My recently assembled blimpduino escaped because I forgot to close our portch’s screen door. It is a large blimp shaped silver mylar helium filled balloon with some electronics and propellers attached to the bottom. If it fell off the balloon is history, but if it didn’t maybe someone will find it.
Written on one side in black permanent marker is the word “Faceblimp” and the other side has a small blue and white Facebook sticker that is just the letter “f”. The front has a pair of eyes and a mouth, also drawn with black permanent marker. The gondola portion is mostly Legos, electronics and a LiPo battery. It looks very much like the image below, except it’s silver. The video is actually the very blimp in question.
It was neutrally buoyant inside, but I suspect once it got out into the sun it became slightly positively buoyant and made it into the wind that looked to be blowing 5-10 mph in a south west direction. I lost it at noon on 7/24/2010 near W. El Camino Real and S. Rengstorff.
When I noticed it was missing, I immediately looked around our apartment complex on foot. Not seeing it, I hopped on my bike and went a few blocks in the direction the wind was blowing. I then hopped in the car and drove a bit further into some neighborhoods. I even asked a couple strangers and one co-worker if they’d seen it. Obviously, I didn’t have any luck.
If you’ve seen or found it, I’d love to hear from you via email or phone at 415.685.3764. I’m posting this here in hopes that search engines will index this post. Then, if someone finds it and searches for “Faceblimp” this will be among the results. I’ve also posted in craigslist’s lost+found section.
After today’s f8 launched Facebook’s new Like button for the internet, I used jdingman’sUsing Facebook’s “Like” Plugin with WordPress and Facebooks Like Button documentation to add said Like button to this site. It was straight forward and easy, and it prodded me into posting a bunch of updates too!
On Sunday, April 11th 2010 I experienced my first rally cross. After almost a two hour drive, we made it to the Sonoma County Fairgrounds where the rain was pouring down. Mary Ann and I spent a few confused minutes walking around the course where tracks from the previous day didn’t *quite* line up with today’s course. After that, we came back to the car to find someone looking at the tires and after talking to them, discovered that not only did he have an STI but that he had been doing the rally school the day before. And that he had made a mess of his bumper, pulled out a wheel lining and lost a mud flap. At that point, I almost backed out in fright of doing damage to the car.
Mary Ann told me to man up and so I registered to drive. Of course, she didn’t follow her own advice and chickened out of driving. I had a blast, as someone at the rally said, it was the most fun I’ve ever had driving at 18 miles per hour. It was slow, slippery, dirty and the mud was deep. The STI’s AWD and Blizzak snow tires were amazing, I think the car just absolutely loved the mud.
Parade Lap
This is the parade lap, which I was very thankful they did. It let me drive the course slowly, following a bunch of people who seemed to already know the course and what they were doing. We also discussed the course a little bit as I drove. You can see 3 more videos after the jump, but I didn’t want to clutter the front page with all of them. read more…
On March 28th, 2010 Jesse Mullan and I went to our first ever auto cross at the small airport in Marina, CA. We both had a blast and got to watch a bunch of cars driving around a cone course in an airplane parking area. We arrived for the second half of the day and worked on the course for the first group of cars. We drove in the second group, alternating driving after every lap. We brought our DSLRs, but we were both having so much fun that we didn’t take any pictures.
My times for laps 1-5 were: 61.181s, 59.626s, 59.399s, 58.454s and 57.883s. I’m proud of the fact that every lap was faster than the one before it. The results can be found in this pdf on their site.
On Sunday, December 20th I finally realized a dream that started with Forza Motorsport on the original Xbox, continued in Forza Motorsport 2 and finally made it into Forza Motorsport 3. Mary Ann and I are the happy new owners of a 2010 Subaru Impreza WRX STI. The above pictures are from the STI album, where you can find more if you like. If you aren’t familiar with the STI, it is a turbo charged all wheel drive beast with ~300 hp and ~300 ft-lbs of torque.
After driving up to Tahoe, CA a few times we realized that AWD would be a huge benefit and we’d been talking about getting a new car in the coming year. We knew we wanted a hatchback for the dogs too. We test drove a few cars similar to the STI like the Mazda 3, Mazdaspeed 3, Toyota Matrix and the Subaru Impreza WRX. The Mazda 3 was boring and the Toyota Matrix was worse than boring. The Mazdaspeed 3 and the Impreza WRX were both fun, but the Impreza WRX STI blew them away. We spent a few days making sure we got the best deal possible and eventually ended up with the car seen above whose only option is a trunk tray.
