Sometimes I just feel compelled to share nonsense, random thoughts, and sometimes just stuff I want to save
Yay!!!
Now, I’ve already seen Doctor Who Season 6. I liked it, but, on the whole, not as much as Season 5. Why am I so excited then?
Because now I can delete these episodes off our DVR and watch them, unedited, without commercials just as god intended.
So, here’s the thing. I really really really like the Maker Faire. I’m just torn as to the most optimal way to experience it.
First of all, I love taking my wife and daughter to Maker Faire. Getting to see so many amazing things all in one place – and getting to see them all through my daughter’s eyes is absolutely incredible. I could spend the entire weekend just walking from exhibit to exhibit with them.
Second of all, I love talking to Makers and finding out what they do, what they love to make, and how they learned all the things they did to get there. I honestly feel smarter just for having gone each year.1
Third, helping man the MakerBot table last year was AWESOME! There was basically a constant crush of people coming by all super interested in what a MakerBot was and what it could be used to make. Everyone was friendly, polite, interested, and had such excellent and insightful questions. Imagine a place where you got to just hang out with people you like2 and people would stop by and ask you to tell them all about your favorite hobby. Chances are you could talk endlessly and cheerfully about it.
Fourth, I’ve build and made some things over the last year of which I’m kind of proud. While all the actual innovation credit must go to Sandy Noble and others, I like to think that my little drawing robot is uniquely mine. It would be a lot of fun to put it up and have it draw a huge picture all weekend. It would be even better with a time lapse video playing nearby.
So, what’s a maker to do? Experience Maker Faire with the family, spend my time talking to makers, man the MakerBot table, or put something on display myself? In all likelihood I’ll probably hit the Maker Faire before the family is up, help MakerBot, catch up with the family. 3
Oh, Natalie Imbruglia, only you know how I feel!
I’ve got this other website with several thousand registered users. This morning I wondered – how many of these users are really active users and how many registered and then abandoned their account. I was kind of shocked to discover that for one of my target demographics, only about 20% of those registered users visited the site in the last 180 days.
What I need to do is bring those users back. Do you have any suggestions?
This isn’t my absolute proudest parenting moment, but it is way up there. Thursday we bought a bunch of small rolls, suitable for small sandwiches, from the grocery store. Friday night I was talking about how delicious they are and how suitable they are for small sandwiches. At which point my daughter tells me she’s going to eat them all leaving none for me. I say some fatherly thing about sharing or somesuch.
Her response was… “These aren’t the rolls you’re looking for.”
As she waved two fingers at me.1
There’s a whole huge article entitled “List of Doctor Who items” which covers just about everything I’ve ever seen on the show.
Singing a song slower doesn’t make it better.
I found a container of canned air at work. I practically emptied it into my laptop and desktop keyboard. I held the desktop keyboard vertically and ran the air can up and down.
In doing so, I accidentally zapped my hand. Cold! I know the directions say not to do it, but then I did it again because it was kinda fun. The directions are pretty clear – no shaking, no zapping skin, immediate and thorough washing of the afflicted area, and no (under any circumstances) huffing. I didn’t inhale.
My office is about two blocks from a grocery store and many days I’ll just walk out there and grab a sandwich from the deli. As I was walking back I thought of something I might want to blog… but none of my current blogs1 was particularly appropriate for this notion. For a full minute I actually toyed with the idea of starting a fourth.
Which, of course, is just pure madness. There’s no damn reason for one man to blog in four places across the internet. 234
Thankfully that moment of madness has passed and I have no recollection of the thought which prompted me to taste insanity just before my turkey wrap.5
Yesterday I got to hang out with Chris of DIYDrones. We discussed this video and he assured me that SkyNet is still a little ways off.
What I didn’t realize about those videos is that they are, in Chris’ words, one step up from a simulation. The rooms in which those copters are flying have no turbulence, are surrounded by sensors, all obstacles are clearly marked so that they can be picked out by the myriad of cameras surrounding the room, and all of the sensing and computing is being done by a computer – rather than the drones themselves.
Even if you had an army of robo-drones that could only fly indoors, how cool would that be? Some of those videos show the little ‘bots lifting and assembling structures. I would love to have a swarm of these things that did nothing but structures out of legos.
Now, I suppose, I only have to concern myself with the zombie apocalypse.
@johnbaichtal had this to say:
Dude, quadrotors are scary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4
Watching an army of nano quadrotors fly in formation, swarm, and return to formation was almost surreal. It really did feel like I was watching a clip out of Terminator. If you get a chance, watch the other videos by this same uploader, “TheDemel” as they feature these quadrotors flying/diving through hoops, flying/diving through thrown hoops, and perching on vertically mounted landing pads.
