I had the quintessential Vermont ‘salon’ night.. salon not as in living room.. but a in when a bunch of smart, passionate and creative people get together to share ideas and eat and drink too much. The whole idea of ‘salon’s has fascinated me since i read about the Algonguin salon where folks like dorothy parker sat around and drank martinis and talked art and writing and politics…
Tonight it wasn’t art and writing and politics.. it was computer hacking, making and then art.. with some science and politics thrown in. Fist stop was the monthly 2600 hackers club meeting.. I hadn’t been in months.. but it was so good seeing the guys.. our group is getting ready to move to a new space.. Our hope is to have some gear set up to share stories and techniques.. Tonight we even talked about doing some student outreach.. there’s no better way to win a kid over to geekdom than teaching them a bit of the ‘dark arts’ . We had a surprise visit from Jeff, a representative from SparkFun , my favorite geek warz emporium. Jeff is crisscrossing the country reaching out to Makerspaces trying to figure out how SParkfun can help. He was like Santa.. I got some great geek shwag.. (4 cool 802.15.4 transceivers, an mpg shield and midi shield for arduino and an lilypad vibrating motor.. how sweet is that ?
After that meeting.. I headed over to the Flyndog gallery to see the opening of friends Homer, Chris and Ethan. I was SOOOO proud of all of them.. Homer had his metal paintings including some of the motorized ones i helped him with.
Ethan had made a piece on site that was one strip of aluminum.. it was really elegant.
And chris had his wonderful steampunk stuff there.. including the urinal
the shower (chis’s beautiful wife kim not included)
the jetpack
and my personal fave.. the sub (i helped with the lights)
It was a great scene there.. I saw many folks from different corners of my life.. and had soem great conversations. i was really glad I was there to be there for this
OK.. gotta sleep now. .More tomorrow..
nite all, nite sam
-me