Well at long last, it’s done. Another 3.5 hours today brings the total time spent on this project to 23 hours. It’s done and it’s a huge model and I could not transport it with all of the pieces on the top. I had to transport it from the loft to it’s final resting place in the office and then assemble the last pieces. Here it is right before transport.

Once it was in place on top of the bookshelf, I put the last pieces in place and here are some shots to show it off…

I’m glad it’s over. Now to find another project…

Well here we are a week after my evening with the 103.5F fever and I’m home and although I’m still not right (lots of coughing and no voice still), I’m just glad to be here. I spent a little more time with the Death Star this evening. The progress you see below is a combination of two nights, one before I left for Kentucky and this evening. I did not get to take a picture of my progress before, but it was largely a repeat of part 5, tho the attaching it to the model went much better. It took another 3.5 hours to assemble and attach this section, bringing my total time on the project before this evening to 17.5 hours.

This evening I put another 2 hours into it building the front belt of the model and found my first missing piece. It’s a non standard piece that I’ve never seen before. Two nubs long by one nub wide it had a finished end on it.

I replaced it with a standard 2×1 brick without the finished end. If it is terribly noticeable when it’s on the shelf, I’ll swap that piece with a piece in the back.

Here’s a look at the finished work so far. We’re at 19.5 hours and the last pieces don’t look like they’ll be too difficult to get done this weekend, but who knows!

Here I am, stuck in the Cleveland Airport, my flight to home is delayed by a quick moving but mess weather system over Philadelphia. I’m tired, and I want to be home. After a week out of town, I just want to be back with the boyfriend, my cat, my bed, etc. Add to that, the fact that I’m totally voiceless. My voice started to go yesterday morning, but after delivering three more classes, it’s totally gone. Can’t speak above a whisper. I had to POINT at the Sprite Zero can that I wanted on the plane!

Thank goodness for EVDO and and iPod full of Pinoyboy recommended movies!

I know this is a few days late, but I decided to let the product announcements sink in and settle before writing a little something about them. Remember this is my blog and these are just my thoughts, I’m hardly a tech expert and I am an avid Apple fan boy.

Right off the bat Steve talked about Time Capsule. Time Capsule is a Airport Extreme (Apple’s wireless router) and a hard drive. It’s intended to be used with Time Machine, Leopard’s Built in back up software. It lets you use Time Machine to back up your hard drive wirelessly to the Time Capsule. I think this is a great idea, I am not in need of one, but I’m tempted to talk my parents into it. The price seems good to me. The Airport Extreme Base Station is normally about 180 USD and the hard drives bump it up, but reasonably so, 299 for a 500GB Time Capsule and 499 for a 1TB (1000GB) Time Capsule. Not bad. I just hope that Apple also allows for people with Airport Extreme’s to hook up their existing USB hard drives to to this wireless backing up.

Second, he mentioned the iPhone update to 1.1.3. I’m pretty excited about this update. I’ve been waiting for multi-person SMS (where was this on New Years Even when I had to txt everyone in my family?), the new locate me feature and drop pin features on Google Maps look great, and of course the customize home screen is one of the major reasons I jailbreak my phone. However, I’m not sure I want to update just yet. I never feel this way with my laptops and updates but, since I use my iPhone for so much… I kind of want to wait until I get home and try it out. I also want to see if anyone has any issues with it.

He also mentioned that they are bringing the same features to the iPod touch, basically making it an iPhone without the phone. They also will have Mail, Maps, Notes Stocks and Weather. All new iPod touches ship with these apps, current owners have to pay 20USD to upgrade their iPod touches. I thought this was a bit unfair as they have not raised the price of the iPod touch by 20USD, but I guess if you want those features, it’s a small price to pay.

Third he spoke about iTunes. iTunes 7.6 is out, it allows for manual managing of my iPhone (yay!) and add lyrics and such it as well. More importantly you can now rent movies from iTunes. 30 days to start watching it, and 24 hours to finish it once you do. I think the 30 days is great, but I think it should be 48 or 72 hours to finish watching the movie once you start it. One cool thing is that you can watch these movies on any current iPod (Classic, nano, touch) or iPhone. You can even transfer it over to your portable device in the middle of watching it, rentals are 3.99 for a new release (available 30 days after DVD release) and 2.99 for library titles. Not bad.

This led into Apple TV take 2. Finally, you no longer need your Mac or PC to stream your files to it. You can buy music and movies from the iTunes Store, download podcasts, look at flickr pics and .Mac photo galleries. You can still use it to do the streaming thing but now you can rent movies in HD from the iTunes Store right on the Apple TV. 4.99. They also lowered the price of the Apple to 229 and 329. All good things. I just wish that it would also add some of the features announced for SlingCatcher. Basically I want to start a video on my Mac (ABC.com or Hulu or something) and stream that to my TV via Apple TV. Ahhh a boy can hope. Another good thing is that all these features will be available as a free download to all exisiting Apple TV owners.

