Maker Faire

[cjsmith]

I saw syren72 but did not see plymouth, and I heard someone (in a car?) call my name as I was heading toward the entrance but did not see who it was. xthread and crasch, I gots no clue. Never saw ya, and I couldn't possibly have heard my cell phone over the din.

Having skipped a year, I see a lot of contrast between this one and the first one. It's gone mainstream. There's cool stuff, don't get me wrong, but man oh MAN find parking before 10am.

I loved the cupcakes. Kids loved my scooter. I was sorely tempted by the marquetry club, but they meet exactly when I work. The hair on the enormous kneeling woman was fabulous, there was a rather spiffy Dance Dance Revolution-like SunSPOT demo, I entirely missed the battleship fight and the diet Coke and Mentos demo, and if I'd been by myself I might have spent way too much time in Swap-O-Rama-Rama. I was quite pleased to see EAA there; it didn't occur to me a couple years ago, but they're some of the world's ultimate makers. I wish I'd been willing to stay late enough to see some of the fire demos, but I have a houseguest coming.

I'm sure I'm forgetting TONS of stuff. It's hard to see everything when you're three and a half feet tall, two and a half feet wide, and can't go sideways or backwards. On the other hand, I'm not in pain, so there's the tradeoff.

Every year I see a few things that make me think "I could do that!" And every year I don't "do that". Am I busy, burned out, or just not much of a maker? I know I used to be more of one. I'm going to guess it's a little of all three.

Comments

[weirdodragoncat.livejournal.com]

crap! I wanted to go to that...there was a band playing that I wanted to see.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It's there today, too! Caution: $25/person entrance, $8/car parking.

[mapache]

If you want to be stingy, you can park over by the Whole Foods for free and take the shuttle. Look for the yellow school busses pulling up to the driveway loop across the main street from the Whole Foods.

[weirdodragoncat.livejournal.com]

Got to scheduled this weekend unfortunately :(

The band was Abney Park and I'm not sure if they were going to be there for both days or not. Anyway...I have a Baycon meeting today and have to be somewhere else in the evening

ah well.

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

I was there. I think I saw you in the Expo Hall, but I wasn't sure and you passed before I had a chance to look closer. You were in a chair or similar, right?

Lots and lots of cool stuff there. I discovered a new band, too.

http://www.abneypark.com/

Fun steampunk/dark cabaret/industrial/chamber-pop/kitchen-sink stuff.

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the mainstreaming didn't bug me, per se. The traffic, on the other hand...

[brooksmoses]

Ooh, yeah; we stayed for their show, and that was definitely nifty. I hadn't heard them before, but andres_s_p_b was raving to them (at their booth earlier) about their old stuff when he discovered them on MP3.com.

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for the show, which is a shame. I think I would have really liked the performance. I did admire their instruments at the table, etc.

Hopefully they'll hit the Bay Area again. If not, I may have to use them as an excuse to take a road trip somewhere. :)

[mapache]

Yeah, I told the keyboardist who was manning the booth that I didn't have any of their new stuff, just everything they published while on MP3.com (which was shut down at the end of 2003). She was somewhat shocked, replying "Wow, you've just dated us. And you." Apparently, most of their fans are recent, but they get the occasional one of us from the MP3.com days. I took the opportunity to buy up the three CDs they've put out since then.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

wahhh, I miss mp3.com. As far as I can tell nothing has really sprung up to replace it. Or rather, nothing that works as well as it did and focuses as much on the random little local bands. I found so much great music there.

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

I hate to say it, but the closest replacement out is MySpace. The music side of it is pretty extensive, and they cater to the local band.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ah! Shantanu thought he saw you, but you were gone before he could point you out to me. Yes, I was in an electric scooter.

And yeah, the mainstreaming bugs me basically because it makes for enormous traffic. That was awful.

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

Ah, I missed Shantanu too? Definitely unfortunate--it's been too long since I've seen y'all. Next big geeky thing, we'll have to coordinate or something.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Sorry I missed you!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too - I'm sorry that didn't work out! I did find your voice mail, later. I knew that not only couldn't I have heard the phone ring, I couldn't have USED the phone, the noise levels were that loud in places. :)

[brooksmoses]

Oh, that was syren72 I saw out in the lot. I thought it had to be, but I wasn't sure. We liked the ropes on the hood. Missed seeing you, though; wish I'd had a chance to say hi.

