Sunday, January 30, 2011

 

Awesome Toronto


We've gotten a tremendous amount of press, so you might have already heard, but I am one of the new Awesome Trustee's at the local Toronto Awesome Foundation! Each month the 10 of us will gather, giving $100 each. People will submit proposals of the awesome things they would do if we gave them the $1000. We'll pick someone, and give them a brown paper bag with the $1000 in cash inside it :-).

We were featured on the front page of the Toronto Star: Awesome Foundation offers cash for Crazy Ideas. Apparently my most notable trait is being a redhead!

I've wanted to start a chapter for months, I found out about the Awesome Foundation originally well before I left San Francisco. One of the first things I did when I settled down here in Toronto was blast out a call for Trustees to various mailing lists I was a part of. I didn't really get a very good response though - turns out poor starving hacker types are not willing to part with $100/month, no matter how awesome the cause. But anyway, though various connections I managed to find 3 other people who were interested over the next few months. And then, the Awesome Foundation put me in touch with Geoffrey, who had found 3 others himself, and with our combined 8, we knew we were close. Geoffrey is a *way* better organizer than I am, and he took charge, we had our first dinner together, and less than a week after that we launched. The speed of launch, and then the overwhelming media attention, is just awesome, to go from nothing to this over a period of about two weeks just proves that ideas do have power!

I'll blog here about our first winner as well, which will happen sometime in February, so stay tuned!

Thursday, January 13, 2011

 

Toronto RepRap Users Group


I attended a workshop held at hacklab.to, the hackerspace that I am a member of. It was a 3D printer workshop, centered around the RepRap, an open source project to build "replicating rapid prototypers". The basic idea is to print as much of the machine as possible on a prior instance of the machine. So far of the project is only able to print some of the structural elements of the machine, and not any of the motors, electronics, wiring, etc, but hey, it's a start :-). We got about 15 people for the workshop, and there were six RepRaps in attendance as well as the labs makerbot. The hacklab is actually innovating on the design, trying to simplify the machine, check it out at Hacklab RepRap. I plan to build a mini version once the design stabilizes and is proven. You can use these printers to make all kinds of things, as seen on thingiverse. See my workshop flickr set. Also note: I'll be leading several workshops in the near future, including ones on Arduino, soldering and wearables/cyborgs.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

 

New Years

In the spirit of New Years, here's a few things I'd like to publicly commit to accomplishing this year:

- make sensebridge a financial success (>$50k in revenue)
- get cyborgcamp toronto & awesome foundation toronto off the ground
- enact "Eric 3.0" plans: another style makeover, get more life coaching, gain more leadership skills and confidence
- and most painfully: figure out how to fix my (broken) heart so I can love again

Happy new years to my readers, may all your dreams come true.

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