I never  saw  a good Illusion in Real life...  i just wave off the stuff on TV ( a Tank vanishes  , while surrounded by  people  ect ect)

 and  never been to a place  where they had them.. Kennywood  had some kid of show, but my  late wife and I never bother to see it ,because  kids wante dto  do rides and games.

 Idlewild is smaller, and thier shows  are  singing  , dancing  with some jokes , so it would be neat to see something like that  in Real life.

Happy Birthday Don!!! from all the monkeys in your jungle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8XRtNltvT8

Thank You Nikki... it  figures  it would be a red head!

Well...were it any other night of the week...or almost any other week this year...I'd already be home.  We had a rental for one of our screens in the late slot, a no-show for another, and the third ended about 40 minutes ago, so I could have closed up shop and gone home.  I've closed up shop...

But I still have a movie to finish copying from the hard drive, and then to the other screens (I think I'll just leave the servers powered up tonight and shut off all the lamps on the projectors, rather than stay until 3 am...) and another movie (Dune 2, so, a LONG movie which means a large movie file) that's copying to all the other screens.  Were it another week of the year, I would have already done all of this...or I would have been able to take the time, earlier, to come in and start everything copying so it would be done by now.

But we're having an interesting time at work.  Spent the day trying to troubleshoot yet another illusion that the director got from the magician who died.  We were in the middle of working on it when his all-purpose-mechanic-type guy started griping about no documentation, no video, no information on what was supposed to work and how, and said the director should call the guy up and demand some answers.  And Macyn and I both kinda grimaced, and said, "Well...he's dead."

"The magician's dead?"

"Yeah.  And the guy who built the illusion for him retired, like, twenty-five years ago and doesn't do this stuff anymore."

"There's no one who knows this thing?"

"Well...Tim (one of the contractors that the director works with on refurbishing a lot of his illusions) was the magician's tech assistant for a while...but that was a LONG time ago.  He's told us almost everything he remembers about it..."

Sometimes, when I stop and think about it, my job really does create some absolutely ridiculous scenarios...

 That sounds like a situation comedy  or even a cartoon..."  the  Guys dead"   " the other guys retired  1.4 of a centry ago"

 You need to write all this  down, and write a book,  Titled  "So you want to work at an amusment park.."

putting this in all my games

Happy Mothers day  to all  the mothers out there, as well as the single Dads  , who must be mothers!. Take time to recognize them on this special day!

Ah the time year where I madly panic that I’ve forgotten to get my mum anything before remembering that we had Mothers day back in March

Well, today was an exercise in frustration...

One of the illusions we're using this year was a recent purchase, and when the director bought it, he paid someone to refurbish it.  It looks great...but it has some mechanical issues.  One of them is a little latch on the inside...it's supposed to hold two doors closed.  When we got the illusion, the latch was positioned in such a way that NEITHER door could close, much less be held shut by it.  One of the first tasks I got when we kicked into high gear on show prep was repositioning that latch...

When the director called the guy who did the refurb, and asked why he got something that so obviously did NOT work, the refurb guy basically said, "Hey, I just made it look pretty, I didn't fix anything..."  So, I moved the latch...but overcompensated, and while it wouldn't stop the doors from closing, it wouldn't hold them.  So, we moved it again, to where we thought it needed to be...and it kept interfering with one of the doors.

So, today, they asked me to replace it with a barrel-bolt latch.  Simple mechanism, should have been a very brief, simple job...emphasis on "should have been..."

I spent all afternoon and a good chunk of the evening working on that damn thing.  Got the bolt section mounted on one door, went to attach the receiver to the other door, and found out the gap between the doors was big enough that the bolt wouldn't fully engage.  Thought I could get away with building a backing plate that would extend into the gap and let me mount the receiver right next to the bolt.  Spent WAY too much time on fabricating that, got it done, but the whole latch assembly in place (I put pop rivets through the holes to hold it in place until I knew...otherwise, I would have wasted even MORE time).  Found out that, with nothing solid to hold onto, the barrel bolt latch was useless...you hold the doors closed, slide the bolt, let go of the doors, and they both swing open together and the bolt slides right out of the receiver....

So, I had to reconfigure and reposition AGAIN the original latch mechanism.  I wasn't working on it non-stop...but I feel like I spent five or six hours on what should have been a ten-minute fix, and the final solution was just a position and minor hardware adjustment of what it started out with.  Beating my head against the proverbial wall...

 That'[s the Most  scary words to ever  say.

 "this shouldn't take  long"....or.." just a few minutes"

I always thought 'Oops...Uuhhh-uuummmm?!' was the scariest personally.

Uh-oh is up there

"WTF!"......"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"..."NO! NOT THTA ONE!"

there are a few.

