I had another quite day at the house aloe doing geek projects which restoreth my soul.
I love just puttering on techie projects.. Midday I decided that the day was to beautiful to waste.. especially with several days of thaw and rain coming. I grabbed my snowshoes and running shoes and ran up t to the Safford Preserve. There I put in my snowshoes and ran/walked up to the ridge that borders the preserve. I clomped around up there for a while .. placed a SamStone in a tree.. then ran back down.. It was great being out in the woods on the crunchy snow.. Most of it will be gone in a few days.. bummer..
    On my run I was thinking about this crazy year.. this time last year I’d set my intentions on using media to help with my education outreach.. I had no idea how much of it I was actually gong to do in a year.. even outside of the TV show.. I’ve been a really getting in to mass media..from myspace, to facebook to twitter.. then the youtube videos.. and now a TV commercial. It’s amazing what can happen when you set you intentions..
I wonder when it will stop.. do I want it to stop ? How much is too much ? My ever neurotic mind is asking me those questions.. I guess we’ll see.
   Speaking of Youtube.. I’ve gotten a bunch of feedback on the Engineering Paradise spoof. Several folks have suggested that I change the tone of the chorus. Tonight Avery and Jacob B. came over an dwe rerecorded. Jacob did a great job with a single male line on the chorus. I’m still trying to mix it down and see if it makes the chorus clearer.. I’ll post both versions.. you guys let me know which you prefer..

Here’s the original..

and here’s the newer one. Which one do oyu prefer.. It’s only the chorus that’s differnt. Any suggestions much appreciated

Sorry folks.. listened this morning.. and didn’t like it.. so I pulled

sorry for the false start

Man.. it’s almost 1:30.. gotta sleep. More tomorrow.
Nite ya’all. Nite Sam
-me

Blissful day spent mostly by myself. Gabe was up at stowe,, Diane and I took a quick snowshoe this morning then She went off to a baby shower leaving me at home alone with  the dogs. I think I went almost 5 hours without speaking.. It was such a treat.. I spent the  time on a couple of geek projects I’d been putting off…  I have pictures.. but for soem reason I can’ get pictures off my phone this evening (and I call myself a nerd ?!)

– project 1 was an emergency trasistorectomy on my medium sized tesla coil . Last time I used it it stopped with a bang and I knew soemthing was up. it tunrs out that it ate one f the four big IGBJT transistors in the driver. Luckily, I had  areplacement.. unluckily.. those replacements are over 20 bucks each.. yow. It was a bit tricky finding the bad one and wrestling it free from its mates.. but once I got it extracated, the new one went in easily and voile la .. the thing sprung bakc to life with 40 inch sparks. Nothing liek a million volts ot make your moring.

– project 2 is goign to be part of my next big dream. I’v ebeen tlaking to some folks about building a really nice stylized statue of the lake Champlain monster “Champ” jus toutside the Echo museum. My idea is that folks would be able to send the scultpre a tetx message form their phone aand it would shoolarge jet of t fire (how cool is that ? ) it was inspird by a dragon sculpture I once saw in Krakow Poland. Today I did the first steps of wiring an odld cell phone up to intercept txt messages.. I also have a solar poweed charger for the thing.. so it should be self contained.. The whole thing is going to be pretty cool..

– project  3 is actually for work.. so I can’t talk much about it here.. / It’s a wireless project.that invloves both hardware and software  ; I realize that this was the first time I’ve picked up a soldering iron ithe course of my day job in a long time.. actually.. maybe in forever..  I hope to get some more time in that tomorrow..

– project 4.. after gabe got home, he and I completely finished his splitboard. It’s a conversion in which we cut an old snowboard of Sam’s in half then addedsoem hardware from a kit that allows it to clip back to gether as a snowboard, or unclip into two skis to be used with climbing skins. It’s been a great project.. and it’s been really fun to make togeter.. Gabe is hopign to test it out tomorrow.

Hmmm.. I guess that’s all for the day..   I love these islands of peacein my busy life.. Hope you all found peace today too
nite all.. nite Sam

-me

ps. The Engineers paradise vid is up to 26,000 hits. I think we’re going to rerecord the chorus tomorrow based on a bunch of feedback. Any other suggestions while I’m in there editing ?

Alll day long I’ve been getting comments on the goofy rap parody I put on YouTube on Tuesday night .  It’s gotten about 10,000 hits in the last 2 days and it’s starting to find its way around. This evening it was picked up by the techno-blog Gizmodo and got anoher 8,000 hits.. and a bunch more comments.. At first, i was really psyched to see folks watching it… and apparently liking it..  but then I started obsessing about some of the negative comments I’d gotten.. and I mean.. really obsessing..

          “Engineers can’t sing. They need to use their own invention, the auto tune“

           “That is one creepy engineer. Technicolor lab coat FTL“

  All night I’vve been plotting how Im going to completely redo that damned video before another person sees it..
   I started thinking about how much ego goes around some of this social media.. I also remember obsessing about the blog comments around the Colony Our producers warned us never to read the blogs for fear that would happen. Early on I used to obsess about how many folks read this blog.. or how many Wacebook friends I was picking up.  
   I’ve always relied way to much on external validation.. I thin all this social media stuff just better automated and streamlined my ability to obsess. I now have convenient hit counters and link statistics to precisely calculate my self worth for me.. it’s very convenient.. and really insane.. I know.  

Oh wait.. someone just posted abotehr comment. better go check it out…

nite folks.. Nite Sam
-me

ps.. The Engineering Paradise video spoof  I posted Tuesday has been getting around. It’s had about 7300 hits in the last 24 hours.. !.. If you like it.. send it to your friends !