While I was down in the bay area, I spent some time visiting my optometrist. My vision is deteriorating (it’s still not horrible…but its way worse than it was ~3 years ago) and snowboarding without something to correct my vision is far more exciting than it is fun.

While waiting for the follow up to my contacts fitting, I was flipping through a car magazine that was laying there, and I came across this:

Joe Harmon is a grad student in industrial design at North Carolina State University. This supercar is his thesis project and it’s made (almost) entirely out of wood. Not carved from a giant block, but made of wooden composites, cut from veneer, woven on a loom, and then infused with resin. It’s super cool, super strong, and just all around neat. Especially if you’re a materials nut.

Some really cool stuff:

Three things.
1) Happy New Year everybody! Hope yours was as great as mine.
2) As of 90 minutes ago, I’m back in Portland
3) @Zach Rose: Baked fries are GREAT if you spray them lightly with olive oil and bake them on a rack. This is also known as air frying and its… its the bees knees. It’s just tops.

(edit: Okay, I lied, there’s a fourth thing. I’ve got about 3-5 blog posts waiting in the wings to be written and posted. Lots of cool stuff. Yep)

Happy holidays one and all!

I’d like to share with you the tale of my escape from Portland.

Between Friday and Sunday 8~10 inches of snow fell on Portland, royally screwing things up. The cold killed off my already weak car battery leaving me in the hands of public transit for getting around. Sunday this was fine, but on Monday, an hour after I arrived at work, service on my route was cancelled. In order to get home, I had to take a bus that got me within a mile of my house, and then hiked the rest of the way home.

The snow was deep. (And largely non-shovelled and non-compressed.)

Tuesday the snow had stopped falling, but the roads were still covered in snow. My bus route was still cancelled. Airport shuttles were not running, and taxis would only pick you up if you were medical personnel trying to get to a hospital.

Tuesday also happened to be the day I was flying out. This lack of easy transit nearly had me thinking I was going to have to hike to the airport, which would have…well, it would have sucked hard, and probably would have kept me from leaving. After some serious research into the status of various bus and MAX lines, I eventually found a way to get to the airport.

It took a half mile snow hike (with luggage), a bus down Lombard to the MAX yellow line, a shuttle that was running to supplement the yellow line because the switches were frozen, two more MAX lines (blue to Gateway, Red to the airport) and a total of two hours to get to the airport.

Thankfully I gave myself 7 hours to get from my house to catch my flight, so I still had 5 hours to kill. Also working in my favor: I wasn’t the only one who had a hard time getting to the airport.

Because of this… shall we say… shabby attendance, I managed to get on standby for an earlier flight, and despite the fact that people had been able to fly out of Portland for the three days prior, I managed to get on the flight, and arrive in San Francisco an hour before my original flight was scheduled to leave.

Which was great… since when I later checked my flight, it got delayed three and a half hours.

Have I mentioned that I’ve succumb to twitter?

…Well, I have.

I love how often the internet seems to bring me to great coincidences.

A link from Diesel Sweeties brought me to this episode of BoingBoing TV which features a studio visit with Tim Biskup.

This got me looking at Biskup’s work, which I love. (His texturing and simplistic shapes remind me a lot of another painter who’s work I love: Shag. Gotta love artists with similar influences!)

I particularly like his pieces with his recurring character Helper. In the studio visit he describes Helper as “this conflicted deamon” and I think he does an amazing job capturing that.

Then, after drooling over various pieces, and wishing I could afford large prints by awesome people, I came across this photo a friend put up on facebook.

That’s right, Colin Williams has a Helper star. How sweet is that?

Hey Dustin, have you seen this book? Could be interesting to see how someone else approached a similar topic.

For those of you that don’t know Dustin and his work, lately he’s been doing a series of animations based on local missed connections ads. They’re pretty sweet.

A considerable amount of snow fell today (no idea the actual depth) so I bunkered down at home and watched a bunch of movies I had yet to see. (Can you believe I hadn’t seen 40 year old virgin before now?)

I also disassembled semaphore-bot v2.0 and built a robot arm out of its servos, aluminum rods, and rubber bands. It’s got 3 points of articulation, but currently no hand. Unfortunately my arduino is in my studio at the stag. … so it’s not currently running.

I haven’t one any drawing in a few months, but tonight the urge hit me. So I sat down and drew this up.

Definitely got what I was going for, but I really want to see this printed large, as part of a series.

I’ve seen this thing before, but all the information about it had been in Japanese. Good to see it making the rounds on the internet in English.

Once you get past the initial “I wonder if they ever used that tech in a sex toy” impulses (who said that? …not me…no sir), there’s still a lot of interesting things going on with that remote.

[via Make] [via NextNature] [via The Popular Uncanny]

(Normally I only link to the first site I read it on, but this trail is great because The Popular Uncanny has info on another project from that show: fruit skinned juice boxes)