Technically… I just turned 60 about an hour ago. It was in a rose garden with my family and our friend Sean. We are on our way back from a great tour gabe gave us of where he’s going to school. It was raining and cold and wonderful

We’ve had a great day just hanging out in Portland. I had an early 6 AM Work phone call… But then went back to bed and fell asleep until about 10. I went for a run while a Diane started making my birthday cake for tomorrow.

Around noon… Max and I went out for a walk about Portland.

First we had lunch at Pokémon .They gave me a free lunch because it was my birthday!

And we checked out one of the local maker spaces

From there we went over to hippo hardware… The most amazing architectural renovation place I’ve ever seen. They had every hinge, knob, lock set, light fixture you’d ever seen it all perfectly organized even know they were all very much used

Then we went to another hardware store which was 100% packed with the line for people to buy snow shovels and icemelt her. They were expecting “snowPacalypse” With as much is 3 inches of snow tonight… It made me laugh a little but I do realize that when snow hits a city that doesn’t usually get it it is a big deal

From there we hiked down to city liquidators. Mostly junk but some cool stuff like this ancient early IBM punch clock straight out of Endicott New York

We all met up back at home around 5:30… And walked out in the rain to see the winter light festival. The weather was terrible but the event was still fun

All along the river were cool light up sculptures. Luckily I had my glasses and gabe and I had our headbands so we fit right in

This was one of my favorite ones and it was made by Maxs Friend and we later ran into

Our final event from the evening was seeing where gabe is working and studying : the Knight cancer research lab. What an amazing place !

We got to see some of the tissue lines he’s growing… These are human Pancreatic cancer cells… Don’t worry they’re not contagious

It was great seeing gabe in his element here

OK… I’m going to stop here because I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. More from my birthday tomorrow.

I think I’m going to like being 60

Night All’, night Sam

– me

Out in Portland with my family .. all here for my birthday :-)// Spent the day on the plane getting here which was a good time to catch up on lots of work. One fun thing that happened today is that my friend Va published an article in Medium on the Veremin.. video theremin project we collaborated on. It allows you to use your pone. tablet or laptop as a musical instrument. it reads the positions of yoru hands and converts that to musical tone and volume.

I did a krufty prototype, then Va worked his magic to make it beautiful and functional . you can read the article here..

https://medium.com/ibm-watson-data-lab/veremin-a-browser-based-video-theremin-1548b63200c?platform=hootsuite

to try veremin .. got to https://veremin.mybluemix.net

let em know what you think !

nite all, nite sam
-me

Super busy day today. I think I only had 15 minutes not on the phone.

Yes the big news is I have got my new glasses ! . Not only do I see different but I look different. I’m interested to see what people think. I’m now able to read with both eyes. Fancy that !.

The day ended with my talk at the camp Mead speaker series. I was the first speaker. Just as I was taking on an ice storm started. The roads were a mess the freewayWas backed up… And as I expected a relatively few people had braved it out tonight. They were only about two or three people beside the crew at the red hen bakery where the talk was going to be. But just as it hits 7 o’clock a couple more people the. a couple of more than a couple of more and that reached my threshold I decided sure what the heck. I gave my talk anyway. It was really fun. It was a great receptive audience. And small enough to interact. I got some great feedback from them in terms of turning my talk for the next couple of times.

http://johncohn.org/base/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/img_6394.mov

OK got to get some sleep. It’s an early flight tomorrow.

Night all , nite Sam

-me

Just sitting down at home for a second before going to sleep. It’s almost midnight. I have so much to do… That I’m not having much time to play. Super ironic because I have three talks on ‘play’ in the next five days… How funny is that?

Night all, night Sam

-me