mykle systems labs

About 18 months ago I started using Zenbe Lists, a nifty list-manager system available for free from zenbe.com.  I liked everything about it: it was clean, fast, beautifully designed, and allowed me to organize and consult my many lists both on my phone and on my laptop.  I began to put more and more of my personal organization into it, but eventually I hit a wall: I found it didn’t scale well.  Furthermore it has a few bugs that I have trouble working around, and I slowly became aware that the developers have stopped developing it; it exists in a sad limbo of the nearly-awesome but dead.  So it’s with deep regret that I announce it’s time to jump ship. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reluctant to talk about the Columbia River Crossing project — the plan to replace a local hunk of Interstate 5 with a much larger, wider hunk — because I hate to preach to the choir.  I’ve naively assumed that all my Portland friends and neighbors are already lined up in opposition to any sprawl-enhancing freeway upgrade.  After all, this is the city that blocked the Mount Hood Freeway and rerouted I-5 off of the waterfront.   We hate this sort of thing, right?

But Portland has changed a lot in the last decade. We have more people, more cars, bigger suburbs and, I worry, less of a sense of local history, of how Portland became the great place it is.  So perhaps I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am that the CRC isn’t on everybody’s radar yet.  But I know I need to say something when perfectly intelligent friends of mine say to me, “Gee, Mykle, you sure are worked up about this CRC thing … tell me again what’s wrong with expanding the bridge?”

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I’ve found many online references to Bucky Fuller’s bamboo dome design, but no reports of anybody actually building it.  Here’s my impressions, and a few things I learned.  (But keep in mind that my dome fell over.  Caveat Surfator.)

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Even now, two weeks later, friends of mine are expressing to me their sympathy for LIGHTBAR, the way they might for a dead relative or pet.  People have asked me how I’m feeling, if I’m okay … call me dense but at first I thought they were offering to lift heavy objects for me.  I didn’t figure out until lately that people are worried about me personally.  But really, I’m fine.

The collapse of LIGHTBAR was somehow incredibly shocking and sad.  The most frequent text response I received was an N with twelve Os after it.  But sad as it was, it wasn’t so bad.  Nothing was damaged, nobody was hurt, no major financial loss was felt.  I happened to catch a bad cold right at the same time, but I feel fine now.  We missed out on three days of LIGHTBAR, but we had seven others under our collective belt.

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LIGHTBAR goes dark early this year …

WTF? Well, I knew there were problems.  I’ve already had to fix several broken struts, and there were one or two near the top of the dome that I couldn’t reach to fix properly.  Yesterday we had the heaviest rain and wind in a month.  Did my baggy roof tarp begin to take on water, and grow heavy?  Were the winds worse than I realized? I wonder if anybody else’s dome fell down last night.

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Sorry to keep you in suspense!  The cold I’m fighting has me too tired in the evenings to blog about the day’s events.  But to summarize …

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I know what you’ve been thinking:

“That guy’s dome is too big.”

I’ve been in denial.  I’m sorry.

I plotted out the 32 foot floor plan, and eyeballed the rest.  But that third dimension is a bitch.  I’m bumping and scraping against the limbs of our three mighty trees, but that’s not even the problem — limbs are flexible.  The problem is, I’m now touching the overhead wire that delivers the Internet to my next-door neighbors. I hardly need tell you, The Internet, what it would mean for my neighbors’ quality of life if I accidentally severed that wire.

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90% done now, and the thing is hee-yuge!  I wish it had an upstairs.

More than half of my time in the last three days was spent driving around town, picking up bamboo from the yards of my friends.  There are now six varieties of bamboo in play, with different diameters and colors and traits.  It could get messy, but it seems to be holding up well.

Yesterday I started Stage Seven before running out of duct tape again.  I’m off to the store for more, but I think I may actually have enough bamboo now, which means the frame will be done soon — soon like tomorrow!

Then I have to work out how to get the tarps onto it.  I can’t really climb it, and my ladder won’t reach the top, but I’ve got some ropes and some ideas.

That’s a lie — my worker-elves and I spent some extra days collecting, cleaning and marking bamboo.  Lightbar eats more bamboo than a giant panda!  I need 170 sticks to complete the 5/8 dome and I’m still about 80 short.  But with what I have, I’m about done with Stage Five of the plan.

(Incidentally, that link is only one of several places online where you can find Bucky Fuller’s original plan transcribed.  Somewhere my mother has copies of the original Domebook that first published it.)

I also built the stilts described in the instructions, using an excellent bamboo knot that Lam taught me:

Thanks to Andy & Bax for the fluorescent orange 550 cord, and for stocking duct tape in obscure colors like white.

Now the dome has begun to assume a spherical shape on top, while still flopping out on the sides.  It resembles a limp octopus, or one of my wife’s sculptures.  But I can finally visualize just how big it’ll be.

To prevent the tarp from sagging and collecting rain, I added five more struts at the top.  Each one bisects a hexagon vertically, and then all five intersect in the top pentagon.  It’s really lovely how lashing more bamboo to this just makes it more spherical.

The duct tape is holding just fine so far, although we’ve still had no rain.  Really it’s excellent weather we’re having for the middle of January, but it’s cold and windy as hell.  When I put Stage Three up on the stilts it kept blowing over.   But now it’s free standing, and beginning to feel rigid.  I’m looking forward to that magical moment when I make the final joint and the whole thing becomes stiff and strong.

I don’t think I’ll be able to climb this dome without a bit of reinforcement.  And I won’t need to, but I can imagine a dome just like this, but built with thicker bamboo, that would make a wonderful jungle-gym.

I finished the first two stages this afternoon before I ran out of light, leaving a great big bamboo pentagram in the middle of my yard.  (I’m told this will repel Christians.)

Fuller’s plan would have me cut all the poles to a rough length after marking, but i’d really rather keep them whole, and somehow work the extra structure into the dome.  So far I seem to be getting away with it.  There’s always little extra bits of bamboo flopping around, but I can cope.

I’m using about 1 foot x 1 inch of duct tape for each cross intersection, and 1′ x 2″ two times on each joint between two crosses.  so that’s going to be something like 2 & 1/2 feet of 2-inch duct tape, times 85 crosses = about 70 yards.  That’s about one big roll, and a bit more.

I’ve left the whole thing uncovered outside.  Dew will form on it, and rain may fall.  Let’s see if I can really get away with using duct tape on this.  If not, I may upgrade to white gaff tape.