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sparrSo, I missed a day and failed the August challenge on 750words.com. That makes me sad, but all the reasons I missed it were worth it.
I left home on Friday morning to head to work. For anyone not following my recent posts, the new job is tech support and system administration for a dedicated hosting company (peer1.com). People call us when the servers or network services they pay us for aren't working right[1]. I've been paired up with some other people so I can listen to their calls and watch them resolve tickets as part of my training. Now I finally took some calls on my own and handled some email support requests. I think I've got about 50% of the peer1-specific stuff figured out now (and 90% of the generic technical stuff, but that was a given going into the job), so I only had to ask for help about once per call. In theory that rate will go down over time as I encounter more of the most common issues and systems, since I generally prefer not to ask the same question twice.
After work I headed over to Freeside to prepare for our anniversary party / open house on Saturday. A bunch of folks showed up and helped out in various ways, but some miscommunications and incompatible priorities put a serious damper on the preparations. I ended up getting frustrated shortly before midnight and calling it a night, on the theory that some sleep would leave me in a better mood and the space less full of conflicting interests. Saturday morning brought more preparations, of the last minute variety as well as planned things such as beginning to chill the space and the drinks and grill all the food (MEAT! and veggies).
The party started slowly, as most do, with just a few strangers through the door in the first hour or two. That was fine, since we were still actively preparing and members were starting to show up to work on projects or set things up to show off. As the day progressed we had more and more visitors showing up. Some discovered us via google and chose the party as the day to stop by. Some found the facebook invite. And as many were invited in person by our members. The peak was probably around 8PM, when we had over 30 people in the space, including about 10 members.
As to all of the things that we showed off... Raiford brought the makerbot back, as well as his half-assembled reprap (which was mostly printed on our makerbot), both of which proved to be big attention-grabbers throughout the whole day as we printed a variety of objects[2]. Brandon set up the chill space for more casual hanging out, including two TVs playing videos and video games over the course of the day. He also had the CNC mill running for most of the day, cutting out other parts for the reprap. Matt did some metal work, lathing and welding, as did BK, who also continued to man the grills for the first half of the party. And to finish up the day, once it got dark outside the foundry was fired, and we cast an aluminum copy of a foam cutout of of the skyline image from our logo. Along the way, a number of other members had in-progress projects to work on and answer questions about, including laptop repair, painting, LED array assembly, hot wire cutter design/assembly/testing, some woodworking, and other things.
I left the party before it died off completely in order to head over to C7. I introduced a new prospective tenant to some of the folks at C7, ran into some friends there, then we all made our way to CoLab for the Jungle II event.
The party at CoLab was ridiculously packed. The main parking lot filled up before midnight, and the overflow before 2AM. They set a capacity limit for the party at around 800 people, and there was a line down the street of people waiting to get in. Total attendance was somewhere north of 1200. The indoor dance and chill rooms were packed from 11 to 6, at least, and there were even more people outside than in. The back porch had fire everything[3], as usual. The WonderDome was still up, but sans stuffed animals due to the heat, and it stayed packed with ~20-30 people all night. The normal small glow paint room has a snow cone machine instead, and the food room was turned into a giant glow paint room. There were dozens of 10-30 person mini-parties all over the parking lot, with cars playing all sorts of music at reasonable levels[4]. I think there were probably 100 people at that party who never went inside the building.
The party slowed down around 6AM and was pretty sparse by 8 (maybe 200 people left). The sun tends to have a negative impact on people's energy levels, oddly. I chilled out with a bunch of folks who I haven't had a lot of time to spend with lately, and made closer connections with a few female acquaintances. As the sun started to get annoying I headed back to C7 to crash with some friends. A long nap later and I was headed to Waffle House for a 4PM breakfast then home for some catching up and writing. Expect to see a month worth of photos on my flickr and facebook galleries later tonight.
