First Steps
(Approximate dates: March-April 2007)
After three to four months of casual trips to Home Depot, Fisher Hardware and Lumber and Hastings Plastics, we had our material. To store our tools and lumber, Edgar gave us keys to a small, locked closet. These were critical steps. Once we put money into building the booth, we were irrevocably committed to finishing it.
Except we weren't. Everyone stopped working. Scheduled meetings were unattended. While I started investigating JMF for the software, I ran out of steam. Have you ever tried working with JMF? It's horrible.
The next thing to save the group was Benji. Benji was one of the people who sat with us during dinner that first night, but after dinner when we confirmed people's interest, he backed out. But now everything changed. Benji put a lot of effort into getting us excited, and getting us moving. When there was a construction session, he was there. He built all the software I never did. If you had an idea, he was always there to talk it out.
The photo of Benji to the right was taken during one of our construction sessions in 2008. This was at a time when a significant amount of construction was complete, and we had to start integrating the booth and software. Here Benji is testing and debugging.
I don't want you to be misled by the photo: that photo really belongs near the end of the story, since that's when it was taken. I mean, we didn't even have walls until July '07. Think about C3PO and how he had a shiny silver casing in the fifth second Star Wars film. As for us, we're talking pre-prequel.
Our first material accomplishment was in April 2007: We built a floor.Well, not so much a floor, but the frame of a floor. Doesn't matter. We were super excited. In retrospect, a good thing about building the floor first was that it was our warm-up construction. Since it needed to be strong, it was okay to overengineer it. The photo on the left shows the constructed floor. The back, facing up and punctuated by Nick's head, had extra support since that was where most people would walk and sit. The front, facing down, was where the computer and components would sit.Though our effort was spotty, our scheduled work days were late Wednesday, Saturday and occasionally Sunday. By working off hours not only did we keep our jobs, we could work without much disruption, and we could also try to maintain some semblance of secrecy. But this was an office garage, and it had traffic during the weekends as well as weeknights, so people knew we were up to something. The very first construction day, while the floor was in some state even less complete than what you see, a coworker approached and asked what we were making. I said without thinking that we were building a chuppah [image search] for Alan's brother. A chuppah is a canopy traditionally used during Jewish wedding ceremonies. Alan found this lie to be gigglishly amusing, not only because he wasn't Jewish, but because he didn't have a brother. And also because people somehow accepted this bald-faced lie.