I had the pleasure of attending Maker Faire this year and show off my self-balancing skateboard.  There was fun and some suffering in it.

I had the pleasure of meeting some awesome people at SparkFun, Sun, Evil Mad Scientists, and Pleo.  Also I had my buddy Andy Konkol to attend.  He may be the panda.

And then my smart ass mouth caused this to happen.

So enough about the interesting folk, let me the story of the skateboard.  SparkFun sent me a replacement and I updated the source code to a working version.  Once the batteries were charged up on Friday, it literally took me 20 minutes to get it working and we even had a chance to ride it.  It wasn't tuned in 100% but it worked.  I am a golden god.

BUT some nice fellow decided my rental car needed a nice make over while we ate dinner Friday night.

Both my work laptops, camera, camcorder, Zune, Shure earbuds, and my IMU 6DoF from Sparkfun was taken.  While my stuff isn't the big deal, I feel sorry for Louis Ingenthron, maker of Unsigned the XNA game.  His bag was in my car too and he is just a college student.

Time to see what I need to do to get everything back to normal and fix everything with Louis.

Stuff was still demo'ed, Louis got his game working off an old version of his source code.  I still showed off the world's most expensive teeter-totter. 

On the upside, I get to buy a new camera and test out my sanity level by doing all my work via Outlook Web Access.  Also I ran into my brother at O'hare.  My dad actually called me up and joked about how my brother was going to Florida that morning.  I gave him a call and he was only a few gates away.  I look ever so great after sleeping on an airplane for 4 hours and I'm not exactly known as a morning person.