Wet and rainey much of the day so we stayed inside. Got stuff done around the house today.. I did a ritual cleaning of my office.. sorted all the electronics, through a ton of stuff out.. basically got organized for the new year..

We went out just before 5 to go to the visiting ours for our freind Rob..It ran from 5-8 at the Rich funeral home in Essex Junction.  even thou we got there just after 5 there was already a long line all along the outside of the building. . As we stood there waiting people just kept coming and coming. Rob was such a great guy.. he was really central to stuff many things around the high school and the community.

It took about 30 minutes before we got in to the building.. and it was another 20 until we got into the room with the family. Rob and Lisa have  4 beautiful kids Marcello, Dom, Lei and Belle . My heart broke when I saw them and Lisa. We got to hug each one of them.. I really didn’t know what to say.. just that I/we all really loved Rob.. He was always so much fun to hang out with..

Then we paid our respects to Rob..

By the time we got out of the Funeral home the line was way longer .  it seriously looked like the whole town of Jericho was there. It just showed how loved Rob and his family are in our community. It also shows that they are going to have lots of support in the hard weeks, months and years ahead..

Rob’s funeral Mass is tomorrow

We’re wishing them all peace tonight..

nite all, nite sam

-me

Woke to the happy sight of Snow.. i didn’t care if it had freezing rain and sleet mixed in.. at least it covered the ground. it finally looks like Vermont !

Had a busy day .. First job was to set up the home weather station we got. I’m doing this because IBM just announced it was buying The Weather Channel.. One thing we’re getting with TWC is The WeastherUnderground.. WU does micro local weather forecasts with the help of over 100,000 home weather stations like the one I have now. It’s greta to be able to participate.. and use the data from the station. Our Station can be found at

http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KVTRICHM14

you can see our weather camera at

http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/johncohn/3/show.html

here’s a shot from it this morning

 

Later in the day we went and visited our friends Jeremy and Dani and 7 month old Ike who are visiting form Chicago.. it was so great seeing them.  and  Jeremy’s mom and sister. What a happy baby !!!

 

from there we headed down town to the open ceremony for  ‘Lake Brite’ the very cool light sculpture at the Leahy Echo Center. The work was funded by a very generous gift from Google. They are helping us visualize data from the lake in a very cool and engaging way.. Huge thanks to Goggle, Matt Dune and Justin Caroni for supporting this work.

The project was led by our friend Rachel from the Generator. She did such an amazing job pulling to gather the funders, advisors, ECHO folks makers artists and software folks. It was so exciting to see it all come together

Major Kudos to Matt and Erik for the physical build.

The structure has 7500 addressable light up balls.. The whole thing weights about 3000 pounds and is built so beautifully..

Alex and crew led most of the software .. They’ve done a great job of bringing the piece to life. They’re now worrying to make the interfaces open to other data scientists so they can visualize their data on the piece.

 

Phelan introduced the small ceremony

 

then Justin spoke on behalf of Google

Then Nancy mathews the Dean of the UVM Rubinstein School spoke.

 

Then Sneator Leahey and hi wife Marcella spoke

I was so proud of Echo and the community. It was especially great to see so many folks form The Generator involved in making this possible.

Once again.. huge shout out to the team that built this.. Rachel, Matt, Erik, Alex, etc

and huge thanks to Google for their support !

 

Stay tuned.. we’ll be spreading the word on how you too can use Lake Brite to show your data to the world !

nite all, nite sam

-me

 

Super satisfying day at the generator .. My mom even came to help ..  Friends Ben and Jerry are big supporters of Bernie (and so am I). Their mission is to create some ultra cheap and ultra visible light up lawn/window/car signs for Bernie  in support of the upcoming Iowa Caucus and NH Primary. We’ve been working on some prototypes using either cheap  battery powered or plug in xmas lights. The idea is to sell them starting next week on ETSY at cost.

Here are two of the design prototypes Ben made..

We’ve been hand making them.. but that won’t scale to the hundreds we need to make, so today we had a work party at The Generator to come up with a more scalable.. and it turns out … cheaper version.

 

We had a verity of folks stopping by to help, kibbutz, watch, whatever.. even some kids !

 

We experimented with several designs, and processes.. all caps, mixed caps, different colors, fonts and spacings. Eventually we opted for a rework of the ‘traditional’ Bernie sign..   We first hand drilled some holes for the lights.. then set up to laser drill them . Here’s Ben plugging one of the hand prototypes

 

Distance check !

What else can you spell with the letters from ‘Bernie’ ?

here’s the set up for the first laser cut one.. (I’d printed a single color sign at Fedex.. thanks to Matt F for design 1, Jeme for design 2 and John M for assembling it)

Here are the boys attempting to keep their fingers safe cutting it to size.

Here we go with the laser.. Bern-baby-Bern !!!!

john pokes out the ‘pregnant chads’ 

and Voila !!!

Here’s Ma with the instigators 

 

Enjoying a little bit of cardboard pinball !

By the end of the day we had the artwork worked out, the printed signs, stakes, lights and packing material ordered. We’ll get them by the end of the week and be shipping by next week.. Great team effort !.. Go Bernie ! Go Generator !

Special thanks to all the folks at generator (Matt, Matt, Erik, John, Jeme, Jake, Peter, Heather, Brook, Beth, Scott, Letth, Rob, Turner, and the nice woman who let us take some of her laser time.) for making it such a Fab place to Fab..

Onward to the primaries !

nite all, nite sam

-me

 

Today we said goodbye to our good friend Puckett. He died December 8th on his own terms. Yesterday his Mother Jody brought his ahes back up to Vermont to spread them on Bolton Mountain.

We met this morning at 9L30 in a cold drizzle.. then waled up to the top of Timberline . Puckett loved that mountain..

 

here’s Pucketts Grandmother Jill.. we walked up together. 

 

Jody transferred soem ofPuckett’s ashess to a container for spreading..

 

we took turns tossing the ashes out on the wet ground..

 

Brad had Puckett’s ipd… so we listened to some of his music.. mostly death metal.. it sounded sweet and right to be listening to that stuff under the circumstances..

 

i put a samstoen on some of puckers ashes.. they were such good friends.. it made me hope that in soemwierd alliterative universe they were off playing guitar together…

 

then we started down the hill

 

a little more than an hour later we gathered at the Richmond library..

 

there were about 75 folks there.. lots of buckets friends. Here’s nick. jeff and urion from Pucketts band Black Night Vengeance.. Sam played in that band before he died..

 

 

we watched a great slide show that Pucketts sister Miranda put together.. there wasn’t a dry eye in the place when that was playing.. it was so good seeing all those pictures of Puckett.. he was so fun and talented…. 

 

people got up and told Puckett stories.. here’s Lee telling  some fun ones. . 

 

for more than an hour folks got up and said how much Puckett had meant to them.. there were soemveutifull stories.. soemhard ones too..

 

Afterwards folks stood around and share stores and connected.. which uis what we all needed do .

 

by about four o’clock.. folks had shared and told stories.. and were ready to say goodbye..

a short while later the place was empty..

it was a hard day..I think everyone had a chance to say good bye .. and to reconnect..

it was what we all need to do..

Puckett…we’re all really going to miss you man.. you were one of a kind..

we

l keep you inner thoughts…

nite all.nite sam

-me