The Icetweets Cometh

On Sunday I will leave for Fairbanks for another year of carving ice with Lars Hansen at the World Ice Art Championships. After taking last year off, we will once again compete in the Single Block Classic next Tuesday through Thursday.

I'm going to do one thing differently this year: Instead of blogging about our progress (and struggling to post up-to-date information), I'm going to try tweeting. I've only been on Twitter for about a year, and this will be my first ice carving event since then. It should be easier for me to post quick updates and photos that way without having to take as much time away from the competition to prepare blog entries.

So, for those of you who have followed our ice sculpting escapades on this blog in the past, you should keep an eye on my Twitter feed this time around. I may post a little bit (like hopefully a web cam link) here, but most of my updates will be over there. My poor Twitter followers (who mostly know me for things unrelated to ice) have no idea what's coming!

Oh, and here's a photo from Lars, a sneak peek at what we'll be doing next week!

rumblings from the deep

The first snow has come and gone. The days are getting shorter. It's the time of year when Lars and I start talking about ice. It must be time to revive the blog.

blog blog

I've decided to try blogging about more than just mechanical ice sculpture. Does anyone care? Probably not. But, hey, blogging is more fun than watching television. Anyway, if you want to just read about the ice stuff, click on ice in the Topics sidebar.

error analysis: blogging

I think I did a fair job as a first time blogger capturing the events of the week, but I certainly could have done better. I didn't blog or even photograph a whole bunch of things that I could have:

• chainsaw modifications
• ice chime experiments
• Sandra, Patty, and Annie's documentary production
• competitors and their tools and techniques
• fans who visited us repeatedly
• the lathe in action
• the gear tooth cutter in action
• the sub-zero natural ice lubricant showdown
• Wednesday night's pizza box design session at Belfair
• observations on day one of the multi-block

My process for posting photographs was way too slow. I had to take the camera back to Belfair (we were only there for a short time each night), transfer the images to my laptop, select good ones, edit them with the GIMP, copy them to a flash drive, take the flash drive to Ice Park, and upload them to the blog at a convenient time at the warming hut. All of this activity created about an eighteen hour delay. I should have used ImageMagick or some such thing instead of the GIMP; since 90% of the image edits were just resizing and occasional rotation, batch processing from the command line would have saved time. The greatest benefit would have come from being able to upload photos directly from the camera to the blog on the warming hut computers, but my need to edit the images prevented me from doing so. (Also, I never tested connecting my camera to a warming hut PC; it might require special software or a separate CompactFlash interface.) I could probably download Windows binaries of ImageMagick or maybe even use a Linux LiveCD. Another option might be to use Flickr or a similar service.