Tomorrow is Flux Thursday @ Flux Factory (directions), and it’ll be a special Flux Thursday not only because of the awards ceremony for Flux’s current exhibition The Science Fair (I wonder who will win the award for “BIG VIOLENCE”?!), but especially because I’ll be giving a slideshow by the working title The World’s Longest DIY Slideshow.
Don’t worry it won’t be as painful as it sounds. Since returning from the Bay Area for Maker Faire, a lot of people have asked me how was the trip, what did I see, do, etc. So rather than repeat the same story to a dozen people, I’d rather spit it to many dozen people at the same time – and be merry with drink and eats, Flux Thursday is a potluck event so if you plan on coming bring something for others to enjoy. And I will plan to make it worth your while with my roller coaster slideshow – my plan is 300 images in 30 minutes! 10 a minute or one image every 6 seconds, with explanation! Strap yourself in! It’s gonna be fuuuuuuuuun!
It looks like this. It has 5 stickers on the front, that fit into those rectangular areas; and my name on a sticker on the back. Inside, my contact details, including: POBox, phone, Google Voice, skype, email, web, etc.
I got there early, helped volunteer, busted my balls setting up the books and electronics departments while people were flooding in. I did my best. This was my payback – for the 2 minutes I had my back turned, someone stole my notebook. It was behind the electronics table, in a pile of obviously-personal stuff. It was not an “accident” – it was an obvious quick-pinch. The analogy is like taking off your shoe to remove a rock, setting your shoe down to wipe your foot, and someone stealing your shoe: SCORE! FREE SHOE!
Why would someone do that?
There was clearly a culture of people there who understood the intention of the event: keep waste out of landfills, exchange, dialogue, talk about stuff, the aesthetics of life. And then there were people who were there to simply cart away as much free stuff as they possible could get away with. Sad but true.
This reminds me increasingly of why I’m a “digitalist” – specifically, why I like to keep as much information as possible “in the cloud”. Unfortunately, I hadn’t transcribed all of the information contained within my notebook yet. And most of my notebooks, once they finish just sit on a shelf and collect dust. Unfortunately, this notebook wasn’t supposed to “finish” until the end of September.
School of the Future, Holocenter, Maker Faire, Flux Factory, etc… if I had a meeting with you, if I took notes, they’re gone. Just GONE.
6+ months of notes and ideas, snatched in a single breath.
Gone.
Needless to say I’m pissed, upset, and depressed. Like I say I helped Alpha One Labs setup shop, and volunteered my energies. I barely got to talk or network with anyone because the pace was so hectic. The event organizers seemed plenty nice and there were a number of cute girls there. The lady running the book area was super-cute and there was a barkeep I would have liked chatting up. Now, I’m sitting at home sulking on a sunny Saturday afternoon and frankly I DO NOT WANT TO GO BACK OUTSIDE.
I know at some point I’m going to cry, I just lost so much work and time. And I’ll have to spend double-time the next four months in preparation for World Maker Faire (NYC) recovering or following up with a “sorry” to everybody I was supposed to get in touch with and now… my mind is so overworked and flooded with information, I simply can’t remember everything anymore. I have to write things down. But now it’s like I no longer trust writing it down, or taking a notebook outside that might contain sensitive information if lost. But it wasn’t lost, it was stolen.
I’ve coordinated events before with 2, 4, 900 people. In my home and elsewhere. Always left doors and rooms unlocked because I felt safe for my stuff. Now, now I no longer feel safe. I’m not sure if I trust a free-swap style event anymore. In near-6 years I’ve never had anything in NYC stolen from me.
My information is clearly labeled inside the book. Will someone go out of their way to return it? Please please, I hope so.
This is one of those megaposts that makes me sad, because it reminds me of how much activity just happened, and how poof, it’s all gone now. I’m still nervous with excitement – okay maybe that’s the late-night coffee talking – and unclear what exactly to say other than if you missed it, you seriously missed it!
