We had beautiful weather today so when I came home from work ‘Diane and I decided to go hike Bolton. It was a little cool… But we didn’t somehow remember that there would still be some snow up there even though its only 5 miles from us as the crow flies. We’ve had some 80° days so it was natural but we had forgotten. It was a beautiful hike… though we had some deep snow to contend with.
Reminds us that will spring is here in the valleys it hasn’t quite reached the mountains yet
Had an Nice opportunity to have lunch with my friend Herman today. Herman is one of the founders of beta and came there after a long career at GE. We went out to lunch and his very beautiful Jaguar… We got to talking about our individual history’s and what it was like working i big hierarchical companies in comparison to beta. I admire him quite a bit.
Later in the afternoon my good friends and coworkers ‘Shannon and Phoebe and I spent some time wrangling a bunch of our demos into one of the beta vans. Shannon is taking them over to Plattsburgh tomorrow for a even with a large group of students. These demos are pretty… But they’re also heavy. Shannon has to start driving at 5 AM… She’s taking one for the team 🙂
Tonday was a busy build day at work. Not much I can report here. We had a face-to-face generator board meeting in the afternoon… I’m approaching my 10th year on the board and I’m really happy what generator has achieved and all that time. Next year I’ll have to step off of the board because of term limits…. Honestly I’m not really cut out for board meetings. A lot of the conversation is about money and fundraising which I know is essential but I don’t have much skill in that. Anyway… have a great deal of admiration for my fellow board members. We have such a great mix of skills there… HR people, entrepreneurs, marketing people, lawyers, accountants, and a whole ton of makers. On that… I had voiced some concern as w added new members to the board to replace the outgoing ones that we try to get more makers an artist involved. At that Meg, our leader… Asked all of the board members who considered themselves makers and or artist to raise their hands… I was so impressed about how many people had those skills…I think we’re in good hands!
As always the case after a board meetings we went over to zero gravity to get a beer (NA in my case) .. One of the folks working there was Gabe’s friend Josh… I love our small town where you can run into people wherever you go
Today was really fun .. We hosted a team from Spaulding high school in Barre for a project called BETALabs that my friends Tyler and Shannon are leading. The Teacher from Spaulding is my old freind Michelle LaFrancis (aka Lafran).. She’s the School to work coordinator at Spaulding and such a great advocate for her students. The idea of BETAlabs is to get teams of kids to take an open ended problem and implement a solution using the resources at Generator Makerspace and BETA . We’d collectively picked a pretty sophisticated project. It was the design and creation of a motor demonstrator that showed the relation between current and torque. The students had to design the physical components and cut them out with laser and print them on a 3-D printer. My awesome coworker Shannon helped them do all that fabrication. Then they had to design the electronics including the windings and battery power and switches to energize the coil. Finally they assembled the whole thing with scale to measure the torque. They have several weeks to do this including two visits to generator and two visits to beta.
