This most likely means that the user made a web reqeuest, probably through ajax, on your site and then cut off the connection before the ajax request completed.  The connection can be cut off by clicking on another link, closing the browser, or things in the middle like firewalls and whatnot.

There isn’t a good solution to this issue that I could find, the error is just something that happens from time to time.  If it happens regularly and you don’t think it’s an accidental connection cut off, do some more exploring (particularly with firewalls and other potential connection problems), otherwise it can be ignored.

I also sold things at Maker Faire NY, which was great.  My necklaces and t-shirts were big hits and I just about made enough money to cover the expenses of the trip. (Lesson #1, don’t dig so big a hole that you have to have a ton of success to get back out of it.)  I kept track of a few things I started out doing wrong and did my best to fix on the spot, so hopefully those mistakes won’t happen again:

1. Post a price or people don’t know it’s for sale.  With all the makers just exhibiting things, it’s easy to get confused.
2. If you put t-shirts out on a table people will look through them for their size.  Either have sizes out there or hang them up behind you.
3. Don’t underestimate the number of girls there.  I didn’t think necklaces would sell well, but a ton of girls came by and loved them.
4. People loved trying on the look of disapproval glasses and sending pics to their friends.  If I had a kiosk to do that it would be nice for collecting emails.

If you’ve never been to BARcamp or to any unconference before, you should definitely come check it out.  The weekend will be filled with a wide variety of technology and entrepreneurship talks given by attendees.  If you have some knowledge you’d like to share, you can give a talk too!

We’re also repeating the BARcompany contest.  Last year we had three companies present business plans and prototypes, and the winner, Sacha DeAngeli of RuggedScents, has now launched his third manly scented cologne and has revenue coming in.  This year we have three experienced judges and a cash prize for the winner, so start thinking about something you’d like to make.

I know I’m excited for BARcamp this year, and I hope you are too!  For more info, check out our website at http://www.barcampchicago.org/ or follow us on twitter.

I think the fundamental problem is that I’m doing too many things that I’d be good at or that would be beneficial and not enough of things that I love. I’ve frequently heard the axiom that to be happy and effective at work you have to be doing what you love. I never really considered that very deeply. Ever since high school I’ve known I wanted to write software for a living because I thoroughly enjoyed computers. As I grew in that through college I began to love writing web applications. Incidentally, I also really appreciated data mining and I’ve kept that interest alive on occasion, but I largely abandoned that. I knew I needed to specialize and while the web and data mining often complement each other they are very different disciplines. That’s probably the healthiest approach to this problem that I’ve ever taken.

As I got my degree in computer science and continued marching toward becoming a software engineer another passion started growing: woodworking. I had liked building things like simple desks and furniture out of wood in the past but I never took it seriously. As I worked harder at software, I was becoming more interested in making more complicated things from wood and making them higher quality. I didn’t have much guidance in that discipline so I ended up like any typical modern suburban man might; I bought a gaggle of tools that I didn’t know how to use in an attempt to compensate for a lack of knowledge. Ultimately I gave up without making anything noteworthy, but my passion for making things never went away. It was a different facet of the same passion that brought me to programming in the first place. While I was stuck unable to make things as well as I wanted with wood, computers enabled me to make things without needing any particular talent beyond an analytical mind and there were teachers at my schools who could help me along in my development.

After graduating college I continued improving as a software engineer. I met with local user groups about Linux and Python, I designed and wrote applications in my spare time for the joy of solving interesting problems and for the sake of improving my skills as a developer. I progressed professionally and was pleased with the success I had. I continued carrying a torch for making things – keeping some of my tools in my apartment even though using them there would be extremely impractical. (Not that that always stopped me!) I even rented a garage at one point and kept my tools there so I could build more things. I made a collapsable hammock frame that failed dismally but had some design features I’m still proud of. I made a computer chair that struck a balance between reclining for comfort and sitting up for serious work. I made a small shelf for my then girlfriend’s bathroom and an “emergency” Guy Fawkes mask box. These things were all very simple due to my limited woodworking skill, but they were very rewarding to make. They also weren’t too distracting from my course as a software engineer. There were more things I wanted to make that were too impractical for me to do, like make an aluminum foundry or a steam engine, but I knew these were well beyond my reach not for a lack of skill but that I believed they couldn’t be done in a city like Chicago.