It’s incredibly difficult to explain in a blog post what Maker Faire is: what it excites and instills in people, and how it operates. The best way to explain it is to participate in it, to see it live, and to flow through its channels. Maker Faire isn’t a thing that tells its Makers what to do. Instead, Maker Faire is whatever the Makers make of it! There’s a point at which the floodgates open and the crowds come rushing in, sure, but more-so than that there’s a point when the team who put it together kind of give it up, and let the Makers run the show! It’s really remarkable, really incredible, not something you find much of anymore. So much of society elsewhere is “curated”, orchestrated, composed. Maker Faire is LIFE. It’s fluid and organic and sometimes it doesn’t work – and when shit breaks down, you understand it that much better, and you hack it back into place!
And perhaps the most impressive element of Maker Faire was how it natively procured a platform of dialogue that is lost in so many other facilities. You could easily walk up to a complete stranger and ask them a question – be it technical or conceptual – about their project and get a response. They were there to talk, to exchange, and to expand the minds of those attending, to open up new possibilities through language and presentation. Here is this thing, yes, but now I will tell you here is why this thing is here! Ah-hah! That’s when it gets really interesting.
I really want to mention and caption each and every single image with its own essay, but that simply might not be possible. This page will never load and this server will crash if I tried to load all 400+ quality photos I took at this amazing event. Instead I’ll post a couple dozen now, and I hope to mention a couple more choice images and projects in the days ahead; because it’s pretty clear to me that as I twitch and type that I’m completely overwhelmed with the mass of experience I just encountered, I’m looking for a way to unload, and I want you to participate in the tidal wave of awesomeness that Maker Faire has to offer:
this is like one of those centrifugal spinning solar system devices, only GIANT and DIY!
a Make workshop about marketing your hand-made products
I gave the PaperBot one of my blue ribbon Editor’s Choice awards. Here’s a video showing the PaperBot in motion:
Kids having so-much-fun in the Young Makers building
Also, kids and adults alike could learn how to solder for just $1 – and you actually made a blinking LED device!
embedded arduino lilypad in fabric – wearable electronics
giant… cardboard… robot… AWESOME!
Madagascar Institute – from Brooklyn – Invents The Wheel at Maker Faire! I have yet to take this thing for a spin!
a custom bike wheel with embedded LEDs that display images as you cycle! in this case, the Matrix code.
a crafty theatre set for teaching middle schoolers the principles of stage lighting design and sequence-programming (cue calls, basically), driven by a MaxMSP patch with iCamera and servo-lights. Brilliant!
Angus operating the ShopBot… HI Angus!
hi Tramaine… Shouldn’t You Be… (Tramaine was the resident sign-painter and made some lovely hand-painted signs chock-full of info’mation)
lots of crafters at Maker Faire!
glowing boxes of DIY-whats-it-dos!
a solar charging station, reminiscent of gas stations of yore, for you to recharge your mobile devices with sun-ergy
learning basic smithing skills, taught by Oakland’s The Crucible
the Midway fairegrounds. And yes, that’s a rocket in the background. And yes, it’s 40′ tall. And yes, you could go in it. And YES, it’s capable of space exploration, they had all the knobs and dials and viewports to prove it!
Like I say, if you missed out on this you missed out on one of the most exciting events in this country. That’s saying a lot, but it’s also true that there was something for everyone at Maker Faire – from kids to adults to hackers to solar enthusiasts to gardeners to pyro-maniacs to music and performance. And it was all Do-It-Yourself! See you next year – I can’t wait!
my first full day in the Bay Area, technically still going as I jot some notes down at the I/O after-party (not to be confused with the “after-after party”). Just notes, because there’s too much going on around me to write any serious synopsis or review.
