Tag Archives: techjam

Saturday night – Techjam, Bridge street

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Busy and fun day.. Took today completly off from work.. haven’t done that on a weekend in a while..

Worked aroudn the house all mornign trying to catch up from being so busy at work..   Diane finished painting our bathroom.. looks so nice now !

 

Mid day I headed downtown to check out Techjam. What a GREAT event. I was so amazed to see that many smart and techy people in one place. . I ran into so many friends… I could hear in the buzz of conversation connections being made, careers advancing.. kids getting interested in tech..  I want to say to the organizers (Hi Cathy !) how much I and I’m sure everyone else appreciated them putting together such a powerful event. !

Technjam was just upstairs from generator.. so we got lots of through traffic. the place was jumping !  Great first contacts..

Here’s Cathy R.. Techjam goddess.. and SteM maven running her girls tech lunch .. She’s so awesome !  My friend Cairn is standing to her  right.

 

Ran into my buddy Dave.. whose company Pwnie express is doing great.. We had a really interesting conversation (really. really, really interesting) .. on the topic of Internet of things.   He was on the cover of one of the tech mags.. pretty nice !

Jeff and his family had some new home made tech bling. the girls always have soemthign new to show me.. it made my day !

heres fritz  the powerful !

Kevin G

Mssr Osler

The .. IBM (and soon to be not IBM) crew

Pascal and ed

Freind Ken from Soundtoys

Two guys working for my buddy bill

old friend Kevin O

The lab B krew

Sean and Dan

Joe C and his robots.

An many, many more folks I saw .. so much positive energy in that room !

Then.. back home to put on the storm windows.. not much fun.. but between Diane, Max and Me.. we made sort of quick work of it.> The last job was to use a 25 foot ladder to clear an abandoned birds nest our of our upstairs bathroom vent.. Max offered to do it because i’m not so good with hieghts.. He pulled out so much gunk from the vent which was over 25 feet in the air.

here’s the birdsnest proper.. birds left over a year ago.. they raised a nice family in here.

final event for the day was a visit to our favorite local restaurant.. bridge street cafe. Closing after 14 years.. We had to go and get one more veggie wrap.. We wanted to say thanks to our good friend Marvin for taking such good care of us over the past many years.. 100’s of dinners, creamies, Halloween wine shots,  bottles of A1 sauce.. and so many memories.. We were reminiscing about a time that Marvin s son Wes made a batch of extra, extra hot chicken wings for Max and Sam.. he offered to make them free if they could eat just one. Sam did !>. Max told us that he got some of the hot sauce on his hair.. and that got in his eye .on the drive home.. Owwwww !

Marvin told us there’s a new owner.. that will reopen in a few months.. That’ll be good. We’ll miss bridge street.. but we wont have to  miss marvin.. he’s sticking around .

full day.. time for sleep.. more tomorrow

nite all. nite sam (we sure were thinking of you tonight)

-me

Friday night – Tech Jam / Complex systems

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I took a much needed vacation today and attended two events in Burlington. I began the day with a an informal roundtable discussion at UVM with a group of really interesting and bright folks on the topic of ‘complex systems’ the room was full of physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists who were turning their tools and skills to the study of large complex systems with huge data-sets. Many of the problems were around social systems and used data gleaned form social networking sites.. It was strange and cool to see the cross application of disciplines. It would be interesting to see what would happen if sociologists suddenly started delving into particle physics.. (The analogy was made.. elementary particles can be either attractive or repulsive as can be people 🙂

 

Around 10L30 I had to bug out and go downtown to the Techjam.. it was held in the old Borders bookstore.. It was weird seeing the bookstore devoid of books.. I guess folks like me who by ebooks off amazon spelled the demise fof the brick and mortar bookstore.. *sigh*..

Anyway.. Techjam was AMAZING> it was absolutely packed with visitors and with cool high tech companies.. and most of them were hiring. !  It had such an upbeat feel it didn’t not feel like a recession inside the building today !

 

Here are some picks.. most of them from Stephen Mees of Champlain College .. my own camera ran out of batteries.. Stephen.. I hope it’s ok to reuse these. they have your name on them..

 

My show was at 11.. I even got introduce by Governor. Shunlin  .. only in Vermont !  (The Gov is a huge backer of science and technology.. thanks for that Peter !!!)

 

 

 

 

My show went pretty well.. lots of people there.. I couldn’t tunr the lights off.. which was a bit hard.. but overall.. went ok.

 

then after my show.. I quickly pacekd up and headed back to UVM for the TEDx talks..abotu a dozen talks on complex systems and ‘big data’

Cool stuff. including friends peter, chris and isabell’s project to measure happiness using analysis of the worlds twitter feeds. analysis of the frequency of human conflict (the answer is 2.5) .. progress that right equeations and telephone poles that tells who’s a stay at home dad.. all very cool.. Finally a quick beer withthe speakers and now home…

 

All iand all a very stimulating and enjoyable day.. and I really, really needed it.

 

ok. now I gotta sleep. more tomorrow..

 

night all, nite sam,

 

-me