Status Update

I know it’s been over a month since my last post…

• Went to LA to celebrate March family birthdays. My nephew, Sebastian, was one of the celebrants, celebrating his FIRST birthday! Too cute! Got to hang out with my family (and some friends that I also consider family). Went to a couple of my favorite eateries, of course (Daikokuya, Jessie’s Mexican Food
• When we got back, some cousins came for a visit. Despite having just received our new couch and ottoman, making the sofa uber lounge-comfy, we managed to keep them active the whole time they were here. The threat of rain pushed us to get out and go out and see the sight “before it rain(ed)”, but it never did rain and we managed to see a whole bunch of the San Francisco tourist highlights (Chinatown, Lombard/Crooked Street, Union Square, Painted Ladies, Golden Gate Park, Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, Haight/Ashbury) along with a couple of our new favorites (Coffee in West Portal; 9th & Irving; BiRite Creamery). We even made it to Muir Woods and Sausalito one day and San Jose on another day!
• Then, last week, I went to Crafty Crafty night at Counterpulse and crafted with a bunch of strangers for a couple of hours. VERY PRODUCTIVE and fun to meet new people. Beats crocheting in front of the TV for a while.
• The following day, I went to Make SF and took my first Arduino lesson. We made a temperature clock (details on the MakeSF Wiki) and I got to play Rock, Scissors, Paper with a computerized glove.

I WAS going to round out the week by going to Forage SF‘s Underground Farmer’s Market, but when driving up to the place, the line pouring out of the building and nearly wrapping around the closest corner was enough to convince me to keep moving and just wait for the next one… I’ll be there earlier next time.

Somewhere between all of this I also found a drop spindle at the thrift store and made my first yarn (still debating taking a picture or using it for stuffing); I’ve been making some hair accessories (soon to appear on Esty, I hope), I made my first (and second) Shepherd’s Pie; and made it through an iPhone Hello World tutorial. My food log has been slack since the last LA trip and I have been unmotivated (I’d say too busy, but I would be lying) for anything more than Sun Salutations. I am grateful, overwhelmed and excited.

TAD 2010-09 Meet MakeGyver

Brought a date to Make SF tonight and together we made MakeGyver (more video and pics on the Make site soon, I hope!):

It’s actually a Valentine’s Day card with a recorder and speaker inside. You can record up to 20 seconds on audio on the recorder and it includes a triggering device that turns the recorded audio on. I made a belt around another card inside that connects the legs and head to move them together and attached the speaker trigger to that so that when you pull on its legs, his head pops up and he says something! (If I’m lucky enough to have done it right, there’s video included with this post! Just in case, here’s another link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karizmatic/4345048489/ )

from karizmatic’s posterous, thing-a-day

Can I Be Your Favorite Contestant?

So, HP Space is hosting a Singaporean TV game show that is looking for creative talents in their contestants and they’ve asked contestant hopefuls to send them a 1 minute video, which they post to their site for the general audience to view, rate and comment on. I was able to put together said video, which you can find here.

Besides the excitement of going to Singapore, I’m looking forward to engaging in new creative challenges so I would love the opportunity to participate in this show and would really appreciate your vote by viewing my video (as many times as you want), adding a rating and a comment, then sharing the link with others.

To rate and comment on the video, please register on the HP site. There is a “SIGN UP” button on the top right corner of the screen that looks like this:

Thanks for all of your support and A VERY BIG THANKS to those who already viewed, rated and added their comments!!!

http://www.hpspace.com/videos/video/1789-p

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Hello, subscribers! (All one of you!) I have decided to revamp this blog a bit and there is some live updating happening on it ad hoc, so my apologies if you try to visit me here and it’s a bit messy for the next couple of weeks (months? eek! somebody send me a comment if it’s been months – don’t let me slip!).

If you were looking for McKay Garner’s and wanted to find him through me, you can visit his site at http://www.mckaygarner.com.

I’ve downloaded WordPress and calling on the XHTML spirits of skills past to get me through some PHP lessons and hopefully come out with a blog I can call my very own (at least until I get tired of it). I am really excited to nerd out. So, peace out! (for now)

P.S. It’s my mom’s birthday today – HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAMA!