Then I was introduced to the concept of a hackerspace. Specifically, to Pumping Station: One, a hackerspace that was just beginning. It was essentially a group of dozens of people very similar to me. People who had modern jobs related to making things but were dissatisfied with the limitations they’d experienced on their ability to produce their ideas. Many were even programmers who wanted to explore more tangible mediums for making. I knew this was a community that I needed to be a part of, and joining the hackerspace did turn out to be a great decision, but it also became a huge challenge. The hackerspace movement was rising around the country but it didn’t come from nothing; the DIY mindset was increasingly popular in general and more things that appealed to a maker mindset were springing up. These things provided lots of inspiration to a group like our hackerspace. Too much inspiration in fact, at least for me. Initially I did end up building my aluminum foundry, but all the while countless these inspirational projects would cross our mailing list and would get added to my to do list, and I got overloaded. There were things from a wide range of disciplines that I wanted to sample to see if I could do them. I eventually had to prioritize, but the new ideas always seem like the greatest and most important ones so prioritization too often devolved into jumping into the new thing with the last one half finished. I’ve been proceeding like that for a year or two, and I don’t think I’ve really made much that I’m truly proud of since the aluminum foundry.

At the same time, programming became more of a job than a passion. With so many tangible things that satisfied my passion for making I became less interested in software. I stopped going to user group meetings. I occasionally wrote software to scratch my own itch but most of it wasn’t very interesting. My skills continued developing, but only where my job took them. I wasn’t working with new exciting tools because the time I would have spent on those was now being spent with wood and metal at the hackerspace.

This state of endless things to do is very demoralizing. I always had five or six projects on my mind and not enough time to complete them. That lead to having to force myself to work on things that I feel like I should be happy to be able to do. I’d lost my motivation to do things that I used to love doing. I even lost the motivation to do some of the basic necessities. And it was hard to recognize what’s going on because on the face of it I was doing exactly what I want to be doing, but it wasn’t fulfilling. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t.

Now to bring this back to where I started, I believe the problem of the endless to do list and constant new project distractions came from not knowing myself well enough to know when to say no. There are huge swaths of maker projects that interest me, and the way I interact with them through the internet they are cut down into easily digestible articles and videos. I love seeing things like that so I think I should make it to learn more about how it works and see if I can do it. That’s a huge mistake. There’s a tremendous difference between liking an article about something and liking something enough to spend dozens to hundreds of hours working on it. To do the latter, it has to be something that you really love doing and have a strong passion for. This is something that is obvious to anyone who thinks about it but is not so obvious to consider in the moment, at least for me. I’m learning that if an idea excites me, it may be because it’s an important idea for the world, or that it’s a fantastically executed example of what it is, or just that it’s something I haven’t seen before. Those are all great qualities for something to have, but none of them are good enough by themselves for me to commit myself to it. I have a lot of interests but I only have a few passions, and passion is what drives you through the hours of labor producing substandard junk until you get good enough at something that you can appreciate the product of your work on its own merits.

As I continue to make things, be they atoms or bits, I’ll be paying much closer attention to my motivations and I’ll be culling projects that are the product of fleeting interests and focusing on labors of love. I expect that this will leave me with more time, a clearer mind, and a more fulfilled life.

P.S.
Much of this insight came from a combination of sources. One of them was a cognitive crisis when I worked hard to get makertees.com ready for maker faire and I didn’t seem to get the response I expected. The rest were well timed readings and that speech from Adam Savage, linked here again for convenience.

