Nice day.. started with a sail with Ben and his old friends Ronnie and Sandra. So nice meeting them. Ronnie and I helped Ben with the ropes. I think I’m finally getting the hang of it ! We came back in early to eat because we were all getting a little queasy. Sandra and Ronnie are so great ! Super fun morning.
In the afternoon I took a walk from Richmond to Jonesville using the rivershore trail with our friend James. It was raining..but not too cold. we crossed the river a couple of times which was fun and wet. Lots to see
Diane’s still in Portland and I’m missing her ! I took a picture of her flowers to show her she was missed 🙂
Ended the day up with Jen. Tim and Nate. It’s a tough time for them . Tomorrow would have been Marie’s 32nd birthday. Jen made dahl which was one of Maries favorites.
Please keep TIm, Jen, Nate and Marie in your hearts
Had a nice day around the house today. Got a run in. Then my friend Jake came by to talk.. Fun hanging out with him. Such a great guy !
Worked around the house the rest of the day.. I began repairing an ancient chimney chase in the spiral room (we call it the spiral room because diane and sam painted a cool spiral on the ceiling.. still there !).. It’s a pretty messy platerign job.. had to pull off old wall paper, build up the ancient walboard , replace the inner corner and top plaster the whole thing. Dusty work !
Later that night I headed to see Aaron and Shosh’s house for the first time. It’s a really nice place.. tons of space.. you can have a room for everything.. even a scotch room. complete with an anotomical tree ! Tom and Greg were there .. we tasted really peety scotches (me only a swallow.. still keeping off alcohol).
Really nice to see Aaron and Shosh able to move in to their own place. It’s getting homey !
I’d been looking forward to this day for several weeks. Thanks to the help of my friends Jenn and Andrea, we’d planned a Burlington visit for some of our maker friends from other towns and affiliations. Our plan was to tour Beta then tour Generator to look for possible interactions. It was a fun group including :
Prof Neil Gershenfeld an old friend from MIT who heads the Center for Atoms and Bits and was the fatehjr of the Fablab movement. We patterend the UVM Fablab , the Essex Highs chool Fablab and Generator after a template that neal created in the early 2010’s. Neil also runs a great class called “how to make almost anything” at mit which is amazingly cool
Prof Scott Kirkpatrick – Now at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.. but formerly at IBM. A long time hero of mine. He was the creator of simulated annealing.. a technique I used in my phd thesis a zillion years ago.. Scott flew himself and Neil up from Boston. THey were able to roll right up to Beta.
Tom Bodet and Johny Wolfman from the Hackspace woodworkers makerspace in Bratellboro. (My friend Lars works there too.. but couldn’t make it) . Tom and johnny are super fun.. (Tom’s a very funny guy. You can hear Tom sometimes on NPR’s “wait wait dont tell me:.”and as the wry voice pitching Motel 6.. “we’ll leave the light on for you” )
From UVM my good friend and collaborator Jenn Karson who has appointments in Engineering and Fine Arts . Her friend Prof Eric Munson, Jenn (and my ) boss Dean Linda Schadler and Dani ? a really nice videographer.
From Generator . my friends Meg Howard the ED of Generator and Veronica Newton lead for programs and partnerships at Generator
It was SO fun showing the whole group around BETA and Genreator .. We had a great day seeign what each other were working on and figureing out how we might work together in the future.
Neil gave a great talk about some of the projects going on at the Center for Bits and Atoms .. and gave us a recount of wall that went on at the Haystack craft camp this summer.. It was so great !
After a quick tour of generator we headed down town for a quick Ramen dinner.. then I drove Neil adn Scott back to BETA and walked them out to their plane
Fun day !. Today at my friend and coworker Paul did a “beta bytes of knowledge” talk on picking locks. I learned to pick some blocks back at MIT about 40 years ago and it’s a skill that’s come in handy quite a few times in my life. Paul had bought a bunch of test locks and pass them ou for us to keep. He did an excellent job teaching us all how to pick simple Tumblr locks. It was so fun to watch everybody go to it.… I ran into ‘Kyle’s friends Jackson and .… (Dang what’s his name?) Who were there because they’re working on an internship project with us at UVM…
Super fun
Later in the day a bunch of us went out to kyle and Katie’s for a planning workshop.… It was such a beautiful day that we did most of our work outside. It’s always fun getting together outside of work like that..
