tikaro.com

Last Friday night was a Guerilla Drive-In showing. We had planned to show Cannonball Run II at the Marsh Creek Speedway (check out those AWESOME seventies rental go-karts, which still run and are for sale), but the Friday night racing got rained out.

So we showed the movie at TheNote instead, which is the new music venue in West Chester. Here’s the best my iPhone could do: (BTW, “Cannonball Run II is the full Rat Pack’s last appearance on film, which is why you see Dean and Sammy here):

I asked them at the 11th hour (lunchtime on Friday), and they had four bands booked that night, but they were really hospitable and squeezed us in anyway. Which lead to some surreal moments — like when I was setting up the screen and the tripod, and a genial fellow asked me what I was showing, and I was telling him, and then I realized I was talking to Phil Margera. Bam Margera is an investor in the club.

Jackie Chan’s fight scenes got lots of applause from the bar behind us, and professional sound-guy Vaughn (sp?) patched the Commando Projector directly into his sound board, with the result that it ACTUALLY SOUNDED LIKE WE WERE AT THE MOVIES for the very first time, instead of enduring a wave of pain. I have a _lot_ to learn about sound. While the movie was going on, the bands were getting set up behind the screen.

The Note has a great stage, and has only been open for a few weeks — if you’re in West Chester, you should definitely check it out! There’s a feed of upcoming events.

The next Guerilla Drive-In showing is coming up on October 25th, and it’s going to be a good one.

The 29th annual Chester County Restaurant Festival is coming up on Sunday, and I’m gonna be giving airbrush tattoos on Mary Bigham’s red carpet. What tattoo does a foodie get? Not a sailor’s anchor, but a FORK, naturally! Expert pixel-pusher Jason Tremblay lent me the vector art for the Restaurant Festival’s fork logo, and Dave Moroz-Henry at Barking Dog signs is cutting the stencils.

I’ll be using the sidecar rig with the five-pound nitrogen tank. Since the Restaurant Festival is a foodie event, I thought I’d dress the tank up a little bit. WITH NEEDLEPOINT! This will go on the front of the tank:

I’m using 13-count mono canvas, with a damn swanky silk/wool yarn. The canvas is two inches wide (26 threads, not counting the four I’ve folded under on each side for a finished edge.) I took it off the frame after stitching the black, and I’m already pulling it into a parallelogram after only a few rows of white background. But this yarn is stretchy; maybe if I just sew it to some stiff Velcro hook tape, that’ll pull it back straight. Blocking things with finished edges definitely is something I’d like to learn to do better.

Anyhow, if you’re in the area, come out on Sunday to get your own fork tattoo! Get your picture taken with it, and win a prize. More information about the Restaurant Festival is on the WC Dish site.

UPDATE: I had a great time at the Restaurant Festival. I gave tattoos from 12-3, and Toren gave tattoos from 3-6. When I came back, he had developed a new overhand grip on the gun, and was giving tattoos better than I was. And his jokes were funnier! Bastard. You can see him keeping the crowd spellbound below: (click the photos to see them on Flickr)

   

I’m prototyping p8tch 2.0. I want these things to be like futuristic ranger badges, except by "futuristic" I mean like "original Star Wars futuristic", or "Syd Mead Alien futuristic", where stuff is actually heavy-duty and shows actual wear. That means incorporating industrial materials, leather, and hand stitching. Plus juxtaposing white plastic and leather, naturally.

Anyhow, here’s a piece of Rowmark Reverse LaserMark. It’s clear plastic, with a white backing. Mike from Hannah Manufacturing in Augusta, Maine took a design from me and cut away the white substrate using a laser table.

The result is a piece of plastic that’s smooth on the front. It’s white, except where it’s MOSTLY clear (the laser leaves a bit of a rough surface.) The plan is to paint the back, leaving a nice, contrast-y black and white design. You can see the original blank here, and then after I spray-painted the back:

Here’s the view from the front after the back has been painted:

In my mind, I had imagined a crisp contrast between pure white and de-e-e-e-p black. However, the laser leaves a rough surface, and so I get a kind of 70% gray showing through to the front, with some striation where the laser had passed back and forth.

I want to explore:

• Maybe a slightly deeper engraving would reduce this? (update: Mike says “no”)
• Maybe I need to apply the black paint with a brush, really grinding the paint into the irregular surface?
• Maybe I need to buff the laser-engraved surface before painting?
• Maybe I should explore engraving clear plastic, etching away the WHITE and leaving the black clear?
• Maybe laser engraving isn’t really the way I want to go, and I should apply two layers matte vinyl to the back of clear plastic instead (first black, then white)?