• Adam Savage – Get Inspired
• Seneca – Letters from a Stoic
• Emerson – Self Reliance
• Paul Graham – How to Do What You Love

I immediately encountered a major problem with one of my assumptions: various sources disagreed on the frequency of letter occurrence in the english language. I always thought those numbers were well established since people widely regard “E” as the most common letter, and Pat Sajak has sworn by “RSTLN” for decades. Also, most ciphertexts are far too small to make frequencies very relevant. In fact, the example I originally started with didn’t even include all 26 letters.

After a few tries, this approach didn’t work. It may be a useless approach because any text large enough for statistics to matter would probably not use a simple substitution cipher. However it was a fun experiment and a negative result is still a result worth sharing.

I “finished” the secret cabinet project. The cabinet is an “emergency documentation box” for Pumping Station: One. It’s mounted near the soon to be new home for Electric Avenue in a fairly prominent place and contains a flip video camera graciously donated by Anne Petersen. Now there’s no excuse to not have video of the culmination of your awesome project. This camera really couldn’t be any easier to use, so I hope this box helps out the space. I said it’s “finished” because I really just got tired of working on it and moved on. There should be some lettering on the window but I’ll add it later.

I implemented the scary sharp tool sharpening system and sharpened a chisel and a hand plane. I sharpened them down to 1000 grit sandpaper and I intended to go down to 2000 but after seeing how amazing the results are with 1000 I don’t think it’s necessary.

I produced a video of a Sun Jar for Element14. They approached PS:One a while back to send someone and record some of our projects and they got a good response from the video, so they asked for more. I hope it’s the first of a long series.

How to make a Sun Jar from Pumping Station: One on Vimeo.

I and several other members built three workbenches for the new shop in Pumping Station: One. It’s always fun to do those kind of large scale builds, but we could certainly use more tools so more people can work at once.

I still have plenty more projects on my list of stuff I could do this month and a few more cool things have popped up, so keep an eye out for weekend projects in March!

After examining the dry paint from yesterday I firmly believe the foam roller is the way to go. I think I could sand that out in no time and get a nice finish. However, I think I would need to prep the wood better than I did to make this particular piece look as nice as I want, so it’s just not going to happen this time. Oh well, another project!

On the left of the lathe you can see my second project of the day. We have several brushes and tools that go with the lathe and they usually just lay in the chip tray or on the workbench. I made this rack for some of the tools and brushes to get the area more organized. It’s just some 1 inch holes in a scrap of 2×4, but it does the job well enough.

Finally, I put what is hopefully the last coat of paint on the secret cabinet. Like I said in the last post, I think my sanding and use of a brush was a problem. I got a sander that could take my higher grit sandpaper and used some 400 on it to smooth out the painted faces. It worked very well, some other people commented that it feels like plastic rather than wood. I think I probably should have started even lower than 400, but 400 did the job. I also got a foam roller and did most of the painting with that. It left a nice finish and any bubbling that occurred during application had dissipated by the time I got back around to that side to examine it. I still had to use the brush on the inner corners, but it’s greatly reduced. Maybe that’s what those foam brushes are for. Anyway, this isn’t actually the last application of paint because the frame for the door is painted on both sides. I’ll have to get the other side painted tomorrow. However, this is hopefully the last time I paint over existing paint.

1. I’m using a paint brush.  When I bought the paint I asked the Home Depot guy what the best way to get a really smooth finish was.  He said either a Purdy brand brush or a foam roller.  I went with the brush since the cabinet is small and the tray is more of a hassle.  I think that was a mistake.  A brush will always leave stroke marks in the surface, and that has to be sanded out.  I’m going to switch to a foam roller tomorrow.
2. I’m not sanding properly.  I don’t know what grit of paper to use at which level of roughness, and committing the elbow grease to try something for it to be a failure is eating up too much time.  I’m going to get a sander and try some lower grits.