What we were noticing was not mainstreamness, but corporateness. Fewer random individuals who'd built something nifty, more companies. And lots more marketing of things like $30 boxed kits for doing the Mentos and Diet Coke trick (I kid you not) -- they seem to be aiming not so much at the crowd who actually spend 13 years building a better mousetrap, but at the crowd who come see it and say "I'd like to do that" and then buy something that provides the illusion that they'll do it but in actuality sits in the closet unused. (And I say this with many books of that nature and full closets, mind....)

Anyhow, yeah, parking was much better at 7:35am. *wink*

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the kits were new-to-me. I thought some of that was a little over the top, though I suppose the money's really going for the nozzle design they use to shape spray (there were several nozzles of different spray heights/patterns included in the kit).

At least they kept that level of salesmanship in one building, basically, along with the "bookstore" and whatnot. It would have been more annoying strewn throughout.

This is the second time I've gone--first time was two years ago, which I think was the first year. Even that year had some degree of corporate presence--Microsoft had a big robotics exhibit, similar to the one this year with Popfly, etc. However, it was definitely more corporate this year.

I did enjoy some of the smaller startup stuff, though. Among other things, I really liked getting to see the Buglabs stuff in person. I've been kicking around using their platform to prototype a gadget, and it was nice to be able to hold it in my hands.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I actually like boxed kits. Or rather, I like that they exist. I don't buy them often and usually when I do it's to use some of the parts along with other parts from elsewhere and make something else entirely... But I was actually thinking while wandering around today that it's really neat that there is this whole continuum between "make completely from scratch" and "buy outright" and that one can drop in pretty much anywhere along that continuum and find a project that works for them and fits their skill level.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

One great thing about boxed kits is that they often have the volume to support having one critical piece custom-fabricated. Sometimes it's worth it to pick up the kit just for that piece.

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, I agree with that in general. It was mainly that one kit that seemed a bit excessive, even with the presumably custom-fabricated nozzles.

Mostly what I was noticing that in was the books. The table we happened across was full of books that were chock-full of instructions that looked a bit entertaining to read in a flipping-through sort of basis for a minute or two, but were nowhere near detailed enough to actually be of any use. And it seemed like the whole vendor area was full of that sort of thing.

I wasn't too impressed by the copy of Make magazine that we flipped through, either. tiger_spot picked it up because of the cover article on "Hack your plants!" This turned out to be two and a half pages of a very basic intro to grafting, cross-pollination, and something else relatively trivial. It wasn't really enough depth to actually explain the tricks to how to do it in more than an extremely cursory way; if I were actually wanting to do it, I'd want to do rather more research first, at which point the article isn't very helpful. And those sorts of tricks are the things I find interesting to read about, too, so it also failed that test.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I figured it was syren72 when I saw the ropes, but was sure when I saw the license plate.

Yes indeed: corporateness. Absolutely. That was big this year.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Marquetry club? I missed that! Dang.

We watched the blacksmith/storyteller, mostly to sit down for a while and have a nice findable spot to meet back up. Got an interesting version of Merlin as blacksmith helping Arthur do the sword-from-stone thing by pounding it out from a meteorite, and andres_s_p_b won a little freshly-blacksmithed wizard face.

Now he's looking up how to put a computer in a beaver. Apparently the Compubeaver impressed him.

Every year I see a few things that make me think "I could do that!"

I'm gonna make a bristlebug today. Because they're cute. And I already have all the parts (except possibly wire).

My excuse for not having more buildy hobbies is that they would require STUFF. Which would TAKE UP SPACE IN MY HOUSE. And that would be bad.

[chriscoxadobe.livejournal.com]

The parking (and traffic getting to it) was the worst part. I hope you found the Scharffen Berger tent (you know, the one giving away 1oz sample bars of bittersweet and dark chocolate). And, of course, who can resist power tool drag racing!?

Yes, even a lot of the hardware hacking is going mainstream (kits for lots of microcontroller bits, much easier to connect than they were just 2 years ago). But that's cool. A few years back I thought kids would never get to experiment with electronics again -- all the kits had disappeared, the magazines were fading, and RadioSchmuck doesn't want to show off components or tools anymore. Now kids can experiment and build a decent robot that works over 802.11! And things like CNC mills and 3D printers are becoming, well sorta, more reasonable and available.

And yeah, that made me want to dust off some of my art supplies (I know I can do better paper marbelling than that!) and soldering irons. Unfortunately, as usual, I have more ideas than spare time...