Non-Profit Orgs, Ramblings

Long story short

01_Currency_SymbolsYesterday was a strange day. I went to a meeting for a contract renewal. There have been some personality conflict issues over the last few months and I was under the impression that the contract was not going to be renewed. In fact it was renewed, and modified with an unsolicited 10% increase!

In this unstable economy it is nice to have annual contracts, even if they have quarterly reviews. All of my other contracts are month-to-month which makes things a bit too loosey-goosey for my tastes.

Any way, the big nut is covered. Today, it’s off to Maker Faire for a bit of steamy goodness.

~FBJ

Development, Events, Projects

SteamFaire

PromoPosterMini250x320As previously posted, I have been kicking around an Idea for a con/faire for some time now (3-4 years at least) now that I have come across a genre that I can sink my teeth into and feel good about extending the effort, I am moving forward with SteamFaire. I have not yet put down much of the data rolling about in my head. This is something I will be working on a lot over the next few weeks to get the ball rolling.

If Steampunk is your thing, and you would be interested in a SteamFaire check out the site at SteamFaire.com

~FBJ

Development, Events, Projects

A new project is developing

AirshipPilotAs many of my friends and associates know, I have been producing events for many years. Over the years I have toyed with the idea of producing an annual historical reenactment event. This is a tough field to get involved in with most of the established genre.

There is a genre that does not currently have that many organized events devoted to it. There are hundreds of fans in the local area, and many more in the region. I don’t want to go into it to much right now, but I am developing a position sheet and project outline. Once the paperwork is done I will post them and move forward with more info on this site.

I will go so far as to say that the concept is for a Steampunk Faire to be held somewhere in the greater San Francisco Bay Area with the possibility of additional events along the west coast or nationally. Another aspect is a Guild association of some kind. The guild portion I need to ruminate on a bit more.

I am very familiar with kind of operation after years of convention and ren faire work in all levels from volunteer to board member, and from actor to guild master and guild association member. There are many drawbacks to the fire format over the convention format, however, there are a lot of benefits to this direction as well. It sound crass to many of the participants when you start talking money and cost / benefit analysis, but it is a business, and I do intend to make a profit, otherwise the event wouldn’t keep going.

A group up in Washington state is starting a convention in the genre, but they opted to go the 501(c) route. Having been down that road and knowing what ultimately happens, I am not going to contact them for collaboration as I original wanted to. I wish them well and will do my best not to interfere with there operation. I do want to go to there event.

~FBJ

Development, Internet

Code Crazy

Recently I have been working on enhancing my coding and site design skills. I decided to delve deeper into PHP and CSS. Over the weekend I built a test server and installed an Apache web server, SQL Data Base server, and PHP. After testing the servers functionality I began writing and running some BETA applications.

2014-01-04_coding

So far things are running well. I hope to begin integrating PHP applications on several web sites soon. I have also been looking at incorporating applications into the WordPress blog model. I will start development of some of these here on this site.

For now, back to the books.

~FBJ

Filmmaking, Media Production, Writing

A Book Project

Motion Picture Budget Book and
Motion Picture Budget Workbook

topsheet

This is a set of books I have been working on for some time now. The books are intended to help film students and new producers understand the budget process and provide a foundation for budget development. The Workbook is available here in its preliminary format for your perusal.

Even if you are not involved in production this workbook will give you an idea as to what goes into making a major motion picture.

Please feel free to post any comments you may have on this project.

~FBJ

Ramblings

Closing MySpace Accounts

no_myspaceI set up MySpace accounts for several businesses with the intent of promoting them, in part, with social networking. After 3 months of constant porn spamming I killed all of the MySpace accounts. I have accounts on several other social networks, Livejournal, Spaces, Facebook, Blogspot, just to name a few. I have never gotten so much in-your-face porn spam on any other site.

When the net was still an infant, back in the USENET days, there was lots of porn, but you had to go looking for it, It wasn’t hard to find, It was actually rather easy to find. It wasn’t however in-your-face. Okay, when the web was introduced if you went to a porn site you got tons of pop-ups and the like, but you where already looking for it. Then there was the email porn spam, that got real annoying real fast. That was reaching out to everyone, but more often that not it was text only.

What I don’t get is why they spend so much time and money on social network sites. If you are looking for porn its easy to find. If you are not looking for it, and you are doing something in particular, will you stop what you are doing when you get spammed with it? Not me. If I wanted to find it I would go looking for it. If I come across it in a place I conduct business, I look for a new neighborhood to conduct business.

It’s a business, I get that. It’s advertising, I get that too. I even get that a LOT of people use the social networking sits to hook up, in the eyes of the porn industry, that is a prime market space. What I don’t get is the blanket spamming that they do. I haven’t seen it on other social networking sites. Why on MySpace? What is the fascination with doing it there. Are they paying MySpace to not shut them down? There is a report as spam feature. I used it a lot. I have gotten friend invites and the account is closed before I view it. Why MySpace?

