I've been super busy since I got back from California, having a lot of fun outdoors and in now that summer is here. This post totally isn't gonna do any of these events justice, but I figure it's way better to get something up rather than nothing! So here's some of the stuff I've been up to for the last two weeks:

Subtle Technologies Festival, a 3-day long conference bringing together Art and Science. There was a massive diversity of presentations, everything from dancing to simulate a cell to how cornstarch fractures to playing with magnetic materials. I really enjoyed watching many of the talks. My friend Alan gave a good talk about brains and computers. Plus of course my talk went really well - I basically explained North Paw and Heart Spark, and then I solicited for volunteers. I had people wear around both 'augmentations' for the Saturday of the conference, and then come back up on stage at the end of the day to talk about their experiences. It was totally awesome, people really enjoyed wearing them, and on Sunday I had a couple of the organizers of the conference wearing Heart Sparks as they introduced all the other speakers. People love both ideas, which feels awesome for me - I came out a lot more motived to keep working on this sensebridge stuff. Flickr set

I drove to Montreal for the Montreal Quantified Self Meetup, a gathering of about 25 people talking about self-tracking. I went to support their launch - this was their first meetup ever, and I was paying my debt forward (Alex did the same for Carlos and I when Toronto Quantified Self got started). My host in Montreal, Pierre-Alexandre Fournier, is also super cool, he's doing a startup which is making a self-tracking garment. While in Montreal I also took the opportunity to get a tour of XS Labs, a wearables design research studio at Concordia. Marc, a research assistant there, kindly took a couple hours out of his busy day to show me around their little space and explain a lot of their work to me, which was super cool. They have like 10 years of awesome stuff, and I totally don't feel like my time there did it justice, but it was a lot of fun non-the-less. They are doing a lot of stuff with nitinol, a shape memory alloy (it can "remember" a shape and then return to it on command, magic stuff, but apparently hard to work with) as well as fiber optics as illuminating elements. Flickr set

On Saturday there was the Hacklab Summer BBQ, which was on beautiful Toronto Island. The day was kind of overcast, which kept attendance low (people stayed home from fear of rain), but we still had a fun time and ate lots of hotdogs :-). I took like 50 shots of the CN Tower, since it's one of the very few places where you can get a nice unobstructed view of the Toronto Skyline and the CN Tower. Flickr set

On Sunday the Toronto Guerilla Gardeners had our West End Plant, we took over a small section of poor looking lawn next to a TTC turn-around point, and made it into an awesome little perennial garden. Much fun was had by all, and we also talked to some bus drivers who encouraged us and might actually come and water the garden on a regular basis, awesome! Flickr set