I am currently at Buildycrunken #1:Hocus Focus. It is packed with people and win.
To clarify, according to the mailing list, Buildycrunkin’ (a verb) is what one does at Buildycrunken (a noun). I suppose that means I am gettin’ buildycrunk? It is very important to establish proper etymology in these situations.
And look! its diverse geeks. Not just the usual computer folks, but knitters and boardgamers and geeks of all kinds (including, you know, girls…)
Collexion, in collaboration with our hosts Third Street Stuff and Coffee, and participants groups like ReBelle Stitch & Bitch, National Novel Writers’ Month’s Lexington writers, and the Kentucky Ruby Users Group are holding
9:00 PM Nov. 6th through 9:00 AM Nov. 7th (yes, thats ALL NIGHT HACKING) at Third Street Stuff & Coffee. The idea of the event is a social, collaborative environment to work on projects of all kinds.
I probably won’t stay the whole night, but I do plan to head over to 3rd street in the evening and join in. I’ll either flit around and join in some of the community projects (the Collexion mailing list has chatter about a homebrew IR Laser Tag system…) or try to get some work done on one of my projects as suits me. There will be workers, hackers, knitters, programmers, gamers and goings on of every sort; I encourage everyone to come join in.
The 12-note barrel is away. I’m pretty sure everyone from Collexion involved is well and truly done with this particular stunt, but it was a neat project with some great results. This one went through the School of Music’s benefit gala to benefit the School of Music Service Organization. It only pulled in $750, but with the lower materials cost that still represents some income for the benefiting organization. The picture above is (almost) all the guts for the barrel, before being assembled and installed.
One of my hobby projects just came to fruition earlier tonight. A team from Collexion has been working on building a pair of musical Bourbon barrels to support local charity auctions. The first one (6 notes from an internal glockenspiel, triggered by capacitive touch sensors on the rings, with an excellent paint job by Sam Wilson) sold earlier tonight at Spirits of Giving, bringing in $1500 to be split between Collexion and the Nash Brigthon Project. It’s great to be doing technological art, and it’s great that it can be used to support good causes. I forgot to bring my camera, but as soon as I get sent pictures from the people who did have them I’ll throw at least one up.
Edit: I don’t have pictures, but here is a video of the demonstration.
EDIT: Never mind, voting has been extended until Friday 2008-02-28
By a vote-with-pledge-for-appropriate-membership-fee, the Lexington hacker space and associated community is now known as Collexion. This was my second choice after LexCapacitor (a double pun on flux capacitor and NYC Resistor, beyond the obvious “storing creative energy”). I agree that this is probably more friendly to the non electronics-dorks in the potential community, and am perfectly satisfied with the outcome. It also sounds like we have a space; will be moving in to a portion of the very large, very nice space recently leased by Awesome Inc., who are working to start as a reasonably compatibly aimed technology business incubator/coworking space. So long as there are no further incidents with people from Awesome (cap = Awesome Inc.) speaking for us, and the slimy MBA feel of the Awesome people doesn’t interfere with our hacker flair, it seems like a great arrangement for all involved.
I am absolutely FLOORED by the response to the hacker space idea. I’m so used to Lexington (as a community) being apathetic and cultureless that it startles me when people show up excited for things. For a meeting announced on blogs/tweeted/transmitted by word of mouth, with a fairly specific interest group to generate 35-40 enthusiastic people, and interested notes from at least a dozen others is remarkable. It sounds like it’s going to move quickly, there’s a Google group already set up to discuss details, and on the strength (financial commitment) of the freelance programmers/web developers looking to use it as an office during the day alone there may be an actual physical space in the next few days.
I don’t know (at least I don’t think I know) anyone involved, and Lexington will probably be a hard city to set one up in, but apparently some people are trying to arrange a hacker space in town.
They have an orginizational meeting Thursday at Common Grounds, I think I might go see whats up. Others?