The day began around 7am, with a splash of water to the face. After that it was a blur. Between there and walking into the main hall at the Google I/O conference there was: a breakfast burrito, a 1/2 mile walk through San Mateo, a Caltrain ride past the city metal scrapyard, a tour past South Park where Wired and other dot-com sites of fame were founded, and then finally the convention center where the conference is being held.
First impression is it’s good to see so many PCs. Sure there are plenty of Macs to be seen here, but Google being Google means they use whatever is available, and in the case of their check-in machines that means classic IBM ThinkPads, and PCs for many of their presentation stations. Basically, they aren’t pompous or pretentious, they just use what works for what they need.
I caught most of the opening keynote speech. Again, Google being Google means the keynote has a different flavor to it than other tech companies. I’m not going to bother breaking down the speeches that were given, instead just flip through the GoogleDeveloper YouTube channel or watch part 1 of the keynote below, and go from there with related videos:
The seminars were hit-and-miss to be honest. The first one I went to – Bringing Google to Your Site, part of the API column of seminars – was spot-on! In the past two weeks I’ve had several conversations with various individuals, non-profit organizations and for-profit ventures, and some of the ideas we were bouncing around in our conversations were answered by Google at this seminar! Very fortuitous! The third seminar I went to – Fireside Chat with the Google Chrome and Chrome OS Teams – was a bit of a flop though. No one from the Chrome OS team was actually present; and the “chat” wasn’t really a chat but a town hall. Granted, I like town hall meetings, Q&As, and open forums, but I was actually expecting to be presented with a chat. And there weren’t any major Chrome developments to report, so it was a bit banal.
However the HTML5 seminar (about Chrome and Google tools) made up for any shortcomings:
and unfortunately I missed the Ignite seminar because it was completely full-up.
One of the most interesting – and almost easily simple – ideas that Google presented was their Font API, which allows you to print custom fonts to webpages with a single link src call, like this:
…
Then there was the after-party, not to be confused with the after-after party. What can I say, Google likes to party. Actually, there were elements that worked and elements that didn’t. The mini-Maker Faire in the after party, ROCKED, of course. As a preview of what to expect at the Faire this weekend, the very-mini event had a whopping 10 Makers – the Faire this weekend will have over 600! The food, however, sucked. The lines were long and the quality was edible but unexciting. Sort of unexpected. However the DJ and VJ element was pretty good – of course you can thank Google for owning YouTube for that! It made the VJ process very… obvious. Just queue up a YouTube playlist and watch some mash-ups on HD projectors! BAM! But seriously I think the mini-Makers and tech projects stole the show:
the I/O was mostly successful. And this post is relevant to yesterday’s events, I didn’t get to see the conclusion of the I/O today, as I’ve been busy at the San Mateo Expo Center helping with Maker Faire prep, so I haven’t seen what Google announced; there was buzz yesterday that they were saving the “big news” for today: TV, Android 2.2, etc. – I don’t know but I’m sure it’s all very exciting. All the Google engineers and employees I talked to were all very driven by being a part of something that was bigger than them, yet something that they knew they were absolutely contributing to the ethos and longevity of. All in all really strong energy, and a sort of alternative approach to a conference compared with historical big-name hardware and software companies.
Oh yeah, and they gave me a Verizon Droid phone with 1 month free data service – in essence, they bought me! However I can’t use the Droid, and I WANT the Nexus One. So anybody out there want to buy an upgraded Verizon phone for under-market rate and help me achieve my dream?
It only happens once a month, and its more popular than auto-tune songs in the Top 10.
It’s Flux Thursday @ Flux Factory, your and my favorite non-profit arts space in Western Queens (DEFEND IT!). Don’t get the jest of my jibe? Is that even a word?
Either way there’s only one way to find out: c’mon down! There’ll be a meal (hopefully HOT with this textbook Spring weather) but it’s also a potluck, so bring something for your fellow punters. They’ll appreciate it. And there’ll be some art, maybe some theatre, and if you have works-in-progress yourself and want to show-and-tell, now’s your opportunity! See you there.