Oh fuck is another one

:;chuckles:: I used  to  mutter , under  my breath... 'ffffffuuuccckkk." when something i didn't like, or  stupid  happened.

 the first time me and my late  wife  saw the Movie 'Major league"... Ricky Vaugn  got  Glasses and everyone  was looking at him ... Coach was was smiling... the  achololic  older pitcher  said he has a pair just like that.. the catcher   smiled and said..'seeing's the most important thing"

 Westly Snipes shook his head  and  said " its not that important!"

 The  Ricky   looks in the mirror  and says.... ' Fffffuuuucckk" real softly.

 My wife  says ..'he's you!"

few years ago was having day surgery on my hand.  I was awake but there was a cloth so I couldn't see anything. about 1/3 of the way through heard my doctor go "shit! slippery little git!" everyone looked at him. he apologized to me. we all laughed. he had the cyst that was in my hand and was tugging it out gently and it slipped out of the tweezers. he got it out a moment later. went home in my 'baby seal clubbing bandage' as I called it. it got better.

I try to be selective about when I use certain profanity, so there were a lot of times yesterday that I caught myself at "motherf..." as I was trying to figure the stupid thing out.

And, just to prove that you can never predict what I'm going to be doing on any given day...as I was getting ready to leave for work, the production manager texted me, to inform me that the Sign Shop had requested my help, and that what they were doing was a higher priority than anything they had on the list for me...so I was being loaned out for the day.

Turned out, I was still working on the show...they're making a big sign with the show name, and my job was to assemble clear acrylic letters (about 15-18 inches tall) in the way they wanted them displayed (there were two of each letter in the title...connected with clear acrylic spacers about 4" long...this is all CNC-cut 1/2" thick clear polycarbonate...)  Spent eight hours doing that...finished, thanks to the guy from the tool crib downstairs coming up at what would normally be the end of his shift and doing one part of the process so I could focus on the other part.  And then I spent another two hours helping clean up the theater because the park is open during the day tomorrow for school groups.  I don't know if it's tendonitis or arthritis, but both thumbs hurt, and I found out that CNC-cut polycarbonate can give you very nasty paper-cut-style injuries.

But they're done, and that puts the sign shop ahead of schedule on that particular project...

 so, Roy?  the other guy had to help you after his shift was ended?...did you work past your shift as well?

Never saw  letters like that close up or handled them But  I imagine, if they are newer, they would have  Sharp edges from the molds?

I feel fir you - once in the distant past I made a shop sign for a friend, backlit acrylic letters...

Never again. That sort of craft is NOT my thing!

finally got some plants for my new deck and therapy
so been singing this all day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVkMoXTlrrI

In reply to Admiral Hack (msg # 180):

Well, my shift was scheduled to be until 10:30 pm with the option to stay later if production meeting ran long, so, no, I didn't stay after my shift.

His shift also started 4 hours earlier than mine did...

And it's been a LONG time since anyone would have tried making letters like that with molds.  CNC machines have been around for decades, and before that, they probably would have used a band saw or something similar to cut clean edges on multiple layers at the same time (limited somewhat by the weight of the material you're cutting, but there are ways to minimize those problems, too...)  I was cutting some ABS pipe with a bandsaw tonight (had to install some plumbing for the output of a fog machine on one of the illusions) and ABS can get a pretty crisp edge from cutting, as well...but a bandsaw is nowhere near the precision of CNC and laser cutters.

only 'in person'  cutters like that i saw , was the plasma torch we had  at the factory i worked at. It was  Class 1, which meant it was a top tier  skill to have..i never  went near it.. one  wrong  cut ( you had to set the automation)..and  100's of Thousands  of  dollar  would  go down the drain...

it was weird waiting  8 torch nozzles  cutting  1 inch plate, under water. like  some  odd looking  Spiralgraph...The funny thing is , the  guy who ran it, couldn't   play a intellivison, let along run a computer  machine..but they learned...and  yes, some of them would flick the machine on and  read  a magazine  or  do busy work..and look up to find out they started it  1/4  inch to the right...

so? i have never  seen a  machine like you talk of!

I had heard of them...my brother used to make furniture and was trained to run one.  But I never actually saw one until they got this one at the park.  The CNC machine doesn't actually make the full cut in one pass...it's like a mill or a router, but computer controlled so it's repeating exactly the same moves, over and over again, slightly deeper each time, until it cuts all the way through.

I haven't seen the laser cutter yet, but I'm pretty sure I saw the letters that were cut with it before it broke down.  The CNC machine, cutting polycarbonate, leaves a hazy, almost frosted finish and a very sharp edge.  But a few of the letters had a clear edge and slightly rounded corners at the cuts (they wouldn't have given me my not-a-paper-cut), because the heat from the laser lets all the tiny little jagged edges that the CNC cutter would leave (which is why the edges were frosted) melt just enough to flow into each other so you get a clear, clean edge that is like looking through ice, sort of...

