KMG Meetup with Hacker Consortium and Midsouth Makers in Nashville

Adventure 20110416
The Knoxville Makers Guild had an impressive turnout for our trip to Nashville with all nine of what are quickly becoming our "core" members able to attend.  It was an awesome opportunity to get to see what the Hacker Consortium has been able to do with their space, and Mudflap, Seeblind, Skydog and the rest of the HC folks were fantastic hosts.  It was even better that three members of Midsouth Makers were able to come over from Memphis as well and Joe, Dan and Mary had lots of great information for us to use to get our group up and running.  You hear that Knoxville?  Nashville and Memphis already have their cool maker/hackerspaces up and running.  ^_^  What are you waiting for?

KMG Old School Blacksmithing Workshop

Adventure 20110402
In an effort to expose the members of the Knoxville Makers Guild to some old style making I asked my friend and neighbor John Enloe of Art In The Burrow and the Clinch River Blacksmith Guild  to hold an old school blacksmithing workshop for the group.  The session was well attend with a crowd of ten very pale geeks exposing themselves to the dangers of the dreaded day-star to have a chance to pound hot metal and create hand-forged wall hooks and railroad-spike knives.  I personally discovered that it is quite possible to make steel burn, which is frankly pretty darn awesome.

Photo album on Picasa.

OLCF/NICS Spring Training

Adventure 20110307
One of my buddies from the Knoxville Makers Guild clued me in on an opportunity to attend a week-long training workshop for the world-class Cray XT5 systems, Jaguar and Kraken, hosted by the National Institute for Computational Sciences and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computational Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  I've gotten a lot of strange looks for spending some of my vacation time to attend what was basically a "beginning programming for Science Doctorates" workshop, but I had a great geeky time.  Always having been on the commercial software side of the house, getting to visit ORNL was kind of akin to a trip to Hogwart's minus the brooms and owls.  Instead of the normal treatment of being pushed into the background, fighting for the bare minimum hardware and getting squeezed for every last penny it was a great change to get to see a place on the forefront of technology focused on what computing can do to improve the world.  After some quick refresher sessions on UNIX, the vi editor and basic C programming we moved into some fascinating discussions on parallelization, MPI, OpenMP and debugging with DDT.  Great stuff and really gave me a lot of notes for future topics to research.  I have to say that the high-point of the workshop for me was during the tour on the first day when our guide actually was able to let us go in and actually physically lay hands on and get pictures of the Jaguar, Kraken and Gaea super-computers.  Yeah, I'm a geek, but that was frakking awesome!  (Shame I only had my crappy cell-phone camera with me.)

Carrie's Chocolate Hazelnut Birthday Cake

Experiment 20110226

My friend Carrie requested a chocolate hazelnut cake for her birthday this year, so this experiment was all about exactly how much hazelnut I could cram, shoehorn or inject into a single cake.  The cake itself was a basic chocolate Dream Whip recipe that I added four shots of Frangelico Hazelnut Liqueur, then filled with Nutella hazelnut spread, and finally topped with Lindt Hazelnut Chocolate Lindor Truffles.

 

Con Nooga and Biltmore weekend

Adventure 20110219

A hint of Spring is in the East Tennessee air so this weekend I tried to pry myself out of hibernation and engage my sense of adventure.

First up was a Saturday trip down to Chattanooga with my Step-Dad to day-trip Con Nooga.  This was the first time we have had a chance to attend Con Nooga and I was very impressed.  Lots of costumes, a good sized crowd without it being difficult to get around, a wide selection of programming tracks, and a very friendly atmosphere.  I particularly enjoyed the Ms. ConNooga contest, and you could tell the ladies were having a great time and enjoying being silly and putting on a show.  We will definitely be back next year.

Next up, Kathy and I drove over to Asheville on Sunday to visit Biltmore.  I can't say that I was very impressed personally, I kept noticing signs of maintenance issues like cracks in the ceiling and cobwebs in the windows.  Also, the sense of scale was off for me, huge cold and drafty rooms were offset by small cramped corridors.  I felt more like I was visiting an old bank than anything else.  Although impressive architecturally, I certainly wouldn't want to live in it.