LiftPort Staff Blog

another email exchange with a new volunteer. owen will be working on capturing the demo event – in vid, pictures, audio and personal impressions. he is gonna have his hands full. it will be a great event – and if you are in the seattle area (or anywhere for that matter) and want to come out – let me us know (rsvp to info@liftport.com).

On May 21, 2007, at 2:23 PM, (snip) wrote:
PS:

The other SE talk pics will follow for sure, and yes, you have permission to use them!

(snip)

Thanks.

And I would like to shoot more at the public demo, if I can tag along.

Yes, please do ‘tag along’. We can designate you as our ‘historian’.

Your role will be many fold, though. We don’t let people just sit around and gawk, it is a working assignment.
1) Pictures (duh!)
Lots and lots of pictures. Set up, deployment, success, and failure – you capture it all. These will all be posted to our flickr.com account.

2) Audio
If you have an ipod/adaptor that can capture audio, great. If not, we will find one for you… there is plenty that happens that doesn’t really need a picture, but there is a lot of conversation going on. Instructions to the crew, conversations with spectators, and there is stuff that, if we fail, will be reviewed and perhaps used in litigation. But it is also a priceless component of our history, and will be another exhibit in our someday plan of a museum. We expect this to be another historic milestone in our reach for the stars. These will be posted to our blog.

3) Video
I think there will be cameras rolling anyway, with TV news crews. But they get to keep their footage. We need to make sure we have some of our own… we will post it to youtube.com of course, but also, need it for marketing materials too. Do you have a good digital camcorder?

4) Text notes
Everything that YOU think. Your impressions, thoughts, concerns, hopes, fears, ambitions. Whatever you are thinking and feeling. If you don’t understand something, ask a question (or many), and take notes on the answers. Scribble fast. The goal here is to capture the event – completely. You will transcribe the notes afterward, and post them to our wiki, along with everything else. Believe it or not, I value text above all else. Text is searchable, and we get for greater results from text than we ever get from pictures, video and audio combined. If the crowd asks something, make sure both the question and answer appear in the notes.

You will play a critical role at this event. The rest of the team are too busy with the effort of putting these tethered towers into the sky. We miss a lot of important stuff. That is why there is no good video our 1-mile effort, because no one was managing a camera or taking notes… you will NOT be working on the deployment. If it is a choice between a balloon floating off into the sky, or keeping your camera clicking – keep the camera clicking. Unless someone’s life is in danger, you are nothing but a conduit for information collection. You are not participant in the actual operations of the event. Clear? My team will also be informed of this. Your role is to collect the day’s events…

It will be a long day, starting early in the morning and ending late at night, when the last item is put away…

I have a compact 400mx3inch (ie f4.0) Mead Astro telescope for teleshots as well. Not a “Canon-Pro” caliber optical piece, but it may do.

Terrific. We are going to be pretty high up there (don’t ya just love saying: ‘we are all gonna be pretty high that day…’ so that will come in very handy. It is a swiftly moving target though, so you are gonna have to manage the motion of the ribbon, balloons and robot. It will be tricky. I have a lousy camera, and I am not very skilled in using it, so my results have been pretty weak.

I do not have proper releases for public use of the costume shots.

o.k. Cute to look at, but I will not post them.

But maybe I can see what I can do with at least the ones of that juicy babe from “Quadrant 42″ that was hanging out passing flyers in the lobby, as they have a web address, just gotta find it

Yikes! I didn’t see her before.

Don’t worry about it; I will just not post those. Still, eye candy is one of the reasons I attend SF Cons. I have met 3 really great girls at various cons. One of them turned pretty serious for a while… so, ya never know.

Thanks for your ongoing and lengthy support. We can finally use your talent on the team.

The data (vid, pics, sound and text) that you collect for this are the property of LPG, when it’s all done. However, now that you are on the team – if you can figure out how to sell or otherwise commercialize the data, I am happy to split it 70/30 (you get 70%). If LPG manages to sell or commercialize it, then the split is reversed, but we wont really be trying to do that, so if you want to make any money out of this, you will likely have to make your own effort.

That said, welcome to the team. More info to follow. You will have to blog whatever it is you are doing on the project, and soon, get a twitter.com account for microblogging about the project. (I am pretty relaxed about your content, so long as it follows the theme of ‘what did I do today, to build an elevator to space?”

_____________________________

Frank, edge,

(snip) should be plugged into the team – email, blog, wiki access.

you can see above, his ONLY and EXCLUSIVE role is as historian… the day of the event.

however, he is a pretty enthusiastic guy and happens to know a bit about weather and meteorology, too. (although that is a rusty skill) so he might be useful in some of the planning and development. maybe also involved with FAA permissions, too.

take care. mjl

—- Original Message —–
From: (snip)
To: Michael J. Laine
Sent: Monday, 21 May, 2007 14:17
Subject: Re: Greetings from your Photographer at Norwescon!

