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Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 05:02 pm
I saw [livejournal.com profile] syren72 but did not see [livejournal.com profile] 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. [livejournal.com profile] xthread and [livejournal.com profile] 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.
Sunday, May 4th, 2008 06:18 am (UTC)
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.