ArcAtack

Have you ever seen electricity dance, or play music? At the Maker Faire was a group called ArcAttack that plays music through Tesla coils. They also place a volunteer into a metal box in the middle of the coils to amp (nuck nuck) up the excitement...



I hear that sometimes one of them puts on a full chain-mail suit and dances in the middle.
So Cool!

Maker Fiare 2010

The Maker Faire is mostly like what it sounds like. It is a fair where the main attraction is learning how to make things, to look at invention and re-use and odd DIY stuff. It was thoroughly overwhelming and I find now that I'm here uploading that I might have taken all of ten photos throughout the day.

At the beginning of the day we saw this guy demonstrating the theramin... for those who don't know this is the instrument you hear in those 1950's Sci-Fi movies. It's completely electronic and is played somewhat like an air guitar.

I tried to draw a tree with light;


I think a little practice would help... but playing with light exposure photography is easily something I could waste a lot of time with.

The place was covered with all sorts of kenetic scupltures made with re-used items... something I didn't take a photo of that I loved was the display of old computers turned into musical instruments including a game console guitar and mouse maracas...

... interactive sculptures... (better photos HERE)
There was a pond for fighting model ships. There is a club thatmakes 1/44th scale WWII ships that have battles every hour with real ballistics. I imagine it would have been more exciting to be participating rather than just watching from behind this rather wobbly plastic sheeting. We did have to wear protective goggles and sign waivers that said we wouldn't sue for injury.
There was a shipping crate that had been hollowed out and filled with all of this metal sculpture made with reused pieces. I thought my Mom would really have liked this part because my Granddad was a creative welder who would have done things like this...

Steampunks ruled this festival. They had a steampunk villiage where they had skits about their strange Victorianesque "robots" and sold their wares. There were people dressed in steampunk clothes all over the festival and it made me a little sad for the SCA folks who were in rather shabby garb and weren't getting much attention for their fencing at the far end of the festival.
The Steampunks did have some neat inventions... yet again I thought I had taken all sorts of photos of them but in reality I just thought about it and was too overwhealmed by the scale of the festival and number of people to really focus long enough to pull out my camera. Anyway, here is their "steam" powered bike (actaully it runs on gas but that's not nearly as cool).
There were several buildings full of activities and trade show type promotions. In one booth I learned how to solder open pin circuit boards... I made a mini theramin. This booth made me laugh like crazy... "Paper airplanes made easy" Really? Because they're so hard? Wow.
This shot from inside one of the tents was of the ping pong ball LED mobius thingie... it looses a good deal in translation. It strobes through several sets of sequential LEDs and looks like some giant bio-luminescent creature.
Fire sculpture;
At the end one of my favorite new bands(Ok Go) played (separate post to follow) with fishbowls on their heads...
It's hard to sum it all up because it was so overwhelming. There were too many people. There were many vendors who didn't actually have any information or activity beyond telling you to go to their website... there were more vendors than I expected selling DIY kits for more than I thought they were worth. There were also interesting lectures and resources that I had never heard of. There was a Tesla coil band (separate post to follow) that played music amplified through 20' tall tesla coils. The next time I go I think I may take more time quietly listening to NASA scientists in the lecture hall and not trying to see everything there is to see.

Maker Faire processing...

I've been a bad blogger... but this weekend I went to the Maker Faire and I've got it stewing in my brain... so check back in soon and I should have new photos up...

For the next time you're on the I-5

Between LA and the Grapevine is a long stretch of highway. Mostly it just winds along with no hope of stopping until you get to the other side of the hill. Since this is the last leg of my journey from Berkeley to LA I am usually just plowing through but there is this spot in the middle, Pyramid Lake, that always catches my eye.
It's a beautiful lake.

This time I decided to stop. Parking is free. There is a water museum inside created by the municipal water district, also free (I didn't take any photos inside, sorry I totally forgot to, it was rather dry despite the subject matter).

There are amazing views, it's a nice place to stretch cramped legs.
There's a water fountain to fill up your water bottle. The picnic areas were closed but they looked beautiful. Next time I'm going to forget the nasty rest area stops and just aim for the lake.

Dark Humor...

I am a Muppet person. I've always been a Muppet person. Disney is meh, ok... but since I was a small child (my mother claims I loved the Muppet movie from within the womb) I have been a Muppet loving, Roald Dahl reading, Chekhov watching kind of a girl. Its healthy to be able to look into the dark abyss and Laugh maniacally at it. If you despair, that's it, you've lost. When you can laugh at the worst day, you know it has not defeated you. I say dark humor is the best humor, and as proof I offer the following evidence;

Faith v. Hope

This is what the bottom level of the Bay Bridge looks like on a good day... a day I can take a snap shot with my right hand and still be safe.
On a day when it's raining driving under this bridge gets you wetter than driving on the surface streets. On occasion there are random chunks of road that fall from the upper level that you have to drive around. Last year this bridge was closed because a cable snapped... (miraculously nobody was seriously hurt)

the bridge is crumbling; and yet I drive on it...

not so much because I have faith that it will hold up, but mostly I Hope it will. I hope that it's sound enough to stay up and that the authorities will close it again if it's not. I hope that the new span of the Bay bridge will be finished before this old one falls into the bay. It probably will, but I'm not sure.

