OK, I’m obviously not doing this any more so I might as well shut this blog and my big mouth.

But, I got reminded by a comment that I never posted pictures of the finished rebel pilot costume and especially the helmet. So as a farewell I’m showing you the pictures from last years Halloween and the improved version from Fasching this spring.

First of all, the papermache took FOREVER to dry. I had to paint the helmet even though I could still feel the wet paper from the inside of the bike helmet. Second, I was running out of time, as always, so I didn’t spend any time on levelling the surface or sanding. So it looks very uneven in the pictures but it looks actually not quite so bad in reality, the camera flash accentuates the problem.

I put two coats of white paint on for this and after letting it dry, I painted the decorative stuff on it. I made a template for the Rebel Alliance sign, I think it turned out pretty well. I wanted to do more on the helmet but there was lots of other stuff (sewing! I hate sewing!) to be done so I left it at that.

Here is the little rebel pilot:

As you can see, with all the build up to get the helmet into a roundish shape, the helmet became too big! And it was also quite heavy as the inside was still wet, my son started to complain a bit on the Halloween tour.

For Fasching the helmet was finally dry and I improved the decorative paintings a bit and added all the black markings with a permanent felt pen.

So in retrospect I would say this:
- You need a helmet base, the bike helmet was good for that
- Don’t build it up to much, it will look silly
- Start way early! It took 12 weeks to completely dry this thing!
- If you started early you will have time to even out the surface with some filler, it will look much nicer after sanding and painting

Please tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do with it now?

Anyway, that’s all folks!
Thanks for reading.

I’s funny how something that you thought is “okay for now but should not be final” bites you in the ass two years later.

Also I seem to have forgotten how to code php.

What a mess.

Oh and by the way, I am very pleased that George W. has left the White House yesterday with the rest of the Neo-Con pack. The world already looks so much nicer today.

Looks like the world could actually become a better place!

Obama: ‘This is your victory’

Tomorrow we will think about real life and the keeping of promises in the harsh light of real politics - but today we will celebrate you, the voters!

Thank you!

I am the first to admit that I’m raising my son to be a giant geek for all things Star Wars and I’m lovin it. There is a whole line of books in the Star Wars canon for younger readers that I got my son interested in and I enjoy reading these books immensely (and he does too)!
So with Halloween coming up and “Fasching” later on I was sure that my son would want to go as a Jedi. I have already researched costumes and sewing patterns and it seemed fairly simple and I even looked up how one can build a lightsaber.

But..

be a rebel

He wants to be a rebel pilot!

He wants to look like this guy:

Now thanks to the great big internet (big pink heart love!), it is no problem to find out the requirements for that. And I had my work cut out for me.

I found a worker suit that I died orange in his size, I scored some black rubber boots and black gloves, I do have some idea what to do about that white chest-thing but where to get a helmet? Well once again thanks to the great big internet (LOVE!) you can easily make one from an actual airforce flight helmet! There is a tutorial! You just have to buy one of those helmets for just 400$ or something, that should be easy, right? WRONG!

Of course, I will not spend 400$ on a costume accessory for my child.
So we have to make that ourselves. The basement was home to an old bike helmet that had cost me 4 EUR one time and turned out to be pretty bad for bike riding. I decided to use that as a base and turn it into an Rebel Helmet with Papier-mache.

If it works out ok, I might even make an instructable out of this.

My first experiment was with wire mesh and lots of duck tape.

mesh - really not easy

you want to wear that?

But mesh is actually very hard to get into the right shape and things were sticking out of it and it felt kind of loose on top of the bike helmet and the whole thing was uncomfortable to wear - so I went with thick cardboard.

Here are some progress pics:

The Mohawk:

Now this just needs to be covered with stripes of newspaper that have been dunked into or covered with wallpaper glue.

And keep doing that again and again. The bike helmet has a more flat top so my son and me worked on that for about an hour I think, to build the helmet up to a more round shape.

Now this just needs to dry, then we have to put something on the side because there is this squiggly thing on the side, that it needs to dry again and then it needs to be painted.

I just hope that it all dries fast enough for halloween!

HAHAHA! Whiny pansy!

via: nerdcore

when you realize that the game that you bought a little while (years) ago for full prize (40EUR) “to play when I have time” comes out now as a freebie on PCgames. And it is actually last months issue which makes this even more fitting.

Gaming and being a mom -> don’t mix.

So I decided to play Thief 3 now no matter what! (Even despite annoyed/sad looks coming from the couch and/or the husband)

And I’m lovin it! I missed playing games!

But it got me thinking…
Is it really just lack of time that stops me from playing a game that I have been looking forward to?
Or do I feel embarrassed by my suckiness? Because let’s face it, I suck at most action games. I blame it again on lack of time and little practice but maybe I’m getting too old for gaming? For now I’m still the coolest mom evar but how far away am I really from “Gawd mom, you just don’t get it!”

Nooooo!

Excuse me, got to practice my gaming!

“There is no reason in 2008 to do shit you hate! None!”

“Everybody has time! Stop watching fucking Lost! If you want this [...]? Work! That’s how you get it.”

This is Gary Vaynerchuk and apparently everybody besides me knows who that is. But it doesn’t matter, watch it. Watch it for the message and for his passion. What a great motivator.

YouTube Link

(a year ago I wouldn’t even have had a clue what that headline could mean…)

Well, I’m a bit sad right now because Ubuntu let me down.

The kids computer is not always connected to the internet. So when I connected it the day before yesterday and saw the 300+ updates it wanted to install I decided to skip that on my asscrawling slow internet connection and upgrade to Hardy right away.

So the update manager starts and does his thing and then this appears on my screen:
Generating locales...
de_AT.UTF-8...


And the system hangs forever.
Damn.

Now there is a very extensive thread on the ubuntuforums about this and it mentions various workarounds. None of them worked for me when I found them, by that point I had already completely borked my system. So I popped in the xubuntu CD and reinstalled Gutsy.
Hail again for /home on it’s own partition, after recreating the users things came quickly back together. Always put /home on it’s own partition! It will save you one day! Trust me!

But, as I learned here, it looks like I could have avoided all that if I had only received the critical kernel patch that was released mid-August. Now I’m not much of a programmer but maybe the update manager should have a pre-upgrade check for level-three-critical-prevents-you-from-upgrading-if-you-don’t-have-them-kernel-patches to be installed before commencing the upgrade. Just a suggestion.

Yes the blog is still dead but sometimes I just can’t shut up.

I’m watching Obama speaking in Berlin right now.
part 1, part 2, part 3

Here is a transcript.

I’m beginning to see why people are so exited about him. I love how he talks about global citizenship and the walls between races and religions that need to be taken down.
Here in germany we would LOVE to see Obama become president! Really, we are counting on you to make this world a better place!

But I have this feeling in my gut that it will not happen. The majority of the USA voted for George W. Bush! TWICE! T W I C E !!!
Why should these same people vote for Obama? Did somebody dump a load of IQ points over the country? Is the heartland ready for change, willing to take part in change?

I fear not.

Please, people of the USA, please prove me wrong!

Hurray for stating the obvious!

I’m going to start blogging in german fairly soon, just to see if the german blogosphere can ever be woken up from its coma.
I don’t think I will post here again but it has been a lot of fun and I learned a lot about writing (it is hard!) and met great people online.

Thank you for reading!