CNN Money Article

Here is an article that's been circling the MWB message group. It's interesting; I'm not sure exactly what "Clean-tech companies can exhibit their technologies, but their products can't display a logo. No marketing material will be allowed." will look like on the playa. Right now I imagine wind turbines and a vast field of solar panels somewhere in the deep playa.

JRS

"(hint: ice will be close by, no matter where you are in the city!)"

Cool!

How to solder EL wire

At some point I will succeed in mastering el wire!

El Wire

Such a cute idea for El Wire, I think. Been getting ideas for my bike.

This place seems to have some good deals, as well as a playa special.

Glowstick totals

OK- The glowstick order is as follows. Meticulously broken down in an excell spreadsheet by myself (because I love the odd organization of a spreadsheet)
John- 38.62
Bicho- 20.80
Mark-20.80
Jimmy-9.47

Bobby and I got some funny glowy shot glasses and mouth things.

Other than that, Jimmy reminded me that somebody needs to pony up for a bike pump, or does anyone have one?

Glowsticks... more planning

We are nearing on the time when we are going to order glowsticks and such. Really need to get an idea of what people want to buy.

Also, I bought a parachute yesterday. It's a regular army green one. I was looking at some white ones, but they were twice as expensive, and I'm really not sure how well they would take dye, being nylon and all.

Survival Guide

Ok nubs. Fib, Prime, anyone else who's yet to experience dust. Listen up:

Don't expect to go shopping two days before and have everything you want or need. I'll go with the both of you and get you a good "idea" at least a week ahead, then we can fill the holes over the remaining week.

Think about food you'd want out there: I'm always fine with eating MREs for a week, but it nearly killed Jessica and Tina. Don't expect anybody to cook for you.

Think about costumes: Really, get your mandress together or honestly consider how to look like an ORK. Grab a funky red-striped shirt and a bandanna, add rum: instant pirate. If you want to go to Spikes "Dusk till Dawn" bring something that can be uber goth (think the blood shower scene in Blade.) I'm talking anything that can fit next to PVC, chains, and Stabbing Westward style eyemakup. I'll still rock the straw-hat and cutoff camo look for the majority of the week. You'll be glad you put even 10 minutes of thought into an outfit.

Read the fucking survival and virgin guides. I know Fib has epic amounts of time to read at work and Mark just has epic amounts of time. READ it.

Art Car

awesome shit that I desperately want to do.

Costuming

This is a post to remind myself of stuff I found while at Marks on Saturday. Our internet is out at our house currently, which is very sad.
Blue wig.
Silly girly kimono.

FIRE

I've spoken many times with the "fire safety" guy at burning man (davex) about a wiiide variety of topics. He's given us the greenlight on getting a laminated-badge thingy to wave at the playa firefighters if they come and try to squirt us with a hose. He suggested that we come up with some sort of 'show,' but knowing bicho and I it'll be something like skeet shooting teddybears with the burna. Any ideas on what would make an amusing show are appreciated there. Hell, he even suggested that we list it in the what/where/when if we think up something. Would be pretty cool to finally do *something out there.

As far as camp fires, yeah. We are allowed to have individual off-the-playa campfires this year. Anyone can have a burn barrel, a camp brazier, or reasonably controlled fire without needing registration. Their requirements are, and I quote, "that nobody burns the damn place down." We'll have to keep gasoline for the thrower and any spare for vehicles under a fire tarp and have some cleanup supplies/extinguishers nearby for any... accidents. I figure we can find some way to make that thing wind resistant, maybe a few metal hose clamps to hold the bangle down then a peice of rebar to hold the footing down? We can have it in our little communal area around all the tents. Would definitely make for a warmer night. Someone bring marshmallows.

Can you canoe?

Taking a brief break from BM related stuff, Jon is spearheading a canoeing trip sometime late this month or early next. T'will be only around $30-50 per person. Will post more info when I have it.

Solar P-P-P-Power!

Today I managed to leave my book at home so my lunch hour was filled with aimless shopping. Went to the Tractor Supply store near the wendys I inhabit and dropped $250 on solar equipment.

I walked out of there with a 15 Watt, 12 volt solar panel and a deep cycle 120 A/H marine battery. Figure we can at LEAST light up the camp for 12 hours every evening. I'm going to go garage sale shopping for a pair of shitty, but loud, speakers and I'm currently working on making my old 40gb Ipod run off of external battery for the 'head unit.'

Another possibility is to get an inverter (I believe bicho and jys are talking about purchasing one for the cars) which we could pwn off of the battery easy enough to run little things like a 'rita blender, air compressor or massive vibrating dick-machine.

