Riding for My Life Out East Austin and Maker Faire

So I went out to East Austin this weekend with my friend Joe to go to the Maker Faire. This was so inspirational and I can't believe I even saw this stuff. I'll post pics and describe it, but I may not do it justice nor do I have the amount of pics I should have taken. This fair pretty much sums up my interests in life. It had everything HPV's, folk music, Legos, Robot Wars, sh*t that shot fire, catapults, spear throwing, spinning and weaving, life size mouse trap, 16 oz cans of beer, and a lot more that I probably didn't even see.

The first thing were the human powered vehicles slash human powered rides. A group called Cyclecide was there with their bike rodeo. They had human powered carnival rides and I believe they were responsible for a human powered snake train, a human powered peacock train, a giant fly bike, and a windmill type thing that had guitars attached to it that would play as you pedal (not pictured).





Next was a bunch of electric powered cars, an art car (a car with yarn glued to it in intricate patterns pictured below), and robot wars.
There were these guys that were making throwing spears like the way they would make them thousands of years ago. I was talking to him and unfortunately people don't hunt with them much, but there is a following of people that are just enthusiasts. There was also a vendor showing off their canvas tents that were supposed to be an alternative to a yurt or a tipi. I don't know if I would use it as an alternative, but it was light and only had two poles. Another vendor in the housewares section was a group that made their own cleaning supplies out of household items. I need to look into that more so I don't have to rely on P and G.
Then there was a huge area with a bunch of CNC, laser cutting, vinyl cutting, and crafts thus related. A few people were repping a DIY router. Some even had 3 dimensions. There was one project that came out of MIT that was a shelter structure that was completely CNC'd and snapped and slotted together made out of wood. There was a huge showing from MIT Media Lab. I hear about them a lot in the open source and research world, and they have some cool projects that come out of there. I need to do more research on that.
Sorry for that picture.

Lastly was the music. It was folk music! The bands played on this stage converted from a old fire truck and completely run by solar power.
The first band was a cajun or tejano band I'm not sure which one, and in the folk style they were playing in the "streets" of Maker Faire afterwards. The next band was the most amazing thing I might have seen in Austin so far. Joe and i were walking out of this area where they had some DIY speakers and we were dodging a field of hippie hula hoopers as Joe said, "We'll it looks like we've seen about everything we should get going." All of a sudden out of south came a marching band. They had horns, saxophones, and a drum section and they were all dressed up in old band uniforms. On further investigation they had electric instruments with speakers attached to their heads. The lineup included, a sousaphone, saxophones, trombones, trumpets, a drum line, an electric mandolin, an electric guitar, accordions, and electric fiddle, and then various axillary percussion. They were running around the grounds and playing their music. They would scatter and all of sudden a horn section would appear on the bleachers or behind the crowd. They're from Chicago and they're called Mucca Pazza. Later they played the rest of their show on the stage.

Their sound was influenced by jazz, eastern European folk music, and some soul.

So overall this day pretty much was a fair of all things Johnathan Kroeger is interested in and stuff I've been reppin lately: diy bikes, folk music, minimal architecture, and, well, everything I've described in this post.

We ended up back in Austin at a bar down on fourth that Joe knew the bartender at. The Bengals got slaughtered by the Steelers (boo) and the Red Sux lost (yay!) I definitely didn't get everything here (I still need to rant about my hatred of bike lanes) so this is just and overview of the entire experience.