Anyhow, it looks pretty cool already. My rough plan is to epoxy this to a die-cut piece of black saddle or patent leather, which Joe from Pisano & Son would have stitched to velcro. At that point, I’m thinking it’ll be the most Syd-Mead-y thing I own 🙂

By the way, the URL on this prototype is http://p8t.ch/zesil, which at the moment is configured to redirect to Tikaro Interactive’s main page. Using the p8tch system, I can change the redirect target on the fly. You can (ahem!) get your very own p8tch for the low, low price of clicking on this link! Plus money.

Here’s a picture and an excerpt from a letter Lydia got in the mail the other day from my dad, who is up in Newfoundland (I’m putting it here with permission from all parties.) It makes me feel like they’re living in a Robert McCloskey book!

“Dear Lydia,

This picture that Nan took is of an iceberg that floated into the harbor of Dunfield, near our house here in Newfoundland. Icebergs are floating islands of ice that break off of glaciers up in the Arctic (where the North Pole is) and float down the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland until they either melt at sea or get stuck in some harbor, as this one did. Visitors come from all over to see icebergs like this one. Some people get into boats so they can get closer to the iceberg and maybe collect some of the ice to take home for souvenirs [and maybe get themselves abruptly killed –John]. Our friend Alma has given out many plastic bags to tourists so they can carry away their ice. Dunfield does not often get many visitors, so people like Alma, who is very kind anyway, do not mind helping out.

“On the day Nan took this picture there were whales feeding in the water around the iceberg. On other days we have seen otters, eagles, moose, caribou and loons. ALso kingfishers, seagulls and terns. I especially like the loons, which look like submarines with periscopes up, and the terns, which are very graceful flyers and can even hover in the air like a helicopter.”

Kate and I walked past a mobile shredding truck this morning. It had great graphics on it — a smiling tiger drawing big, sharp claws right past the little glass window where you can see into the truck and view the shredded paper. the tiger looked happy, too: “RAWR I hate documents!” “RAWR I love shredding them with my big sharp tiger claws!”

I noticed a certification badge on the truck that stopped me in my tracks, too: a badge for the National Association for Information Destruction. Let me say that again: the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION DESTRUCTION.

Oh, this is marketing GOLD. If you check their website, you’ll see that this is very much a certification for companies that destroy paper and hard drives — in other words, things. But can you imagine a certification for how you handle sensitive electronic customer data, all through the “cloud” that comprises an operating web system?

Let’s take my p8tch website as an example. I offer a proxy-url service; the patch is like a tinyURL you can wear. You enter the password for the p8tch, then you get to enter the URL where the p8tch goes. In the course of doing this, a lot of data about what you did gets created and stored in various logfiles:

• When you enter the target URL, it is stored in the database (so that the redirect will work)
• Every night, the database is backed up, which means that that URL is now captured in a backup file.
• That backup file is copied to several locations and included in various uber-backups. For instance, if I verify a backup, I copy it to my local MacBook Pro, and now the file might be included in Time Machine backups too.
• When the p8tch is scanned, the date and time of the scan, plus the IP address of the scanner and the destination returned, are saved to the normal website logfile.
• Just like backup files, logfiles proliferate all around.
• All that info is supoena-able. Five years from now, unless I’m explicitly going around nuking old data, it’s probably find-able in SOME form or other.

So the p8tch website, without explicitly collecting any data in a “marketing-y” kind of way, still generates a lot of long-lived data. People who do the Web for a living accept this as a fact of life. Of course, when you use a service like GMail, much much MUCH more data is collected, stored, and cross-referenced to plenty of other places.

The purpose of an electronic National Association for Information Destruction certification would be to offer assurances that your data-retention policy actually works. For instance, I might promise on the p8tch site that all data is kept for only 30 days, and then it’s destroyed so it can never be subpoena-ed. But it’s the certification that gives some assurance that not only am I, you know, dropping rows from my database, but I’m also doing due diligence to properly scrub logfiles, destroy old backup archives, and properly degauss hard drives when they’re rotated out of service. In each context, the word “destroy” would have an explicit meaning: “when we destroy a backup file, we write garbage data over the sector where it used to live…”, etc. “When we destroy a hard drive, we take off and nuke the site from orbit.”

I think a logo would be fun to come up with, too. You know, like a hard-drive platter getting de-rezzed, basically. I contacted NAID asking if they’d be interested in coming up with a certification program. I know that reputable IT departments already DO this stuff, but from a marketer’s perspective I’m in love with the idea of a National Association for Smashing the Very Electrons that Make Up Your Private Data. Let’s see if they get back to me!