54

54 RULES!!!!!1111

Camp Shower - Kunt.

This is what I have been wishing for, simple battery operated + propane heater. It's made to be a camp sink, but can easily propel water 7' and heats it well. Pulls easily from a large drum of water/little 6 gallon. For the evap pond we'll just do a black 4x6 tarp rolled up and stapled to 2x4s. I figure we can stand the shower on a pallet with some sort of awesome flooring on top (thinking some cheesy tile samples.)

"shade cloth" could be an interesting way to get the tunnel/extra areas shaded fairly easily. I don't know if it'll be easier (see: cheaper) than burlap, but it comes in large pieces and could very easily span across a few tents. There's also this Aluminet shade stuff that just looks hoss.

HUGE fan of the dry-ice idea, there's none better. The multi little coolers is certainly the way to go. Last year we had a "food" and a "drink" cooler. The drink cooler was what we kept any extra ice in and both kept cold easy. I figure, bicho and I will be combining most of our foods together so we'll be sharing two coolers ourselves.

Flame Effect Night Test #2

Tent heater... tent cooler... other

Camp evaporative cooler (aka portable AC that runs off of an icechest!)

Tent heater...

This seems like a really cool link to a whole bunch of guides from Alternitive Energy Camp. I'm trying to figure out how to make an effective evaporative cooler battery free.

Also, this is an interesting list of meal ideas and suggestions.

Here's a quote about keeping food cold that is interesting...
"I take three ice chests (for the 2 week stay) I try to keep them all in the shade.
1.Small one for the day of travel and the first day setting up: snacks, one light dinner and frozen water bottles to keep things cold and later drink
2. Medium one for the first two full days in camp
3. The large coffin (2'x6') plywood box lined with 2" Styrofoam, covered with 1 reflective fireblanket.
This is not opened until the third day when camp is set up and we can begin to enjoy our bounty. It's packed with ~100# dry ice and about 2 dozen frozen liter bottles of light lemonade, in addition to 2 - 5 gallon plastic containers of frozen water (the ice melts and the water is contained and drinkable).

Labeled frozen food is placed on one end near the dry ice. Fresh food (vegetables, eggs, butter, salami, and a little milk and cheese) are in assorted Tupperware in the end furthest away from the dry ice. Cans of soda and V-8 fill in the spaces. Very important to me is that everything is contained. - I dislike to have to deal with partially decomposing food floating in dirty cold water.

We don't need to buy ice and the last two years I have returned home with some ice still intact."

Bob and I got a food shrink wrapper (for lack of a better term for it) for our wedding, so we can encase meats and whatnot in plastic and keep them very fresh in dry ice.

Camp showers

This is a pretty cool thing, a water heater powered by propane. It sucks water from any water source and heats it.


Then you can use this tent to suspend the hose on the inside. This isn't particularly shamey- but is a good solution for height. Without having to get oversized PVC.


This also would work, 29.99 from this site.

FYI- this is posted by Jys, after setting up Marks ability to post.

Camp 54 map

Ok, so I'm slightly bored. Here is the tentitive layout for camp 54. I made this so when looking at it if somebody gets an idea, (like oh, we need this)... and will post on it.

Glow-sticks

Glow-sticks. Who wants to go in on some with us? You definitely need them so you don't get hit by cars or bikes (or get yelled at by irate passers-by). If interested I'm going to be looking into L-wire as well. Will post about that later.
Bob and I will be making our order at the end of June.
This site seems to be very cheap and has good deals.


Glow necklaces are $20.00 for 50. $70.00 for 200.

Glow bracelets are $10.00 for 100 or $45.00 for 500



Glow sticks are 50 for $17.50 or $125.00 for 500.

Glowey mouths are totally cheesy- but we'd like to get some anyway. They are 24 for $11.76.
This site has funny glowey beer mugs, $3.00 a piece.

Also, this site has glow-paint which is supposed to charge from sunlight and stay glowey for 24 hours. This might be fun to paint a sign out of. Basically it's $2.50 per tube.

Bob and I want to get 100 necklaces, 100 bracelets, 50 (or less) glow sticks and some glowey mouths. We'll probably get the beer mugs as well as the paint.

woooo! addemendum.

First order of business:
http://www.burningman.com/themecamps/07_camp_vill_number.html
We're registered for 11-14 people so we get a little extra dust room which will probably be absorbed by neighbors. I'm the contact person but they somehow didn't register me on the jackrabbit speaks. So I don't know who our placer is yet but they never have that info before late july.