Sometimes I feel like a lot of life is like this. I don't have any faith that things will turn out for the better, but I hope they will, so I keep on driving that way.

Passive Aggressive Beer

I found the perfect beer to offer as an apology for drinking your roommate's last beer even though they've just finished off all of your ice cream, not replaced the toilet paper and neglected to tell you that you got a package in the mail...

Hang in there Brian, things will get better... I hope.

Hello Hot Stuff!

Adieu old oven...

Hello 5 burner/accusimmer/power burner/temperature control oven beauty!


Now I get why my folks were so excited to get their new oven... what a difference!

Book shops

To purchase a book at a local bookseller;

1. locate book (oh look a section for Drama)
2. take book to counter
3. cashier will usually comment on the book such as
"oh good book", "I haven't read this one" or will ask you "Did you need anything else?"
4. pay for book
5. leave


To purchase a book at a large national chain book store;

1. walk in store to realize that they've swapped everything around and you've just spent the last five minutes walking to the complete opposite end of the store.
2.locate employee to tell you where Shakespeare is...
3. Walk past African American history, turn left at poetry into "Literature" (don't get me started on how I don't believe plays qualify as literature)
4. Locate book
5. Take book to counter
6. cashier will ask you
"do you have our discount club card?"
no
"Would you like to sign up for one they have all sorts of fantastic bla bla bla"
no
"can I have your email address?"
no
"can I have your zip code?"
Could you just sell me the damn book?!
7.pay for book
8. leave store


---ugh I hate giant business.

loading haiku

reflection is short
when time for it is shorter
blogging posts to come

Distant memories...

This day many years ago... I remember it was dark out and I was in the passenger's seat of the Travellall. Was I strapped into a child's seat? I don't think so, perhaps we left in a hurry or I was so used to it I didn't even think about it. I remember peaking over the seat while my baby sister was being born in the back because she wouldn't wait the hour and a half to be born in the hospital... I couldn't see much because I was too small and Dad told me to stay put. There was a lot of breathing and then a couple of baby cries but not much noise really. I also remember waiting in some building at the side of the road that wasn't the hospital... and then the hospital where it was brightly lit and they wouldn't let me see the new baby because I was too little (at least that was my understanding of it). That I am afraid is all I remember from my sister's day of birth... its a little self centered but I was four and a half, what do you expect?

Happy Birthday Kelly Bug! I'm glad you were born! I have more clear memories of your first birthday when you got your first black eye... and of corse most of your birthdays thereafter. Have a great day this year! Don't run into the hearth.

Love you!!!

The Closing Hand

"...we need to appreciate three important facts about money:

1. It is symbolic, not real

2. Its function is to homogenize.

3. It is a means, not an end."

--Philip Slater, Wealth Addiction

If I had a fleet of meter maids who could site everyone I met for crossing the line or waiting around just a little too long, I might be tempted to do it. As a person, it would make me a jerk, but a city is not a person, this is their way to maintain services without raising taxes (for now).

We dug this great hole and now slowly understand its depth... it's familiar, it's like taking on student loans with no true knowledge of the value of money; not understanding how hard it might be to pay those loans off. However the state of California is not an 18 year old with shoddy math skills... the state of California has been run into this hole by many adults with great math skills. It has people running it with accounting degrees, and CEO's who have successful businesses, lawyers who went through years of hard study... you can blame whoever you like but there were a lot of hands (including voters) who got us all here today... perhaps the problem is that we need more training in science.

What we've been running on here is an assumption that our economy can work like a perpetual motion machine...

For such a device to work implies that this machine will generate more energy than it consumes and go on indefinitely. We have been working on the assumption that we can continue to consume and grow and expand indefinitely despite the fact that resources are finite.

Housing value cannot continue to grow forever, consumption of goods cannot be sustained, disposal of goods must be accommodated, eventually all the oil in the world will run out (I don't know when but it's a resource that is not renewing itself so eventually if we keep consuming it we will have used the very last drop). In the machine, friction and gravity (or say, crooked businessmen, droughts and earthquakes...) will wear it to a stop and energy must be spent for the device to continue.

We're living in a broken machine; the laws of thermodynamics tell us the machine needs energy (work) to keep going. Right now the big mistake is to think that money = work. Resources are "work". Resources of human labor and ingenuity, and natural resources are what we need to keep going. In order to make our resources work for us we need to stop burdening the system. Our culture of over-consumption cannot be supported.

All of the money grabbing and finger pointing in the world is not going to help us out of this bind.