So Facebook chat is really dumb, and doesn’t save chat history. If it does, getting to it is non-intuitive, and it’s just giving me another reason to dislike (hahaha) Facebook. As if I needed another reason.

ANYWAYS

Maker Faire was pretty damn awesome.

I could leave it at that, but my god that would be a disservice to everyone that wasn’t there and reads my blog, which translates into maybe 10 people, if you’re optimistic about the size of my readership. To sum up the experience, I don’t think I’ve been somewhere with so many cool geeks showing off cool things all in one place. And now, I’m just going to list what I saw:

• Makerbot crews
• Reprappers from around the area, and even some from Montana or Idaho
• New reprap boards
• A veritable lack of NYC reprappers
• Man, I bet some hip-hop artist is going to pick up the tag 'reprapper'
• Just watch
• I did NOT get to see arc attack. Quite disappointing, something crazy stuff about 'room capacity' and 'public safety'
• The local hackerspace booths: NYC Resistor (I have to say Metrix's hobo token is much more badass), Alpha One Labs
• Lock picking booth run by TOOOL. Didn't manage to crack their locks, but I only spent 3 minutes at their booth
• Epilog laser (should we make our space green, or get a laser cutter?! Oh, the agony!), Autodesk, some commercial 3D printers
• shop bot
• Make Magazine (duh)
• Couple of dudes presenting their thesis work, like interactive music, drawing with computer interaction
• Element 14
• mbed - realized I'd forgotten people are trying to make money with this stuff when I asked 'are you open sourcing the server code?' and they laughed.
• huge straw structure
• games, of course. physical games, of course
• rubix cube solving robot
• live music remixer using only sound recorder and windows media player
• arm overlay that lets the computer know how the arm is positioned
• fabric hacking! Especially liked the ball o' yarn pressure sensor, and the tape bend sensor
• utility kilts
• The human sized mouse trap
• mathematica playing cards. Seriously. They'll likely be the geekiest cards I'll ever have
• lots of LEDs
• guy that played guitar while wearing a monitor on his head
• luminescent fluid in tubes
• HUGE LED arrays, with separately attached LEDs.
• monome-like devices
• cart-based youtube video uploader
• the reverse geocache guy
• over priced fair food, of course
• microsoft attempting to shoulder into the hobbyist electronics market
• book scanners: at least two guys were doing it
• guy in a 3-4m tall germ suit
• jet-powered fair ride
• biobus!
• sparkfun!
• open STM (scanning tunneling microscope)!
• lots of people trying to sell shirts and stuff
• 3D light show with yarn and a projector
• hydroponics
• talk by a dude that wants to use the building-top water containers as a city-wide cosmic ray detector
• learned exactly how pressure waves kill people in explosions
• listened to Wolfram talk, which was somewhat disappointing because all he did was do random stuff with Mathematica and push his cellular automata based view of the world
• talk by the creator of scratch
• talk by the creator of lilypad
• talks by lots of people that wrote books
• derived statistic: child would have to work full time on getting kidnapped for some 750,000 years for it to certainly be kidnapped. I have some qualms about this derived stat, but it's interesting none-the-less
• I thought the talk titled 'Sustainable hacker spaces' was going to about making hackerspaces green. Nope! It was about how to keep the hacker space alive, a much more pressing concern
• conductive play dough
• guys that want to stick gardens on the top of buses. They're not entirely crazy, either!
• floor that generates power from footsteps
• carrot flutes
• wearable, welded together steampunk-ish suits (think big daddy, or fallout 3 cover guy, but much more chaotic)
• science history museum
• computer recyclers
• some kids trying to rickroll the subway car (okay, so this was on the way back home, and they weren't at maker faire, but still!)

Seeing all those finished projects is a really good motivator: at least, it feels like one. We’ll see if I get things done sooner than later.

My octopart (day 1) and xkcd (code compiling) shirts got positive attention. Woot. Geek status boost!

Okay, I really have to get back to… um, doing homework. And listening to trippy japanese pop. Yeah.

Oh! And Dresden Codak AND Methods of Rationality both updated within a day of each other! Yudkowsky and Diaz must be conspiring together, or something (sadly, this doesn’t even seem to be that far-fetched).

So I’m going to dump core, and whine and complain for a bit. Feel free to ignore, rebut, or burn.

I think I’ve figured out why I can’t do anything: I switch context way too often. What I mean by switching context is switching from one task to another: for instance, going from sleeping to eating, or studying to practicing, or studying to adjusting the volume on my music. Yes, that last one is a context switch: it’s fast, but it still adds overhead. I’ve complained about overhead before: a certain amount of time each day has to be devoted to things like waking up, showering, eating, and all that. And context switching is another source for overhead. Overhead is terrible, because you’re usually too occupied doing things that don’t advance the self, and you can’t focus on something more meaningful. Overhead eats up your time without leaving you anything to show, aside from “hey, I’m still alive!”

So, I’m forcing myself to switch contexts several times a day, aside from the things that one must do to keep alive, by having too many projects open at one time. I’m trying to complete hardware projects (minty preamp, useless machine, pocket oscilloscope, didj hacking, monolith, book scanner, phone glove for a partial list), study physics (Feynman lectures) and math (probability theory and abstract algebra), on top of that I’m trying to do artsy fartsy stuff (on top of writing stuff, actually putting something in the musical section of my blog, and finishing that damn animation), and I have a few software projects jiggling around in the back of my head (mathematical note taking, sane photo management, doing deep integration of twitter and wordpress) as well as a redesign of a completely inane website for an organization that I was once part of.

Whew okay, so I have all these things I want to do, and I want to do them all at once. So that means I’ve been trying to divvy up my day into partitions, and doing different things for each part. But once you consider that switching things takes overhead, then that’s the wrong strategy. If you set a few days, instead of a few hours, you should be able to drop overhead, mental and physical, and get much more out of those few days.

Part of this has to do with not sleeping so much. Part of it also has to do with streamlining my life.

Part of it also has to do with my urges. I’ve said before that I would rather the bio-hackers hurry it up and get to the point that I can re-route my libido to mostly scientific inquiry. Leaving aside that particular urge, I’m also not very happy about the urge to create. No, not that sort of creation: we’ve already disregarded that one. I’m talking about the urge to create works and realize thoughts in objects. You might not feel it, but I do: I want to create. If I don’t create something new, then I’m just taking up space and pushing the universe faster towards an entropic death, and who wants to rush that? Another way of stating it: if you’re not saying anything, than you might as well die, and if you’re not saying anything worthwhile, you might as well say nothing (with speech defined in the broadest sense: by patronizing certain restaurants, you’re saying something about your preferences with your actions).

So it feels like I need to create things, so I flit between different projects with the hope that I push them towards being done. I guess I’m hoping for a breakthrough with the least amount of effort, so that I get that high of finishing something while knowing I have projects in the pipe, because starting things is difficult too, and has it’s own overhead associated with it. But then, it’s not nearly as vicious as switching context several times a day.

In closing: if I could just break the tyranny of creating, or the tyranny of time, then I could be happier. Maybe.