Bicho and I are responsible for the flame effects: our third contact is Bob. When we both die in a horrible ball of fire, bob it is your responsibility to make excuses as to why we were doing what caused said horrible ball of fire as well as clean up our ashes.

As far as travel goes, lets see what Fib figures out with that 6 person van. Tight quarters won't be an issue as long as nobody creates unneeded drama, so be prepared to bring headphones to ignore someone getting on your nerves. I am expecting to drop about 500$ on gasoline and travel expenses.

Further expenses we need to discuss. I believe Jys and Bob are grabbing materials for another dome - that means we have two nice ones. We NEED a shower of some sort. I don't want to be on my knees taking a fucking shower, but my equipment budget is blown entirely on getting us solar power, lights and music. I don't care if it's covered or not, but I'm going to require that we have grey-water evap pond (black tarp & 2x4s) and that it stands over 6 feet from the shower nossel. Somebody else should pony up to this. Bob and Jys already grabbed the TRUCK for gods sake. I'm thinking that some of you playa-nubs should buy what we point at, who's up for that?

there and back again

As it stands now we have 7 people with tickets that probably want to camp at camp54. Me, Bob, Mark, Michael, Bicho, Jimmy and Jen. Have not had any official information as to Jen's travel plans.
I've heard faint rumblings that Jon and Gary might come, but they need to decide very soon to be taken into consideration.
Other years I have gone have been excessively chaotic when planning because we counted hypothetical people into our plans. As my goal for Burning Man continues to be "get bigger and better" each year, I only want to focus on planning for people who are courteous enough to plan ahead.

Of course in the below spreadsheets I take a number of different attendees into consideration for the sake of comparison.

I've heard many suggestions as to how we should get out there. Buying a bus is one option. Bob and I have the truck, and tentively plan on renting a 6' by 12' trailer from Uhaul. We could have Bicho and Michael ride together in one car with Mark, Jen and Jimmy in the other. Or if Jen's travel plans do not include our group Bitcho, Mark, Michael and Jimmy could ride together in one car and put all of our other stuff in another car.
Following are a group of graphs that math out the cost of each option, gas wise. All gas guesstimates are at $3.50 per gallon. The total mileage is assumed to be 3400.
Each option presumes that we add up the total amount of gas cost of the entire trip, all cars included, and divide by the number of people going. This means that the burden of gas does not become uneven, and allows us to divide our goods into many different vehicles without possible hurt feelings over money.

The first spreadsheet assumes we use the truck and some number of cars. Option 1 lists the cost if 7 people go in our caravan. Option 2 lists the cost if only 6 people go in our caravan and we take the truck and only one car.


Obviously if we decide that we need to take 3 cars, like option1 but only 6 people are going in our caravan the cost will be 481.60 for gas per person. Likewise if Jon or Gary decide to go (or both) the total using Option 1 (assuming we take the same number of vehicles) will be $361.65 and $321 respectively.

The next spreadsheets list the cost if we were to (as a group) purchase a school bus. Obviously these numbers would vary according to how much the bus (and licensure, insurance etc) would be. I assume here that the price of the bus is $2000.00 and that is gets 8 mpg. (This total may be a little high some websites I read said they avg. 5mgp). Also, school buses take diesel, the price of which seems to fluctuate more rapidly than regular gas.

For some reason I forgot to total the price of gas for 7 people on the bus. The price would be $498.00.
Using the above information we see that the bus option only makes sense with 9 or more people going in our group. However, I wonder how much stuff we could get into the bus. I've got a short-bus on my mind, I'm not sure how much a full-sized bus might cost. Also, I suspect that you need a special license to drive a full-sized bus.
If we get a short bus we may need to rent a trailer and take the truck as well. This means that the price per person doesn't make sense again until around 11 people are going.

My personal opinion is that the bus is a really cool idea, but probably not doable this year. Bobby and I, having just purchased a new car, cannot buy a bus ourselves. This means somebody else would have to take the reigns on getting info about buses/licensure etc.
Also, as Michael said, I would be afraid to put all of our eggs in one basket. An old bus may not work very well, and may need alot of mechanical upkeep and might just break down on the way there. Our truck is brand new, so barring any severe misfortune will work great there and back again. Also we have at our disposal several very travelable cars.

That being said, it'd be pretty cool to have a burning man bus. If somebody wants to look at it, send me links and whatnot so we can further discuss it on the blog.

Camp 54

This is a blog to post all of the stuff related to the planning of Burning Man 2007 from Lawrence KS to Black Rock City in August.