Hi Michael!

I have the last week of June scheduled as a vacation.
I can try to shift it, if you can give me some details about where and when this will happen – yes, I will have to check the web site too
I am quite rusty in my weather background, but I can try to be of help and least come up with some pointers and maybe even be of use, who knows.

Oh! And I had an idea about the ballon launches!

I have seen plenty of old reels related to Nasa etc and those huge launch vehicles they use for those huge blob balloons.
Here is something to try instead:
How about stuffing the balloons in a tube?
You inflate with a feeder line on one end of the tube, while gradually letting out more of the inflated portion on the other end.
That way you get a more manageable ‘hard’ bubble, instead of a large envelope that keeps flopping around until it starts tenting up.
In order to avoid damage from the envelope chafing through the tube as it is fed forward, the tube can also be segmented with clamps. Just open up a section at a time to release more of the inflated envelope.

You keep the finally inflated balloon under a master envelope with a rip cord to open up the master envelope for final release, when you get to say “Look at it fly….”

later

(snip)

—– Original Message —–
From: Michael J. Laine
To: (snip)
Sent: Monday, 21 May, 2007 12:19
Subject: Re: Greetings from your Photographer at Norwescon!

(snip),

thanks for the pictures!

more comments below.

On May 18, 2007, at 11:06 PM, (snip) wrote:
Hello Michael!

These may not be nice times for you as I would imagine from the news I am reading in the newsletter.

I am doing alright. It’s a little rough, but we have a plan that I think will work. It’s going to be a race against the clock, because we have enough cash to get us through to September. so, what we have to do, is work out the balloon systems, and sell them. the ‘tethered towers’ plan will carry us through, but it is going to be tough.

On the other hand I would like to say that it is people like you who keep dreams alive.
And that gives somebody like me a kick in the ass to do something

glad we could help! don’t worry about us, we will be fine. and it is the vision of the future that we are fighting for. the fight is worth the effort!

I will have to order a bag of magnets, as I have a few ideas to pursue myself!
They may even come in handy for the elevator project, who knows

not sure what you are talking about here, but good luck with whatever your project is.

Well, it took a while to dig through more than 600 images I shot and “develop” the RAW files into jpg pics.

thanks for these. I just set up a flickr account. its not ready to be promoted yet, because I have too many images and they are not organized or anything. but, I was hoping you would give me permission to post these shots. I am trying to collect as many images of the space elevator as I can, and collect them into this site. if you have other SE images, I’d love to have them, too.

I am mainly testing your address right now, but if this one doesn’t bounce, then get ready for a few shots I liked a lot

it worked fine. send more.

Maybe my little camera outfit can be of assistance for PR purposes on weekends, or I can take a sick day once or twice in the year … or three or four times, as long as the job to finance this doesn’t evaporate in the process

it would be great to have you along for our mid-june demo… we usually have someone assigned as a ‘historian’, who records ‘what’s going on’. images, video, and taking notes of the events. if you want to tag along, that would be great. watch our blogs and newsletter for exact details. we don’t know them, yet, because we are waiting on approval from the FAA, navy and Air force.

So – here is the first (reduced quality for quick sending) batch of samples.
Some are cropped.

if you are going to give me permission to post them, then please edit/crop as needed. I still have 2000+ images to post, edit, tag, organize into sets and collections, date and locate on a map… its a long, laborious process.

There are more.
Please pardon the fuzzy stuff, as they were made without flash and under low light
More corrections and improvements are possible yet.

Let me know if you want ANY of these in their full 3.5 MB quality:

how many are we talking about. yes, I would like ALL of them, that relate to the SE. and if there are some random ‘cute girls in costumes’ shots to add a little color to the set, that would be fun too. I DONT need 600…

take care. mjl

p.s. if memory serves, you have a meteorological background, right? wanna chat with me about that… we could use a hand in that area.

thanks. mjl

Michael J. Laine
President
LiftPort Group

245 4th Street
Suite 508
Bremerton WA, 98337

360-377-0623

www.liftport.com

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Written by Michael Laine and posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under 1. Nuts and Bolts, 1.1. Science, 1.2. Technology, 2. Communicate, 3. Capitalize, 3. Support, 3.1. Media / Social, 4. Coordinate, Balloon Lift Systems, LiftPort Group, LiftPort Robotics, MJL Personal Comments, Miscellaneous, Pop Reference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.