atoms&electrons;

The company-for-which-I-work has quite a nice art collection. There is a wide variety of art in all the buildings ranging from paintings, prints, sculpture, mixed media, etc. I just ran across some photos I took about a year ago when I travelled to a remote office. This was a building that had just been finished and they commissioned some very cool artwork for it.

What a difference a year makes. A year ago I didn’t have a TechShop membership, didn’t know what Atmel AVR or Arduino meant, didn’t own a soldering iron and had never fired a laser outside of a DVD player. That all changed last year when I attended my first Maker Faire and was overwhelmed by the amount of creativity and technology on display. It was almost too much, as I remember walking around a little dazed not sure what to look at. However, when I think back on that day one particular exhibit does stick in my memory.

Also check out the Apple //e Twitter Display for another take on this idea.

I’ve partitioned my social networking life into two fairly distinct pieces. Facebook is for friends and family, and Twitter is for my technology hobbies. Facebook is for vacation photos, and Twitter is for the latest news on robotics, CNC, Maker culture, etc. One consequence of this is that I usually only check Facebook once or twice a week to catch up on what people are doing and reject requests to join The Mafia/Vampire Clans/Farmville. However, I find myself checking Twitter multiple times a day, because there’s a constant stream of interesting technology tidbits coming in. Twitter is the cocktail party full of interesting sound-bites to Facebook’s Thanksgiving Dinner at Uncle Ralph’s house.

In the spring an old man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of vacuum tubes strewn across the De Anza college parking lot, and thankfully the Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market is there to accommodate. I’ve noticed the days getting longer and it’s just about time to set our clocks forward, but I was caught completely by surprise by the return of the flea market. Thankfully folks as close by as Sunnyvale and as distant as NYC were tweeting about it last night so I forced myself to bed by 1AM so I could make the early morning trek to Cupertino.

Back in July I built RoboSketch which to this day still gets more traffic than any other post on my blog. People seem to love it. Somehow the spammers have figured this out because it gets dozens of comments daily hawking Acai Berry diets, Colon Cleansing products and my favorite which is a site that sells the book “How To Get Pregnant.” But the dirty little secret is that aside from the demo video, I was never able to get the RoboSketch to draw anything without failing in one way or another.

We’re not sending anyone to the moon here, so failure is always an option. In fact, failure isn’t feared, it’s desired. The best way to learn is hands-on, doing things and making mistakes. When you make a mistake yourself, that knowledge is ingrained in you in a concrete tangible way and you’re better off for it. So when my Etch A Sketch device was having conniptions, I took note of the failure and followed the advice of that most wise sage Tim Gunn. Make it work, people.