You’re overdue for an update. I have been spending some time in San Francisco.

Photos are available on my Flickr photostream.

The ACME Anvil Co. series at Riverview is coming to a close so I thought it was about time I get the build information up…

The series “ACME Anvil Co.” is about weights, things that slow us down from going all out for Jesus.

What we did: The set is comprised of shipping crates made from disassembled pallets and some new materials. We were able to round up about 4 dozen pallets over a period of a month prior to the beginning of the series. Pallets are made to be structurally sound so taking them apart perhaps wasn’t the best idea but the alternative was spending a lot of money to get all-new materials.

There were tons of folks that got involved in this build and a handful of companies that donated materials. It has been great to have the help from people around Riverview grow as we continue to do more aggressive sets.

We put some 4×4 legs on the drum riser and ’skirted’ it with pallet materials. One crate was hung stage right and a replica anvil was made and set on one of the crates. Kristie made two stencils that we used to spray the logo on the crates. Five additional crates were constructed for our other venue.

Tomorrow we’re transitioning to our new set for the next series.

Most filters use a combination of several methods to determine which emails are spam and which emails are legitimate. Any email that is sent to someone on a system is analyzed and given a score based on the content of the email. The higher the score of the email, the more likely that the system will mark it as spam. If the score exceeds a certain threshold, the system will refuse acceptance of the email. These scores are usually determined by comparing the email’s content to confirmed spam email content, confirming the authenticity of the sender and analyzing the “header” information (routing details not usually visible to the recipient) among other things (RBLs, language filters, et cetera).

The filter variables are scrutinized often, which means that a spam email of a certain type is not likely to continue to get through the filter for very long. While the algorithms that filter spam are very advanced, there are still occurrences of both false positives (email that should get through that does not) and leaks (spam email that gets through despite filtering).

Please correct me if this is not accurate.

Our first set in the new building expansion at Riverview, probably one of the most challenging and mind boggling sets we have ever done.

What we did: Where to start? I guess I’ll go chronologically… Kate and I put up the bubble-wrap on the back wall (yes, that is bubble-wrap) on Sunday afternoon following the last message of our previous series, Sketch. Monday we cut and painted the weird quadrilaterals with help from Kristie, Kate and Linda. Tuesday and Wednesday we got our lighting hung and Andy built the projection screen. A tip about hanging lighting: make sure you get two inch outside diameter pipe, not two inch inside diameter and really, it may not be a bad idea to take a clamp with you to double-check the size. The projection screen is a 2×4 frame with eighth inch underlay and a painted canvas drop-cloth mounted to the front.

Hanging everything was a huge challenge but we’re trying not to attach anything to the wall in the new building. What complicated the hanging issue was that everything had to be hung in a particular order because it is all different distances from the back wall. We’ve gotten some great positive feedback about this set and I think it set a higher standard for quality in our future designs.

The projected images and video are all masked so that they only appear on the hanging shapes and screen. Kristie and Noel handled that process so I don’t know how long it took but there are ongoing adjustments because of how the hanging shapes settle from week to week.

There are a few more pictures here.

We are currently working on logistics for our next two sets, one should be fairly scaled back and will be up for two weeks and another that is relatively involved which will run through October into the first part of November.

This picture and more on my Flickr stream.

I check my voice mail rarely. I do not mean to neglect you, I just prefer simpler messaging systems.

If your matter is urgent, voice mail is the wrong medium of communication. Feel free to call any time; if I don’t pick up, try out email or do some new-fangled text messaging.

It’s hard, I know.