And in further "I'm doing what today?" news...I spent a couple of hours, a couple of days ago, changing out cables on a lighting control for some LED-neon tape (lack of research on the director's part...he ordered LED tape from one company, a DMX-capable controller from another company, but didn't bother to look into how one connects to the other...luckily, between extra parts that had been delivered and an old project at the park that got changed after the initial purchases of equipment had come in, the park electricians were able to cobble together a way to use some cables they had in storage to get our problem cleared up...but they only modified one controller, and a handful of connector cables.  So, I copied their work on the one to make the other viable for us).  Today, I finished getting it installed and connected it to some LED tape that Macyn had run around the front edge of the stage...

Except when Macyn laid it out, he was envisioning power coming from the other side of the stage.  So I had to peel up all of it, flip it around, tape it back down, and then get it connected to the controller.  But it worked!  And as I moved on to another project, I heard a loud sound from the stage and a bunch of startled cries, looked up to see the choreographer looking in my direction with a distressed look on her face, before she called my name with an equally distressed voice...

They broke a cable on one of the illusions (one that was built back in 1992, one of the ones with the dubious history...)  We broke the other one when we first started working on trying to refurbish it, so I already knew, more or less, how to fix it...but I was NOT expecting to replace a cable today (or any day, really).  But I got my 'miracle worker' status refreshed...it broke just before they went on their dinner break, I had it fixed almost an hour before they got back...had to make a couple of tweaks to get it dialed in, but yeah...they lost maybe ten or fifteen minutes of rehearsal time over it, and she was thinking it would be down for an entire day.  Figured out what happened and how to make sure it didn't happen again.  Five years ago, I'd have been like, "Ummm...well, I ~think~ I might be able to figure it out, but it's really outside my skill range..."

Told a few people, "I did NOT have 'stringing a new cable in Death Drill on my bingo card for today!"

--Also found out a few more details about the 'dubious circumstances' under which the former owner had perished...that illusion and its brother have a whole soap-opera backstory all their own!  The owner lived in Vegas, was doing shows there, and decided he was going to relocate to Branson, MO, and negotiated the sale of his house.  Before he moved, he was found dead, partially consumed by a tiger that had escaped from the tiger habitat he maintained...and the guy he'd arranged to sell the house to claimed that, since the paperwork had already been signed, the property and everything on it was his (and it was nobody else's business whether he had paid or not, since the only other party to the contract was dead and therefore couldn't contest the claim).  The magician's family decided it wasn't worth fighting over the house...but they donated all the tigers to zoos and animal parks, and they loaded up all of the illusions and put them in storage...and then apparently endured years of shady magicians coming out of the woodwork and offering them, like, $20,000 for ALL of the stuff (having someone build just one of these illusions would easily be a $50,000+ prospect, and while they didn't know what fair market value was for all of it, they did know that these guys were trying to rip them off...)

They reached out to the guy who used to work with the magician, basically doing all the kinds of weird repairs and improvements that come up (a more intricate and advanced version of what I do) and asked if he knew anyone working in magic who wouldn't try to screw them over on it...and he suggested our director...who, when contacted, told them he couldn't afford to pay them fair market value for it, but did offer them SIGNIFICANTLY more than anyone else had...between that, and wanting the illusions to be back on stage again, they made the sale.  So, the one I fixed tonight was involved in at least two lawsuits brought by David Copperfield (the first was against the guy who made it, because Copperfield didn't want him building illusions for anyone else--the guy basically said, "Screw you, I've got enough money, I'm not making illusions for ANYONE.  So there!"  That ended that lawsuit (Copperfield nominally won, because the guy stopped making illusions for other people...but it cost Copperfield his primary illusion-builder).  The second lawsuit was against the magician, claiming that the illusion was a copy of one of Copperfield's...didn't hold up in court, Copperfield's used a gigantic buzzsaw blade and this one uses a steel auger, and Copperfield cuts himself in two and then puts himself back together, where in this one, the magician has the auger run through him, and then the box opens up to reveal that he's not there and he reappears somewhere else in the theater.)

And I'll admit...there's an odd sense of satisfaction to taking this 32-year-old piece of history and getting it back in good operating order again.  It's a really cool illusion, and it is at the same time one of the most complex and one of the simplest pieces we've done.  I told the techs, the first day, "Working on a show like this...you will never watch a magic show the same way again.  You may not realize how they're doing the bit, but you recognize the bit, and instead of being impressed with the 'magic', you become impressed (or annoyed) with the skill (or lack thereof) they display in performing it.

I know about magicians and their secrets... but it would be a shame if these were never documented for posterity.

didn't get a chance to read  Roys  post..i'll read it when i come homw.

 Football for me..then later  one the Girls Last  race  for the Healthy Kids   running thng..Gwen ( 2nd oldest) can lock up a 1st place trophy..the little  one  is  5th in her age group.

 ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

 one question..check you sheets?... Did i evcer  award  the  medlas  for Paradise. It was broguht up to me by Nikki... i can tell my ther NPCs  who have sheets, be cause i  ad them  on (  example :  (2) two Gold stars ..ect ect

 Let me know, because i want them out there, ..if you record them, they are on your Unirom.

Thanks...see you all later