Last night's Dorkbot SF was Boing Boing in a box. First, Mikey Sklar explained how he implanted an RFID tag (a simple chip with a 40-digit number) in his hand. Then he showed off some projects using the tag, including a proxiity-controlled trampoline-triggered oven...flamethrower...thing. (The upshot: You jump on the trampoline, the flames shoot up.)
Even in the overpriced conference world, the going price to hang out with Ballmer and Gates is cheaper than two shares of Google. An eBay bidder paid just $760 for two passes (and one hotel room — hot!) at the Microsoft MSN 7th Annual Strategic Account Summit, a 3-day, 3-night conference in Redmond, Washington.
In the chat after his Berkeley lecture ("The State of American Media") this week, Dan Rather talked to ZDNet journalist Steve Gillmor, who came with indie journalist (and ex-Mercury-News columnist) brother Dan Gillmor and Steve's look-alike friend, RSS czar Dave Winer. To save you from caption confusion, here's the breakdown:
Don't mind that old fart ConFonz — this weekend's Maker Faire was a two-day rockfest of hackers and crackers sprawled across the San Mateo Fairgrounds. This was a fair with sponsorships from Lego and Digg, this was a festival with an official scooter. MAKE Magazine pulled its best and brightest — MAKE blogger Phil Torrone, editor and BoingBoing blogger Mark Frauenfelder — into a campus of hangars and lawns, where the crafty boys and girls smashed, launched, and hacked the hell out of everything in sight. I showed up to write, and Laughing Squid's Scott Beale showed up to shoot.
ConFonz is a cynic — how else to explain his take on this weekend's Maker Faire in San Mateo? Not a mention of all the children running around, sticking their hands in rotating bicycle wheels and playing with fire. But for those who missed the Faire, chew on the Fonz's sour grapes.
We know this video is advertising some Purim event at Makor, the younger and (theoretically) hipper branch on the 92nd Street Y on the West Side. But we have no idea what the event is. We just know that the shtick of the Channel 35 phone-sex commercial that instead stars two nice Jewish girls — one in a Brandeis sweatshirt — is pretty damn funny. "I'll do anything you want," the redhead says suggestively while music pulses in the background, "as long as it doesn't stain." Oh, we like it when you talk clean to us.
If you're anything like us, you were drinking and dancing till the wee hours last night, celebrating the announcement of this year's National Magazine Award finalists. Such excitement! Such drama! Such drug-addled nightmares of being stampeded by a herd of bronze elephants! In the sober light of morning, finally, there's a chance to ponder some of the great metaphysical questions raised by yesterday's announcement:
When we received an email from Jenny Lee last night enquiring which of us was on the birthday beat, we answered honestly and then steeled ourselves for what we assumed would be the inevitable indignance. So you can imagine our surprise when her numerical name appeared in our inbox again moments later bearing not scorn but a gift. Herewith, the actual invitation to the four-city Jennifer 8. Lee 30th-birthday extravaganza, as delivered to invitees, and submitted by Ms. 8. Lee herself:
Hoping for a chance to wish a happy birthday to your favorite numeraled reporter? Have we got good news for you today, then. The Jennifer 8. Lee 30th-birthday extravaganza will be making a four-stop U.S. tour. We hear from people fortunate enough to be invited that select friends, members of the Harvard-alumni Yahoo listserv, Times colleagues, man-daters, and Amandra Tree recently received a real, old-fashioned, paper invite on card stock, bearing on its front the image of a Chinese food container, chop sticks, and a fortune cookie and on the back this text:
The Coop, clearly in his element on St. Charles Avenue.
It will be the most extraordinary collection of homosexuality to have ever been gathered in Carnegie Hall — with the possible exception of when Liberace rehearsed alone.
We'd like to take a moment to wish the happiest of third birthdays to our delightfully unjaded crosstown friends at Gothamist. The actual anniversary isn't till next week, the Gisters report, but last night's Moveable Hype concert apparently served as a celebration. We congratulate them on their longevity, but mostly we envy them their readers, who, apparently, take it upon themselves to whip up Gothamist-themed birthday cakes. (No one ever makes us baked goods. Sigh.) And while we could not have designed a more perfect Gothamist cake than one featuring both Jerry Orbach and a panda — well, OK, we might have put some weather in the background, too — we also admit we're a little confused: We don't quite understand why Jerry would be going undercover in a panda suit, and we don't quite understand why Jerry looks so much like a vampire. But, then, we're always OK with not quite understanding Gothamist, and we're pretty sure they're OK with it, too. Have a happy, if mildly confusing, birthday, guys.
So we actually planned to show up yesterday at No Pants 2006, in which a group of wacky kids were to ride the 6 train pantsless in a bravura bit of street theater. We weren't going to depants, of course, but we thought maybe we'd "happen" to be on the same train so that we could watch things as they happened. (It's rare that our voyeuristic and reportorial instincts so nicely overlap.) But then we suspected that a few people we knew might be among the depantsers, and we didn't want to be recognized. Plus the folks called and offered to buy us a late brunch. So we didn't go.
Mark your calendars, kids, because this Sunday is No-Pants Sunday.
There's so much double-reverse meta-irony going on here, we can't figure out if the event is serious and sarcastic.
Among our many problems in life, two of the biggest are these: We are not very good interviewers, and we are not very good gays. Tonight, it seems, we shall have a chance to work on both problems — and, even better, with drinks!
