbow, which is a larger artwork that Ryan will hopefully be bringing to Burning Man this year, and in that way it was successful. As art, it was not. But anyway:

The artwork consists of a breakbeam (built from a laser pointer and a photocell), two LED stage lights, and a controller.

The lights are arranged to "dazzle" anyone who walks through the breakbeam (half a second of blinking light), then if they stay for longer, they cycle through some fun blinky effects. Leaving the breakbeam resets the sequence, so the next person is "dazzled" again.

What didn’t work:
1. My homemade breakbeam design sucks. It went out of alignment after about 30 minutes. I fixed it once, but didn’t feel like babysitting it all night. Next time I’m going to use a commercial breakbeam (maybe from a garage door) or Ryan is talking about using a completely different sensor type for Double Rainbow.
2. The placement was very bad. This was through no fault of the art placement team, who gave me lots of options for where to put it and let me choose. I chose a place at the end of the main room, by a door I was told would be closed. Well, it was closed most of the time, but venue staff were using it to come and go with stuff for the bar, and there was a security guard standing in front of it the whole time… not really inviting for anyone who wanted to check out the art! Oh well :) :)

OK, and it’s photo time. I’m slowly getting through a huge backlog of photos, most of them from way before the trip. So now you can check out:

• North American travel (does not include Yellowknife yet)
• A few from my Cross Canada Bike Trip in 2000

[*] I think it was an icosahedron, but I didn’t count the faces. Too busy playing with it. How it worked: the edges were made of metal tubing bolted together at the vertices, and each vertex also had an eye bolt on the inside. Each eye bolt was connected to all the others (except where that would duplicate a metal edge) with rope. You took off your shoes and spent time balancing, rolling, etc. while people outside steadied the thing or moved it around. It was a really neat toy :)