I guess the only important thing for me is that I don’t play in that neighborhood any more. There are plenty of other business friendly streets to walk and enjoy the view.

~FBJ

Development, Writing

Daedalus Development

Writing, for me, is a complicated process. Alternate history requires a knowledge of history, alternate technology requires a knowledge of period technology, add historical figures, and this brings on a whole new level of study.

As you can most likely imagine I have been immersed in research for the last couple of days for the Daedalus project. One thing that kept me up last night was an idea for a steam powered mechanical/electrical power generation system.

The power generation system is a single boiler plumbed to multiple, steam turbines, lined up in series. The turbines have a direct drive gear with a flywheel and clutch, below the turbine is a gear box that allows an operator change gear ratios or to a different PTO (Power Take Off ) system, gear, screw, belt, or directly to a rotor/stater generator for electrical power generation. This provides a modular configuration making it easy to add engines or change the configuration of power transfer without shutting down the entire system. Very flexible, and maintainable.

With turbines lined up in series, pairs could be assigned to critical tasks, it would then be easy to pull one engine down for maintenance. Clutch the engine in need of service out, and its mate in, now you can switch back and forth and disassemble and service ether one without loosing a beat.

By introducing a secondary boiler you can create a level of redundancy that provides a maximum of reliability, efficiency and mechanical/electrical power output. This whole operation could provide mechanical and electrical power for a large facility with only a few people in the engine room.

A different configuration using the same components would be a distributed drive system moving the engines close to the equipment requiring power and plumbing the steam to the engines. Although this reduces the mechanical complexities of power transfer it is inherently more dangerous. Running high pressure steam pipes and steam turbine engines throughout the facility is just asking for trouble.

In ether case, the most complex part of the system is the delivery of the mechanical energy to the equipment in need of it. The placement of the engine room and the layout are totally dependent on the operations of the facility.

Ah, Industrial Revolution period engineering. Looks like fun to me.

~FBJ

Ramblings

Daedalus

A friend posted a comment in her blog about Steampunk Star Wars the other day. I have been thinking about the genre ever since. I spent just about all of today doing period research, genre research, story development and just a whole lot of relative poking about on Wikipedia. I did come across some very interesting things.

sp_z-group-hero

On Wikipedia, under analog computers is the Antikythera mechanism, discovered in ship wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete. It was found in 1900. This item dates back to 100-150 BCE! That is an old computer.

I have always been fascinated by this genre, I just didn’t know it had a name. I love history, archeology, mechanology, steam power, and the period most commonly associated with steampunk, the Victorian era. I had several ideas for a story, and decided, this is a direction I would like to go. So, off I go.

Some of the basics have already been put to paper, as of yet there is no plot or hero’s journey, Just a very rough outline. I do have a plucky pair of historical protagonists with a cadre of cohorts picked out, along with a few antagonists ranging from government agents to industrial tycoons.

There are several directions this can go.  I will just have to keep developing at least a short story along each of these lines. Once I get something less vaporous, at least a solid outline or short, I will post it.

😉
~FBJ

Site News

Site News

News of The Day 08:04:10

If you have been poking about it will be obvious, several web site/domains have been merged into this site. They include;

  • FlyBoyJon.com
  • RedSailFilms.com
  • WanzerAviation.com
  • WanzerGroup.com

The move to incorporate several domains into this site was to provide a central administrative system and to encourage more frequent updates and posts.

Now back to the project list,
~FBJ

Aviation

G1000 Goes Synthetic!

The Future Has Arrived

Ever since the G1000 hit the streets, I knew this was only a couple of steps away. About this time last year I was telling a friend that they would see this before summer 2008. The big deal is that it is an STC’d software update, not a hardware one.

I have always been a big fan of Garmin, but this shows why. Way to go big G!

This doesn’t mean we, as pilots, can get lazy, it does mean we can be more efficient. My hope is that advances like this make us safer in the skies. My fear, is that pilots will become complacent. This is an amazing tool. But it is only that, a tool, not a replacement for common sense, training and skill.

If you go out and by an aircraft with a G1000, LEARN the equipment, learn it well, and use it as a tool for safety and skill.

The following is copied from Flying Magazine’s e-newsletter.

Garmin’s Shocker: Synthetic Vision Has Arrived

The FAA has granted supplemental type certification for Garmin’s three-dimensional Synthetic Vision Technology (SVT). The system displays high-resolution, 3D graphic depictions of terrain, runways, obstacles and even traffic on the primary flight display (PFD). The graphics replace Garmin’s previous blue-over-brown PFD depiction. The user-customizable system also incorporates highway-in-the-sky guidance with rectangular boxes depicted on the PFD, and a flight path marker-which clearly indicates where the aircraft’s flight path is taking it. Garmin said SVT should be available in July for aircraft equipped with its G1000 and G900X (experimental only) systems, and G1000-retrofitted King Air C90s some time next year. No hardware changes are needed for the SVT upgrade, but the software changeover will have to be made at a Garmin dealer.

~FBJ

Amateur Radio, Emergency Communications, Traffic Handling and more