Maker Faire: Steampunks and Battlebots and lost iPhones, Oh My!
Went to Maker Faire last weekend — had been wanting to go each of the last years and never quite managed to do it. Finally did, and wasn’t disappointed. It’s fairly expensive ($25/person), but well, then again I haven’t been to a State Fair lately, and in some ways it’s a similar sort of setup. Probably not really that expensive, considering all of that.
I was trying to explain to some folks what it was, and tried “family-friendly burning man”, which isn’t quite right although gets the spirit pretty accurate, and “high-tech state fair” which is close but no cigar as well. It is, to some extent, like a ham radio convention, skipped ahead a couple of generations. Well, but with (much more) weird, whimsical art. It’s hard to describe, but a fun time was had by all. Alex especially liked the Disney (sigh) section with WALL*E (ok, the $200 toy robot version coming out later this year actually does look pretty cool) and the DIY model rockets (with launches!). Oh, and the battling robots. Ohhh, the battling robots…! We saw some way cool robots that shot flames… and then promptly had their owners chastised by the local police/security folks. I think that was predictable 
So anyhow, after a few hours, as we were getting pretty tired (the two kids make it a lot more unwieldy, but a lot more fun too) we sat at a bench and had some ice cream, and then headed back to see WALL*E one more time (please, Daddy, please!) When we emerged, I was checking out the t-shirts and Val ran up, “I think I lost my phone!”. After some frantic digging through the stroller compartments, we couldn’t find it. Val said she thought she might have recently lost it out of her back pocket when we were eating ice cream, so I went off to look. Nothing near where we were, and I asked the info booth if anyone had turned on in recently… they pointed me to the main info booth, they pointed me to lost and found, they said they thought “yes” one was turned on, and pointed me to security office. Off I went, halfway across the event in a sprint. After I got there, sure enough, that had one just turned in! The security officer held it up and said “is this it”? Of course, this was somewhat funny, as basically all iPhones look identical. But I unlocked it in front of her, and it was Val’s (right wallpaper, for example.) So, the Maker Faire bunch are also an honest, or at least helpful lot.
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