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

[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.