[1] or when they screw something up, or just don't understand how things work
[2] a skeleton key, a working model rocket, some helix-shaped cups that nest, a 3d version of the Android mascot, and some other stuff
[3] poi, staff, nunchucks, swallowing, hoops, etc
[4] no loudness wars, everyone was pretty respectful of keeping music low enough to not interfere with the next car party over
I left home on Friday morning to head to work. For anyone not following my recent posts, the new job is tech support and system administration for a dedicated hosting company (peer1.com). People call us when the servers or network services they pay us for aren't working right[1]. I've been paired up with some other people so I can listen to their calls and watch them resolve tickets as part of my training. Now I finally took some calls on my own and handled some email support requests. I think I've got about 50% of the peer1-specific stuff figured out now (and 90% of the generic technical stuff, but that was a given going into the job), so I only had to ask for help about once per call. In theory that rate will go down over time as I encounter more of the most common issues and systems, since I generally prefer not to ask the same question twice.
After work I headed over to Freeside to prepare for our anniversary party / open house on Saturday. A bunch of folks showed up and helped out in various ways, but some miscommunications and incompatible priorities put a serious damper on the preparations. I ended up getting frustrated shortly before midnight and calling it a night, on the theory that some sleep would leave me in a better mood and the space less full of conflicting interests. Saturday morning brought more preparations, of the last minute variety as well as planned things such as beginning to chill the space and the drinks and grill all the food (MEAT! and veggies).
The party started slowly, as most do, with just a few strangers through the door in the first hour or two. That was fine, since we were still actively preparing and members were starting to show up to work on projects or set things up to show off. As the day progressed we had more and more visitors showing up. Some discovered us via google and chose the party as the day to stop by. Some found the facebook invite. And as many were invited in person by our members. The peak was probably around 8PM, when we had over 30 people in the space, including about 10 members.
As to all of the things that we showed off... Raiford brought the makerbot back, as well as his half-assembled reprap (which was mostly printed on our makerbot), both of which proved to be big attention-grabbers throughout the whole day as we printed a variety of objects[2]. Brandon set up the chill space for more casual hanging out, including two TVs playing videos and video games over the course of the day. He also had the CNC mill running for most of the day, cutting out other parts for the reprap. Matt did some metal work, lathing and welding, as did BK, who also continued to man the grills for the first half of the party. And to finish up the day, once it got dark outside the foundry was fired, and we cast an aluminum copy of a foam cutout of of the skyline image from our logo. Along the way, a number of other members had in-progress projects to work on and answer questions about, including laptop repair, painting, LED array assembly, hot wire cutter design/assembly/testing, some woodworking, and other things.
I left the party before it died off completely in order to head over to C7. I introduced a new prospective tenant to some of the folks at C7, ran into some friends there, then we all made our way to CoLab for the Jungle II event.
The party at CoLab was ridiculously packed. The main parking lot filled up before midnight, and the overflow before 2AM. They set a capacity limit for the party at around 800 people, and there was a line down the street of people waiting to get in. Total attendance was somewhere north of 1200. The indoor dance and chill rooms were packed from 11 to 6, at least, and there were even more people outside than in. The back porch had fire everything[3], as usual. The WonderDome was still up, but sans stuffed animals due to the heat, and it stayed packed with ~20-30 people all night. The normal small glow paint room has a snow cone machine instead, and the food room was turned into a giant glow paint room. There were dozens of 10-30 person mini-parties all over the parking lot, with cars playing all sorts of music at reasonable levels[4]. I think there were probably 100 people at that party who never went inside the building.
The party slowed down around 6AM and was pretty sparse by 8 (maybe 200 people left). The sun tends to have a negative impact on people's energy levels, oddly. I chilled out with a bunch of folks who I haven't had a lot of time to spend with lately, and made closer connections with a few female acquaintances. As the sun started to get annoying I headed back to C7 to crash with some friends. A long nap later and I was headed to Waffle House for a 4PM breakfast then home for some catching up and writing. Expect to see a month worth of photos on my flickr and facebook galleries later tonight.
[1] or when they screw something up, or just don't understand how things work
[2] a skeleton key, a working model rocket, some helix-shaped cups that nest, a 3d version of the Android mascot, and some other stuff
[3] poi, staff, nunchucks, swallowing, hoops, etc
[4] no loudness wars, everyone was pretty respectful of keeping music low enough to not interfere with the next car party over
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Date: 2010-08-09 02:31 am (UTC)