Burning Man at last! A week in the desert, thirty thousand people, lights, music, action, the environment for which this machine was designed - and, in a way, an anticlimax. People loved it, just as much as I'd hoped they would, and all the parts worked as well as I'd hoped they would. After two test runs, I had no doubts about the electronics, and the assembly process was down to a system. I wasn't missing any tools or parts, and I didn't have to jury-rig anything. Everything went smoothly, and I had a pleasant, mellow time riding around watching people get a kick out of my creation.

There were two untested technical changes, which both worked out fine. After watching the original PVC pole sway and bend alarmingly at the Phoenix Festival, I built a new pole out of steel conduit sections, joined with screw couplings. The new pole worked really well - it was a bit heavier than the original, but not so much that I noticed it against the rest of the system. I also finally added the microphone, which I used to automatically synchronize the Rave-O-Matic's light show with the sound produced by the large P.A. systems I passed by. The microphone was the beginning of the project, really, but everything else grew up around it until it ended up being a fairly minor part of the eventual machine. It was still nice to have it, but it's funny how the emphasis shifts over the course of a project's life.

I set the machine up on Tuesday, at dusk, and gave it a quick test run. I don't think my camp mates had quite realized what it was I planned to build, or how tall it was going to end up being. In any case it got a lot of attention, and as soon as I turned the music on people started drifting over. I noticed this phenomenon over and over again: the machine itself wasn't the sort of thing that people spent a lot of time watching directly, but it defined whatever random patch of dirt it happened to be sitting on as a place worth hanging out in. People would drift by, pause for a moment, and stand around talking to each other over the music as the machine glowed and thumped with all its might.

My original vision had involved a sort of pied piper effect, where the machine would slowly drift around, towing a small crowd as it went. It turns out that it is really hard to ride a bike slowly enough that people feel like drifting along at the same pace. Instead the project became a series of stationary exhibitions: I'd drive to some random place, park, and then just relax and talk to people for ten or twenty minutes. Wherever I parked, no matter how random or out of the way, the lights drew people in; nobody ever really came walking directly toward me, but the machine exerted a sort of gravity, and people showed up all the same.

The one major technical problem I experienced came late enough in the week that I was getting tired and didn't mind anyway. I brought a generator and a charger, which I used to fill up the battery after each outing, but the pervasive alkaline dust corroded some of the charger's internal components and it burnt itself out after only a couple of days in the dust. When I ran the power out on Friday night, that was the end. I had hoped to haul the Rave-O-Matic up to the fire line on Saturday night, to provide music for my camp's fire performers, but it was not to be. Oh, well; I had enough fun with it during the week to count myself satisfied.