Monthly Archives: October 2012

Tuesday night- project x

Leave a comment

Too lazy to get off the couch so I’m trying to blog on my phone . The phones misspelling on top of my own may make the unreadable ( or more readable ?). I had another packed day… But I had to stop at 5, herb called from the haunted forest because they were having trouble with project X, the pumpkin robot . Evidently it got banged up on the way back from makerfaire and it’s head got knocked completely off. They screwed it back on but the 8 or so wires that run the creatures mouth and eyes didn’t fair that well. Surprisingly , things were not as bad as I thought. I found a couple of broken connections in the audio path to the arduino that works the mouth and eyes…. And a loose connection in the power supply to the radio receiver Nd two arduinos that control the pneumatic servos that work his arms . In 30 mon herb and I had him working again This is the big guys 4th year… Or is it 5th ? This is well past his warranty 🙂


Ok … Got a work. All now. More tomorrow

Nite all, nite Sam
-Jc

Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Monday night – throat shakra

Leave a comment

Today was sponsored by the Throat Shakra..  The shkaras .. as you probably know .. ar ethe energy centers the vedics envision along our spines.. there are 7 primary ones.. (I beleive). Diane is doning a yoga series on them all.. and tonight was the throuat .

Wikipedia tells me that the throat chakra is

“also called Vishuddhi, is the fifth primary chakra according to Hindu tradition.

 

Vishuddha is positioned at the neck region near the spine, with its ksehtram or superficial activation point in the pit of the throat. This chakra is white with 16 purple or smoke coloured petals, and within the pericarp is a sky-blue downward pointing triangle, within which is a circular region which is white like the full-moon, representing the element of akasha or ether. This region is represented by the deity Ambara, who is white in colour, with four arms, holding a noose and a goad, making the gestures of granting boons and dispelling fear, and seated upon a white elephant.  The bija mantra (seed sound) is the syllable हं haṃ, and is written in white upon the chakra. Vishuddha has sixteen purple petals upon which are written the 16 Sanskrit vowels in golden;

अ a आ ā इ i ई ī उ u ऊ ū ऋ ṛ ॠ ṝ
ऌ ḷ ॡ ḹ ए e ऐ ai ओ o औ au अः ḥ अं ṃ

Vishuddha chakra is known as the purification centre. It is associated with the element Akasha or Æther, And the sense of hearing, as well as the action of speaking.

This is interesting to me.. because everything today has been centered on my throat..

Today I was speaking with my friend M.. she was talking to me about finding balance between heart and mind.. She suggested I find a mid point between.. Ahhhh HA   !the throat.. ..

Then tonight in yoga, the whole evening was devoted to the  throat . The throat shakra is the thing that I most felt after Sam’s death.. It burned whenever I thought of him, and compelled me to say his name or speak about him. Tonight in yoga when we talked about the throat shakra.  it took me right back there and  brought me  to (good) tears.

Be nice to your throats people..

Speakign of which, I gotta go watch the presidential debate..

nite all, nite sam

-me

 

 

 

 

Sunday night – Richmond land trust at 25

Leave a comment

Quiet day.. finished up a long standing electronics project.. which was good to get done.. still need to integrate it with Hoer’s stuff… Didn’t do much the rest of the day.. so gotta dip into yesterday… Which was the 25th anniversary party for the Richmond Land Trust.. The Land Trust rented out Bridge Street Cafe..

and we all hung out and reminisced about 25 years of tree hugging. It was great to see everyone and realize that we’d all been getting together around the same causes for the last quarter century.. (wow !). We ate, drank and watched slide shows.. same folks.. just more and darker hair in many cases. .


Krista currently runs the board.. and she had all the original officers speak.. including me.. I was (believe it or not) the treasurer… which taught me that I never wanted to handle money or think of money again in my life.. 🙂

Gary has been all sorts of officers.. he’s done so much for the town

dan.. (who’s Brittany it was last night !)

THe slide shows were great.. we got to see our old friend Warren and Ruth Beeken on the pictures.. they both passed away about 10 years ago (I think)

we talked over all the projects the land trust has handled:, the river shore, the stafford preserve, the bombardier reserve, the monitor barn.. the land trust rebuilt it…     we held Sam’s memorial concert there.. it will always have that place in my heart i guess.

Got hoe and Gabe had a passle of football kids there.. he wanted to do some science so we did some quantitative stoicheimetric exothermic reactions (aka ..we blew some stuff up !).. Here are the boys with no flame thrower..

and here they are with teh flame thrower.. .nice !

today.. got oot out with Diane and the girls to start exploring the Richmond Ridge trail .. late fall leaves .. nice to be outside.

ok.. thats it for now.. more tomorrow..

nite all. nite sam
-me

Saturday night – Vermont Open Data Hackathon

Leave a comment

Very cool 24 hours. At 6:30 yesterday evening several of us kicked off the Vermont Open Data Hackathon. By buddy Tim and MWG owners the Tarrant brothers generously offered the use of their beautiful work space in the Champlain Mill for 24 hours of hard-core hacking on the topic of Open Data. The idea was to build some killer apps for the state of Vermont. We had about 114 folks sing up in 32 teams. Some worked alone, some in teams with as many as 5 folks.. Some were seasoned pros, others were college students.. we even had one 19 year old guy working on his own. In order to spur innovation, there were few rules. The only requirement was that it made use of one or more sources of open data and that it made Vermont a more livable place.

The very cool thing about this hackathon was that it aligned with (and in some ways sprung from) a project I’m doing at work on Open Data..  I was one of the panel of judges for the event.. and felt honored to have been asked.   At 6:30 Tim and I gave a short intro to the challenge and the rules for judging.. then they were off !. It was so inspiring to see all these folks coding for 24 hours in order to give back to our state..

 

GO !!!!



By 6 pm there was already pizza that had been donated..

Of course, there was a generous supply of redbull..  a necessary programming tool


I stayed only until 12:30 last night.. I wasn’t competing, so I got the chance to sleep !  Things got pretty weird as the night went on

Hey Andrea !!


junk food wrappers started to show up everywhere !. A sign of good, hard thinking !


at 12:30 there was a break for ice cream and burritos..   again.. all donate.. by Ben and jerry’s and bullacos

I came back in around 2 this afternoon .. folks were still hard at it.. they looked sleepy, but happy !


It was very cool looking out unto the winoski that was swollen from all  of last nights rain .

then it was over.. and time for the judging to begin.. All the teams lined up.. all 32 of them.. each had to make a 3 minute intro talk./demo . that’s not much time !

the suspense was great !

here’s our team of crack judges ,.

here goes one of the first talks.. this is my buddy Sam S. from Lab-B.

we even had one group do hardware ..   this is a traffic sensor


it was hard choosing from all the projects.. in the end we gave out 3 honorable mentions..

then the best university project..

then 3rd place..   an app for helping choose the best place to live in the state based on a a variety of open data sources.

then 2nd  place. a tool for comparing VT towns based on a set of metrics

finally, first place… a great app for visualizing a time line of the lifetime of commercial enterprises over the year..  that used local historical business records and map data


then it was time for folks to pack up.. they were a tired bunch !

speakign of tired, I can’t keep my eyes open..

Thanks to all th organizers, contestants, and judges for making this open data hackathon such a big success.
this is the start of something very good for the state of vermont.. !
more tomorrow about the land trust dinner this evening..
nite all, note sam
-me
Thanks