11PM and just sitting down after a long , fun and amazingly scattered day..after a fun night last night. We went over to our friends Andy and Jen’s house for a great dinner then went to the Flynn to see Menopause , The Musical. It was pretty funny.. 4 very talented actresses of a certain age singing parodies of popular songs around the topic of menopause..   (:cha – cha – changeeee !) very funny. Funnier still was that Andy and I were in the tiny minority of men at the show.. The girls had even taken over the mens room !

It was a definitely geeky sort of day.. it began with a one hour virtual meetup between our Vermont makers and a sister maker organization in Malmo Sweden.. I’ve met these guys through my friends Henrik. Michael .. and David C.  one of the Arduino founders. My friend Jenn and I did a presentation on the Vermont Makers and how the maker movement has been effecting our small state. The Swedes told us about their organization and some of their projects. I got some good ideas from the conversation. They were great creative folks over there.. i’m hoping that we can arrange some sort of face to face meeting at some time. More than anything the event reminded me how world wide this maker revolution truly is…

From there I went to burlington to work with freind Jarrod on a musical instrument project. We made great progress today.. by the time i left my little arduino touch circuit  was talking to his midi drum synthesizer.. a minor triumph. Still much to do on that project..

I’m eager to get this project done and out in the world first beczause its goign to be very cool.. and second because I’m limiting the number of projects I take on now to make sure I get then done… and new cool things to work on keep appearing on my plate.. like this one

My buddy ben has this crazy idea for a way to call attention to the lunacy of ‘Citizens United’.. the insane law that makes corporations people too in the eyes of the law.   His idea is to build a contraption in the back of truck that takes a persons money, runs it through a maze of ramps, ladders, gongs and chutes. Then it stamps the dollar and gives it back..  It illustrates how big finance adds little value to the real economy

Ben got the device made… and its beautiful.. but it needs some work.Gabe and I spent about an hour over there today looking it over. . i’m going to be helping him get the thing running smoothly..   which I think I’ll enjoy.. it will be karmically good to help on this cause. i’ll post pictures as things get going.

Form there I dropped by the FabLab to cut out a plaque. Tonight was an IEEE Green Moutnain Chapter meeting.  I wanted to make a short presentation thanking the IEEE for sponsoring my last Tesla coil build  . In late 2010  the chapter treasurer Jim Monzel gave me money to build the coil. Sadly, Jim died shortly after giving em the grant. Over the last year and a half,  Friend scott and I have built and rebuilt that thing to the point its running well.. .. I made a small plaque this afternoon on the laser cutter that  that dedicatse the machine to Jims memory

We also had a great talk by my freind Eric from NRG on the hidden failure models of wind turbines.. interesting and somewhat disturbing..

OK.. I’m exhausted.. gotta sleep/ More tomorrow !

nite all. nite sam

-me