BarcampLA7 – thanks for CATURDAY

I met a bunch of (and didn’t get to meet a whole bunch more) SUPER AWESOME people at Barcamp LA yesterday. A geekfested fantasy wonderland!
I watched nerdy girl, @baconqurlyq, talk about AIBO (Sony’s robot dog), comfortably navigate through command lines to get her robodog to perform! perform! for us. Then, later, I got to talk to her at a side table and found out that she was a crafter too! AND she lives near my neighborhood! BONUS!
‘Attended a session delivered by @tara called “Your Tweets Suck | Let’s Play a Game” and joined (and worked through) a game of Twitter Jeopardy (Followed a bunch of them on Twitter this morning when I woke up at 5AM and then watched them “waking up” as they followed me back – that was even more entertaining and exciting than I thought it would be).
Ran into @susankitchens in the kitchen as she was pouring her last bit of self-brought coffee; she shared it with me (thank you!) and I was lit pretty much the rest of the day! (In fact, I felt it this morning when I woke up) That coffee was amazingly strong (or am I really just that wimpy?) and it was just in time for me to deliver my own talk…
I decided to deliver a very short presentation on this year’s Bike to Work Week. Only problem was, I was so hyper from the coffee and nervous in general that I
1. completely forgot to mention the best part of Bike to Work Week – You can make a pledge on metro.net and win prizes (like a vacation!)
2. left my presentation feeling like I didn’t really connect with the people who actually showed up to my presentation! – this bummed me out the most once the coffee wore out. I don’t have enough bike friends and how much cooler could that have been to have nerdy bike friends?!
So, I’ll do my best to remedy that on the user group. And, if you were one of those folks who came to my talk
1. THANK YOU for not leaving my talk with tumbleweeds
2. Here’s my Bike To Work Week PowerPoint Presentation if you wanted to see it again and connect to the links I mentioned – they’re all embedded on the presentation.
3. Please contact me and let’s go biking!
The cookies I brought seemed to be a hit, too 🙂 I met a slew of other super awesome creative-innovatives, felt completely at home and was super inspired. I really needed that! Thanks, Barcamp!

COFFEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

It’s midnight thirty and i am now trying to figure out how to force myself asleep. This weekend, McKay and I went thrifting and I found this great linen sheet that had an embroidery pattern on the edge. Without measuring it, I assumed it would be enough fabric to make curtains out of for our bay window. Besides, it was 10 bucks and I figured that if I can’t use it for that, I can probably use it for something else – it’s good fabric and cheap to boot!
Well, I made it home, unfolded the fabric and found that the edge had been patched on and the embroidery pattern overlaid on that – that edge, only able to fit one or two of the panels I’d be making, would have driven one of us crazy (or maybe both of us). So, I needed a new strategy.
I went to another thrift store and, what a lucky surprise – I found another flat sheet in ALMOST same fabric – a shade darker and a hair thicker and plain (no embroidery) for 8 bucks! Of course, I thought it was the same exact fabric until I got it home and compared them side by side. Fortunately, the second piece I found is actually big enough to make all 4 panels… maybe it was King Sized.
After some deliberation, preliminary designs, meetings with my husband/housemate/co-designer of our place, I decided to do what already was thinking of doing when I realized the fabrics didn’t match…
I’m cutting out the embroidery from the original fabric (sorry, I forgot to take pics BEFORE I started hacking away – it WAS 2 rows of flowers one one end of the sheet with some kind of squarish geographic pattern in between – the one with this post is of the “detached” flowers in progress), one embroidered flower at a time, and use each flower and applique (is that a verb?) it onto the other fabric. Now that I’m about 12 flowers cut into it, I ask myself, “WHY?”, which is immediately followed by the question “HOW… am I going to applique these flowers onto the other linen and not make a big mess of this project?”, for which I am still formulating an answer. Tune in to find out…

Meanwhile (speaking of tuning in) I also setup my blog on Feedburner and now have nifty buttons that you can click on to subscribe to my ramblings (or the responses to them). Yayy!!! (?) Here’s one now: