May 2013

SM Taco Time

SM Taco Time : Pick a Pony

It has to start somewhere… Two weeks ago Mark and I met on a Friday, drank a case of beer, and filmed four hours of footage involving cartoon horses. It was exciting, revealing, and everything a talk about bronies shouldn’t be. After editing it down we came up with this… a rant that captures our inner child at its most immature and perverted state. On our agenda of topics we had some good points to make regarding the brony movement, that acknowledged the more sensitive and often ignored part of the male soul… as well as a debate about whether or not most bronies really like MLP, or are just leaping onto a new and irreverent fad. Most of these segments ended up getting cut (for the moment) because of how long they were. As a result we are releasing something that lacks any true intellectual content, however we plan…

General Stuff

Maker Faire : San Mateo 2013

I found my people. We packed up the truck for the ten-hour long pilgrimage to San Mateo to embark on one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. This weekend I rediscovered what child-like wonder is as I perused the main hall, attention fracturing over the decadent saturation of brainy eye candy. I want to thank Jeff for letting me in on this secret… we had an amazing time walking around as Mr. and Mrs. Cool Goggles. Playing to the big kid side of me (which is more than 3/4) the first cool thing I saw upon entering the first building we came to, were giant RC controllable Wall-E robots. They could look around, change expression, and even occasionally played sound bites from the movie such as the musical clip from Hello Dolly. My pants were immediately charmed off : The very second thing that demanded my attention upon…

General Stuff

Delta Force

The SYN Shop podcast pilot is up for viewing just in time for Maker Faire weekend! Check it out! I want to thank Suz and Pawel again for thinking of Mark and I while coming up with ideas for their first show. They did an awesome job editing our rambling and childish robot play into something cool to watch. ….Oh yeah….. and a special thumbs up for including my bloody nose art. If you didn’t get a good look at it in the middle of the film… here it is in the flesh (teehee!) : Lets just say I know how to make Mark bleed. If you are curious about Amber, as you well should be… check out Mark’s Blog at Circuit Monkey.com

SM Taco Time

Mark & Sarah’s TACO Time

“Between the two of us we are one functioning psychopath.” Making our very own podcast will either be me and Mark’s best idea… or just something that we do on Fridays to contribute to our extra weight. Either way, it’s been a hoot. While filming and editing this weekend, I’ve laughed hard enough to make the muscles in my face sore. So hopefully we’re as funny as we think we are, not just hyped and drunk. We decided to start filming our dialogues because when we hatch ideas for new projects… the exchange is pretty amusing. Though our talks will be mainly about our collaborations and future projects, we’ll occasionally cover a topic of interest like the one for our pilot episode; quite the laugh. What’s so funny? Why, the topic for our first episode is none other than a study on why and how perfectly sane men fall from…

General Stuff

Science & Technology Week

I sit here in my bathrobe, numb from the events of the past few days. Even though it was really cool, I don’t think anyone else aside from the volunteers who participated in it realized that this was “Science and Technology Week” here in Las Vegas. SYN Shop answered the call of duty for this festival. It was coordinated to coincide with First Friday, which made for a brutal gauntlet of setting up, tearing down, and giving attention to endless amounts of people. All of the excitement began on Thursday night downtown in new Fremont with the Science Crawl. The first event was family friendly and held at our hackerspace, attracting a wild herd of parents and children for an hour of building ‘light sabers’ out of pool noodles and electrical tape. (doesn’t that not sound horrifying??) Luckily, Jeff and I escaped this madness by the skin of our teeth and went for some dinner before…

General Stuff

SYN Shop Podcast Pilot

Last weekend my friend and collaborator Mark Koch and I were asked by our wonderful PR team at SYN Shop to have our delta robot making ‘rivalry’ featured in the pilot episode of the hackerspace’s podcast. Needless to say we were excited to help out and talk a little bit about our precious bots whom we’ve been building over the past five or so months. We each had goals to achieve before the episode was shot last Sunday, but both Mark and I had some complications that kept us from preparing anything epic quite yet. With the team’s deadline set before first friday, they needed to get things underway so they took what we had (even though we whined a little). You see… I had a lot of motors scheduled to arrive earlier this week, which they did on time as expected… however I am an idiot and ordered the…