Curved Plywood

Source for curved plywood:
http://www.getwood.com/stage/rtb1481/curv_ply.htm

The have 1/2 rounds and full rounds. A good replacement for tight radius and where the grain of wacky wood won't work.

Domes

The following is a link to a resource that supplies acrylic domes.
http://www.aliendecor.com/acrylic_domes.htm
pricing ranges from 40 for 5" thin wall acrylic, to well... much more, though my pricing isn't current. At any rate, funky acrylic shape sources are always good to have on hand - and they have some other interesting products as well.

How dark is dark

A new carbon / nanotube carpet like material reflects .045% of light. Would be great for scenery / masking!

Read the article at:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5451632.html

Cool Knee pads

Check out these knee pads:
http://kneeblades.com/

Not only good for cushioning - but would make getting around fun and easy.

New product

I cam across a new product the other day: Paperstone.
http://www.paperstoneproducts.com/

We were using a piece for a museum project and we cnc text onto the surface of the product.

The material is very heavy and hard (multiple bits were used to cut the engraved text), and oil / water affected the product - though it is to be used as a counter top surface.

It's interesting that its 100% recycled - but at a rumored 800 a sheet, I doubt I will see it for theatrical purposes. Regardless - I thought it was worth a mention as it is different than what we normally get to play with.

Safety Information

The following website caught my eye this morning:
http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/etis6.htm

Its a safety guide regarding working at heights produced in the UK. It leaves much out, but I though the risk assessment, precautionary measures and bibliography is worth a look.

Maps

Perhaps a little off topic, but then again somehow almost everything is useful somehow or another in technical theatre.

I have been planning an itinerary for a weekend in Chicago for some friends who are coming. I wanted to map out the locations with markers and no driving directions (or the lines that map quest puts on the map even w/o printing the directions.

The place that I found that I ended up using was: http://www.zeemaps.com/
You can make a list and they will put markers on the map for you. You can link to it from another site, but if you want a PDF they want to charge you for it. I used Print Screen, and put it into word....

There is another site called community walk (http://www.communitywalk.com/about). I haven't played with it too much, but it offers free and paid services, and alot of ability to customize content (audio for example). I could see multiple uses for this (touring for example) that might make it useful.

Is that gel just out of your reach

Try:
http://www.egeneralmedical.com/pik-stik-pro-all-purpose-reacher-and-grabber-26-yellow.html

I hear it works well.

Planning Roller Coasters

I was reading an article about Maurer Rides – a company that build roller coasters in FunWorld, and I thought I would pass on a few points that I found interesting and relevant. Their approach to design development and implementation is divided up into 4 phases: Explorer, Artist, Judge and Warrior.

The exploration stage is where all the information is gathered. Collecting available data, looking for information that isn’t readily available, requirements of the ride (especially requirements that are in apparent conflict), restraints, and all other pertinent information occurs during this stage. This allows the artist in the next step the ability to come up with a diverse amount of creative ideas.

The artist stage uses all of the gathered information to generate a variety of ideas for the coasters design. This phase generates the best ideas when the team is diversified and resources are used from every angle. A wide variety of participants discuss ideas before being fully developed.

“Judge” is the next stage. During this period evaluation occurs regarding ideas and current achievement within the project. It also matches the ideas against the specifications to confirm that the proposed ideas meet requirements.

The final stage is implementation which is where the warrior comes into play. The Warrior realizes the idea from the designs to a finished product. Schedules, budgets and planning are among the tools used here.

Lastly the article relates a common message: the better your initial requirements, goals (requirements for a successful outcome) are, the better you can evaluate your outcomes. If you don’t define what is a success is – you will have a hard time creating a successful end.

I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions – but it seems to me that these phases relate to theatre and projects pretty well and is a useful way to look at the project cycle.

Tax / Self employed sites

As 1099 forms are prevalent in theatre I thought I would post the following two sites as there seems to be some useful information.

http://www.junewalkeronline.com
http://junewalkeronline.blogspot.com/