Seen above a urinal at the Goodreads office in San Francisco...

WTF? Seriously. W.T.F.....

Space Needle

Of one thing I am confident; the Space Needle has been photographed significantly more than 8 times. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of it's image across the city (heck I can even buy Space Needle imprinted underwear) I felt drawn to take my shot and awesomize the heck out of it. Behold!

Kindle Fire as Secondary Laptop Monitor

There are plenty of times when I need additional real estate for my laptop: when I'm on a call using OCS and want to have the controls front and center; Amazon Cloud Player etc. Rather than hauling a monitor with me Ive been using the Air Display app for the Kindle Fire. It’s $9.99 and works over Wi-Fi ( both devices must be on the same network). You also need to download and app for your Mac or PC from the Air Display website here.  If you don't have a Fire you can use any Android device, iOS device, Windows computer, or Mac as your second monitor.

LAN Party?

Not been involved in a LAN party for, well, a very, very long time. Now, this is not quite a LAN party in the traditional sense. Evan and two other guys are playing League of Legends. All three showed up with their desktops. monitors, keyboards and mice - no laptops here and definitely no laggy wireless connections. I ran three cables from my HP ProCurve switch (yes - it's still running fine....) and off they went. Seem to be kicking ass last time I checked in.

Eagle Scout Ceremony - Troop 222 Menlo Park

Video I made for Evan's Eagle Scout ceremony last year. Congrats Evan, Ian and Will!

Giving a lecture at HMC on March 5 are part of the Annenberg guest lecture series. Look forward to seeing you at Mudd!

Chickadee Trail Restoration

Evan's completed his Eagle Scout community project, restoring the Chickadee Nature Trail at Huddart Park.

Congrats!

Zappos; Pre-M&A vist

During the Zappos M&A due diligence I took a tour of the offices in Henderson. Super group of folks there who really rolled out the red carpet. I found this picture from the tour. if you've been there you'll know what this is about. If not, I highly recommend that you take the tour.

Andromeda. Military Inspired Tri-rail Lamp

Andromeda, the world's first ever, military inspired tri-rail lamp. It utilizes the picatinny rail system (aka the MIL-STD-1913 rail or "tactical rail") allowing customization of the shade and leg positions. It's the latest project to which I've committed funding on Kickstarter. Check out the funding page and join in!

How much are three eggs?

If one egg is $2.50, and two eggs are $4.00, how much should 3 eggs cost. Hint: not $6.50.

It is difficult......

Upton Sinclair, the author, once said:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Emma in the New York Times

Emma made the New York times on April 2 in an article entitled Giving Women the Access Code that covers Maria Klawe, Harvey Mudd and women in engineering and computer science. The irony of course, is that Emma is attending Harvey Mudd but is wearing a Cal Lair of the Bear hoodie in the picture...

Laser Cut Mikey Jewelry Box

Quick holiday project: Mickey-themed jewelry box. Pre-made acrylic box from Tap Plastics (why make one yourself when they do it cheaper!). I cut twin Micky heads with flat bases and acrylic-welded them to the box. A simple and swift project that looks rather fine. Could be scaled up to a full-size end table (although I'd have to manufacture the box component myself as Tap don't have an off-the-shelf version that large).

(Note: Not for commercial use/sale; personal enjoyment only)

Kindle Fire - Laser Engraving

Ah - the power (literally) of an Epilog laser. I dialed down the power to 15% and set speed to 100%; didn't want to wind up cutting my Fire in interesting ways! Took about 30 seconds to raster my name into the rubberized back of the Fire. Depth is about half a millimeter (or so). Nice compliment to the Kindle logo just above it. You see the detail of the rastering in the picture below. Click on it for a enlarged version.

Destruction of Time: The Videos (Finally!)

And a slightly longer video showing hours and minutes:

Facebook Video Calling: Fail

Facebook Video Calling was announced on July 6th. It's now July 9th and all I've seen so far is the "will be available soon - Please check back later" (and I'd much prefer that Facebook notify me when its available rather than me acting as an unpaid click farmer for them....). Is this actually working for anyone????

Maker Faire

Maker Faire this weekend at the San Mateo Fairgrounds showing "The Destruction of Time". Evan and I are in the Expo Hall location 10 (North east corner of the building). Hop over to The Destruction of Time blog to see construction details. I have a few videos I'll be uploading when the show is over). What is it? An over engineered, expensive, doesn't-tell-very-good-time, clock. (HM:MM) built from ink jet printers and paper shredders.....

Chase Down Again......

Just when I thought Chase had a handle on the availability of their website they prove me wrong. Perhaps merely the act of thinking good thoughts caused the outage......

Let's decompose their message:

1. "We're working quickly to restore access" - Now, if this is a 'planned' outage for database backup or the application of patches, then tell me when that process will be complete. If it truly is an unplanned outage then I presume you're working diligently (but I don't really know what 'working quickly' means). In fact I'd rather you tell me that you don't know what he problem is, but your on-call staff have been notified, the SLA for response is 15 minutes and you'll post regular updates. That would be much more valuable;
2. "and we encourage you to log on later" - Well, duh. If I was trying to log on now and the site is unavailable then it's reasonable to expect that indeed I will be coming back. I don't need any encouragement to do that (late fees for not paying my credit card bill on time is all the 'encouragement' that I need...).;
3. "Thanks for your patience" - rather presumptuous of Chase. I don't have a choice and I'm certainly not being patient.

So Chase, here's some advice. Drop the dumb message that one of your engineers wrote when told to throw up a Gone Fishing page. In fact they would have been more successful with a simple "Gone Fishing" message as that's about as useful as the message you are currently displaying.

What's the best Gone Fishing message you've ever seen?

Eagerly Awaiting my Desktop CNC Machine

Now that I have my Egg Bot and the build is underway I decided that i really need a small, desktop CNC machine. Low and behold, Kickstarter has such a project underway: The DIY Desktop CNC Machine. I kicked in a pledge for a fully assembled machine (and yes - I will do a tear down when it arrives so I know exactly how it ticks). More of the project details and history at mydiycnc.com

Eagerly Awaiting My Egg Bot!

I first met my new best-friend-to-be at the 2010 Maker Faire in San Mateo. The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball size to that of a small grapefruit-- roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (4 - 10 cm). Super adjustable; designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally "impossible" to print on. Not just eggs but golf balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, eye balls and even things like wine glasses-- with a bit of work.

My order will be satisfied from the first production run of the kit -- I know, liable to be snafu's along the way, but that's half (actually 99%) of the fun. When it get bored with imprinting my picture on Ben Wa Balls I'll send it down to Emma at Harvey Mudd to play with.