Pioneer Festival 1
Sep. 24th, 2011 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoTire still holding pressure this morning. A good sign, I hope.
Gary and Rob had a stage performance to give at the Boone County Pioneer Festival this afternoon, and I tagged along. I enjoy that event and in spite of threatening weather and cool temperatures, it was still good. While they tuned up I made a round to look at exhibitors, re-enactors, and vendors as well as the many historical "settler's gardens" they have on the grounds. These are kitchen gardens maintained to show what immigrants from various nations might have planted. I toured the Norwegian, German, Scottish, and American plots. The Norwegian was best, not only well-kept but they had chickens running loose in it to keep down the bugs and scratch up the earth. The American garden was also quite tidy. All were very productive, with lots of beans, squash, tomatoes, and eggplants in evidence. There are two original wood cabins, or mostly original, that were recovered from where they had been built up into larger houses later, leaving them entirely encapsulated. (I had never heard of such a thing until I first saw these a few years ago. They are very well preserved, even down to the marks on the walls where shelves were hung and furniture rubbed.
There are many re-enactors playing the roles of trappers, traders, surveyors, and various craftsmen. I took some photos, but will wait to post until after tomorrow because we plan to return so Gary can walk through the exhibits too.
We came back to Woodstock for lunch and then dropped Rob off at the train station. I went grocery shopping while Gary did barn chores, and found the price of gasoline down to $3.59, the lowest it has been since last March, but a year ago it was more like $2.79 so it has quite a way to go. Now a pie made from leftovers is in the oven and we are going to have supper. Haywagon is in the arena but still not unloaded. Somehow that has to fit into tomorrow, I guess.
Gary and Rob had a stage performance to give at the Boone County Pioneer Festival this afternoon, and I tagged along. I enjoy that event and in spite of threatening weather and cool temperatures, it was still good. While they tuned up I made a round to look at exhibitors, re-enactors, and vendors as well as the many historical "settler's gardens" they have on the grounds. These are kitchen gardens maintained to show what immigrants from various nations might have planted. I toured the Norwegian, German, Scottish, and American plots. The Norwegian was best, not only well-kept but they had chickens running loose in it to keep down the bugs and scratch up the earth. The American garden was also quite tidy. All were very productive, with lots of beans, squash, tomatoes, and eggplants in evidence. There are two original wood cabins, or mostly original, that were recovered from where they had been built up into larger houses later, leaving them entirely encapsulated. (I had never heard of such a thing until I first saw these a few years ago. They are very well preserved, even down to the marks on the walls where shelves were hung and furniture rubbed.
There are many re-enactors playing the roles of trappers, traders, surveyors, and various craftsmen. I took some photos, but will wait to post until after tomorrow because we plan to return so Gary can walk through the exhibits too.
We came back to Woodstock for lunch and then dropped Rob off at the train station. I went grocery shopping while Gary did barn chores, and found the price of gasoline down to $3.59, the lowest it has been since last March, but a year ago it was more like $2.79 so it has quite a way to go. Now a pie made from leftovers is in the oven and we are going to have supper. Haywagon is in the arena but still not unloaded. Somehow that has to fit into tomorrow, I guess.
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Date: 2011-09-25 02:23 am (UTC)Unfortunately it will probably be some time before a road trip is possible, but I certainly hope someday I could swing over and join the hugged-by-a-clydesdale-librarian club, heh.
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Date: 2011-09-25 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-25 04:15 pm (UTC)They are amid a large upscaling in their facilities for both prototyping and productive fabrication to let them churn out their matured-design machines regularly for sale to help fund the rest of the development. Marcin Jakubowski, the project founder and essentially project director, recently announced they are on track to acquiring the $1-$2 million total he has estimated the complete GVCS prototyping will require.
At least one of the builders (who had a 1-month project visit, as I am about to embark on, but had to return to complete a semester of school) who learned all the nuances of a couple of the machines (especially the Compressed Earth Block Press) is inheriting a family-owned fabrication shop in California, where she plans to build the designs and sell them commercially which is, of course, fully allowed and encouraged under the open source development model and will bring professional machinist experience and eyes to help refine the design.
They are proceeding one machine at a time, but are hampered by the fact they do not yet have full and complete documentation and blueprints on how to build the machines they have already prototyped, a role I seem to be able to fill, especially as I figure out ways to collaborate with a CAD team; I can focus primarily on getting the specifications and the CAD team members can build the models in parallel (alongside myself; I am not as experienced and, unfortunately, will be a bit hampered by the fact their off-grid facility will only be able to support the power consumption of my laptop which does not have a lot of computing power for CAD work), enabling a documentation set (which includes the CAD models, of course) to be completed much faster.
An overall shortage of manpower on the actual site has hurt the director's time and resources to commit to managing the project, something he has admitted, and he has had to shut down some project communication because his time has become too thin to filter out the many messages being written on the project forums. I'm hoping to find folk who can help filter through and summarize the good ideas from some persistently non-constructive noise from some users.
There is a lot of excitement, and hopefully with the facilities expansion and more fabricators to do a lot of the work, the director will be able to re-focus on the open source model. As I, along with collaborators over the Interenet, start completing the documentation, that builds an information bridge that will enable other teams to form and build the machines and that will help refine the designs developed from the Missouri center. I know citing the benefits of open source development would be preaching at the choir to you, though. :)
I certainly hope I'll be able to make the trek out there for a visit before long. Its been a powerful lifting of my spirit to find a project and a place I am useful to, something that I certainly have lacked in the three years I have been out of work.
*paw-hugs the Clyde*