Last but not least at all… is MacBook Air. MacBook Air is the thinnest laptop apple has ever made. It can fit into a inter office envelope. It’s an amazing feat and it’s an amazing entry into the subnotebook category. It’s got a super small version of the Core2Duo chip running at slower than MacBook speeds but that’s to be expected in a subnotebook. Also it has no DVD drive, but again that’s to be expected, the point of this machine is that it’s thin and light. A dream for a road warrior. It’s not cheap at 1799USD but then again SONY’s sub notebook costs 3000USD. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about it from people but remember this is not the laptop for you as your “only” or “primary” Mac. Could it be your primary Mac? Sure, but you have to understand WHAT the laptop’s limitations are, no DVD drive, smallish HD etc. It’s made to be your “on the road machine” while your iMac or MacPro is your primary machine.

I’ve been asked by several friends “When are you getting yours?” “Did you order an Air?”, so here’s my answer… I lust after it (who wouldn’t it’s only .76 inches thick!), and I’m dying to see and touch it, but… I cannot justify it. I live on my MacBook. It’s my main machine. A MacBook Air would just not fit into my current computing strategy. Plus 1799 is a lot to pay for a lappy that’s not my primary machine.

All in all, I think it was a great keynote. I like how he spent very little time doing a recap of how things were last year, which always seems to be filler, this year it was right into the products. I say more of that. Some have complained about the lack of the “One More Thing…”, but it did not bother me. With so many people paying attention to Apple these days, it’s getting harder for Apple to keep things totally secret, and as amazing a product as the MacBook Air is, people have been calling it for months, how can Steve say “one more thing… yeah you were right?”

This week is crazy, there are three events that I usually like to follow during this time of the year and this year all three converged into the ONE week, I’m absolutely busy and crazy with work. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m away from home this week and the 2008 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), the 2008 Australian Open and MacWorld 2008 are all happening this week. The NAIAS has been hard to follow during the day, as I’m teaching, tho I get a look at Autoblog every once in a while. The Australian Open has been hard to follow as every three hours it switches from ESPN2, which i have at the hotel, to the Tennis Channel, which I don’t. And the biggest disappointment of the day is the fact that the MacWorld Keynote starts at noon EST, and my class starts at 1PM EST, which means I get to see the news of the financial updates and maybe a product or two, but definitely not the “One more thing…”. Sigh.

Well at least I’m feeling better!

It wasn’t bad enough that this week I have a seven day business trip, or that it is over a weekend, or that I’m teaching on a Saturday at 8am, or that I’m missing the boyfriend’s birthday on Sunday, no all of that was not bad enuff, yesterday morning, on day number one of my trip, I got sick. I’m not talking a cold, I’m not talking the sniffles, I’m talking full on chills, fever, body aches, the whole nine.

It started with a sore throat yesterday morning, and then during the day it turned into aches, and a fever. I suffered thru the day and stopped off at the Walgreens onthe way back to the hotel to get supplies, Dayquil/Nyquil, Vitamin C, Zicam, everything. I also picked up a thermometer just to be sure of what my temp was. It started off at 101.5 F when I first took it at about 5pm. I took some Nyquil, had some food and went to bed before 8pm. I got up at about 1:30 AM to take another dose of Nyquil and took it and it was up to a whopping 103.5. Sick sick sick.

This morning it was down to more manageable 100.5 again so I decided to give teaching a shot this morning. It went okay tho my throat was very sore. I just have to make it thru the day and then I can get back to the hotel room and get back in bed. I hope I’m even better by tomorrow.

I’ve been remiss about updating my progress on the Death Star so here goes. I originally planned to post the part 4 update on New Year’s Day as I spent another about 2.5 hours working on it on New Year’s Eve while watching the Entourage marathon with the boyfriend (we’re so exciting it’s a shame!). This part of the model was kind of boring, repetitive building of the panel that made up the bottom portions of the backside of the Death Star:

As you can see, the model is now propped up against the spindles of the railing in our loft. It is simply too heavy to stand on it’s own at this point.

Part 5

Last evening, I decided that with my schedule for January (that’s another post for another time), I’d better get moving on this to try to get it done before my next trip. I had just remarked to Pinoyboy [link] and Mike P [link] about how disappointed I was in the difficulty of the model, that it had just rather easy so far, boy did I speak to soon. Last night brought the construction of a large mostly solid piece of the somewhat destroyed piece of the star. It was very complex and fragile and at one point, about half way through (about 2 hours), I had planned to go to bed and just finish some time this weekend, but I could not leave it partially done so I worked another hour and a half to complete the section:

click to see a larger version

All was going well until I noticed that the instructions call for TWO of these sections! I knew that there was no way in hell I was going to get another 3.5 hours of building done so I just wanted to attach this section to balance out the weight of the model so it wasn’t tipping over.

This was the trickiest part yet, this huge section needed to be attached to the main structure by four pegs fit into four holes. I gently tried to place the section onto the pegs but with the rest of the model bsically closed off by the outter shell, I had no leverage point and sadly to quote Pinoyboy… a crasha!

Yup, I shattered the base, and badly. I had to tear down the last three or four levels and rebuild. That took about a half hour and once again I tried to attach the section and this time, I got it attached but demolished a good portion of the lower part of the section. I had to very carefully rebuild (upside down no less!) the section again with no leverage point to seat the bricks! This model went from bland to challenging very quickly. But with a little perseverance and a lot of care:

It’s been about 14.5 hours since I started first sorting the pieces (which has made things MUCH easier) until this point where I think the model is about 50-60 percent complete. I’ll try to get some more done this weekend!