jon_chaisson | [pix] Bay Area Maker Faire 2011

So yes! Yesterday we drove down to San Mateo for the Bay Area Maker Faire and had quite a fun time. Many strange and silly (and nerdy and intellectual) things were to be seen. So without further ado, pictures from the geekfest below the cut!

To start off, this one guy had a small booth full of Old School Computers that made me feel both nostalgic and old at the same time:

HEY! An Apple II! This is the model my high school had in the library (and on which I played many a game of Jungle Hunt and Lemonade Stand). He didn't have an Apple IIc, the model we used in computer class, but had other nifty things like an Altair and an early Atari.

Next up:

A teletype machine! Sorry for the blurriness--thought this came out better. Either way--this thing I believe is similar to the one that my Dad used back near the beginning of his reporter days when he wasn't typing out a story on his trusty Royal (which he still has and uses).

Further inside the hall was a really cool area for Lego creations, including a complete city block with amazing detail like this:

If I'd had the room and enough Legos, I would have totally made something like this as a kid.

And there were neat things outside too, including many sculptures you could play with, such as this one:

I'm not entirely sure of its purpose, other than that those there boulders are a good couple of tons, and you had to go under them in order to make it move...

And now, a picture for

chaoticmoth:

Yes, they're playing Rock Band. With fire. There was a series of five nozzles that would shoot out flame with every strum and button-press on the guitar. The song playing at the moment? "Iron Man", of course. :)

I thought this was pretty neat:

A General Electric-sponsored merry-go-round running entirely on solar power (the bank of solar panels were off to the side, out of shot).

Of course we couldn't pass this up:

The boys from EepyBird creating their usual mess with Coke Zero ("less sticky than Diet") and Mentos. Quite fun to watch live!

Now this was the one thing (aside from EepyBird) that I totally wanted to check out:

I saw a preview of this on KRON4 yesterday morning...it's a large globe that, on first look, seems to just be an oversized desktop globe made of random metal bits...but the various layers of metal are actually shaped like real streets in the area, and it's lit from within.

But it wasn't all nerdy electronics and toys! Check it out:

In various places on the fairgrounds were a few people with tiny typewriters "writing poetry for you while-u-wait"! Your subject, your price. Man, I shoulda got in on that... :p

And of course, our day out would not be complete without taking pictures of the flora...

...or one of those special "ummm...ooookay..." moments:

Yeah, a man riding inside a muffin. I don't know either. O_o

And lastly, a blast from San Francisco's past:

Three heads from the long-gone Doggie Diner chain, the last of which was on the corner of Sloat and 46th Avenue, right across from the Zoo and closed in 1986. The last remining Doggie head is still there, actually! And yes, this is the very same Doggiehead that Zippy the Pinhead frequently talks to in his comic strip.

So yes...quite a lot of things seen and done, played with or eaten (yes, we had funnel cake!), and it was a hell of a lot of fun. So much so that I was dead tired by the time we got home! It was well worth it, though...lots of silly, geeky fun.