Woodworking projects

Apparently, I forgot to post anything about various woodworking projects I did this past year.

First off, I built a bench for our foyer to hold all the various shoes that piled up there:

Then, I built an electric train table for my son:

Finally, I made a couple of end grain cutting boards I gave as gifts (one to a friend on her birthday and another to my mom at Christmas):

A few weeks ago, I also made a set of shelves to fit our VCR that got displaced when we got a new TV recently. I don’t yet have pictures for that but I’ll post some later when I take them.

Now I’m wondering what woodworking project I should tackle next.

Where I talk about our recent balloon launch….

So, lately it seems that I can’t talk about anything else. So, why change.

Here’s a video I did late last week with Nate Johnson of WRAL about the balloon launch that we did. This was recorded the day before we found our first balloon.

On a lighter note

A vigorous debate: is Fox News “evil” or simply “stupid”?

Accumulated Press Coverage

We have gotten quite a bit more press coverage than I had anticipated. Here’s a list of what I know of so far:

• News and Observer: Raleigh balloon hobbyists aim for stratosphere
• News and Observer: Triangle group takes snapshot from near space
• We made the front page of the News and Observer yesterday
• WRAL: Triangle group enters competition to capture horizon on film
• WNCT in Greeneville, NC: Space Balloon Launch from NC
• News 14 had a segment on us, but I can’t find it online.
• WUNC had a brief mention of us on the news yesterday, but again I cannot find it online.

And, here’s video from a segment on WRAL’s 6pm news yesterday evening:

Quick Balloon Update

I’ll have a more complete writeup later when I can slow down and wrap my head around things, but for the moment here’s a quick update. Our first balloon lost tracking about about 20k feet. Not to be deterred, we quickly put together a second balloon from spare parts and sent it up. It landed a few hours later in Rocky Mount and we spent 4 hours getting it out of the tree where it landed about 65 feet off the ground! Once we did, it turned out to be well worth it as we found some great pictures!

Also, we ended up on the front page of the News and Observer today! Here’s the article.

Media coverage

I just spoke briefly on the phone with Josh Shaffer from the Raleigh News and Observer newspaper. It looks like there will be an article about our balloon launch in tomorrow’s paper. I don’t think I’ll have a chance to pick one up unless I can find one in the evening. If anyone local can grab one for me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Near Space Launch

I’ll write more about this when I get a chance, but this Sunday morning, myself and a group of people will be launching a balloon to “near space” in an attempt to get a picture of black sky and the curvature of the earth. You can read the press release about it here: http://tinyurl.com/33wxxww

It’s been a crazy month, but a lot of fun!