Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

ARGH!

Fuckers. Especially the Darlingtons.

Oh well.

The Mitochondrion isn’t going to be at Kiwiburn. I think I could get the current version to stumble into life, but the next debugging step would involve taking it to pieces and fiddling with them. The way it’s made, this would be getting towards as much work as changing the design and rebuilding it properly. So, I’m going to do it properly. This will take a while.

But, doing this for the third time round should be much faster, coz I’m made many of the mistakes already, and learnt from them. Like: hardwiring batteries is dumb, surface mount soldering isn’t that hard, lead-free solder is not ideal, IDC connectors are awesome, and just coz you can do 0.25 mm wide copper tracks, doesn’t mean you should.

So plan is to have the Mark 3 working by the Juggling Festival, end of March. Also, you should go to the Juggling Festival. Put it in your diary. There will be hooping.

This did make me realise that I’m not doing this for Kiwiburn, I’m doing this for me. The new design should also reduce the chip count from 35 to 13, which is only going to make life easier. Still, you will have to put up with me grumbling about not having it there.

There is simply no way around just staring at the thing. This is broken up by occasional muttering and less occasional poking. But mainly, it’s just staring.

But hey, I’m having a week off work, so kindly drag me away from the muttering and force me to construct whole sentences. Maybe even force me to drink beverages.

I’ll be sending an order off to T-Nation this week. That’s where the Spike comes from, amongst other goodies.

Let me know what you want by tomorrow night.

Casinos – they’re toxic places, at best they count as a tax on the rich and stupid, at worst… urgh! And Sky City casino at 4 am? Not a happy punter in the place.

But fuck it, they were paying me to be there. And paying about 40 other performers, half of whom were from Wellington. So I dressed up as a bee and hung upside down in Sky City atrium for four 20 minute sets. Tissu is had work anyway, but Auckland, so hot & humid, plus lots of people equals me hanging in straddle turnover, I look down and there’s a pool of my sweat directly below me. Mmm… sexy.

Being in the atrium, there’s people on the ground below, on the balconies all around and above, and being New Year, it was pretty busy. Hence people! Argh! Looking at me? More arghh!

Did big climbs and moves up high to start each set, coz by the end of twenty minutes, I wanted to be good and low, coz I was too shagged to be safe.

And then there was much partying, with many astoundingly good dancers.

Also, the atrium looked like this:
Oooh, fluoro flowers!