At Yuri’s night 2008 at NASA Ames, they had a ride called ISS. They’d put you in this capsule and slingshot you up to the International Space Station. We were really lucky because since the Space Station is orbiting so fast, only a few riders each day can get to see it up-close. You can see the space station in the reflection of the glass. It was really pretty spectacular! Charlotte and I had a great time. If you ever get the chance, you should absolutely go!

The fine folks at the Space Coalition hung out in low earth orbit and took photos of us tourists all night.

In the coming weeks, I will republish articles I wrote under the title “Click Here”. You can find them all under the Click Here Articles category in this blog.

From 2002 to 2005, I worked with two publications, The Panther and Around The Greens. Actually, I helped quite a bit with them in addition to writing articles.

The Panther is the official publication of The Panther Valley Property Owners Association. I was a member of the Communications Committee, helping to get the newsletter out and helping with various initiatives in the Valley.

Around The Greens is the official publication of the Forsgate Community Association. My aunt Ernestine McCarren ran the publication from 2003 to 2004. I wore many hats, technical advisor, graphic design and writer. I was instrumental in helping to put together the proof. We used Microsoft Publisher 2003. I did most of the ads. I’d get a laugh every time an advertiser would give us an old crinkled newspaper ad with their logo on it and say, “Here you go. Use this logo but make it a half-page ad instead of side-bar. Oh and our hours and location have changed.” They had no idea that in order to make that work, I’d usually have to rebuild the entire ad from scratch. But with the crinkled sheet, the best I could do for them was… not as good as they should care about their business!

During this time I was promoting my business, “The Computer Guy”. My tagline was “I go to people’s homes and small businesses, fix their computers and show them how they work.” To promote myself as an expert in the field, I wrote a series of articles with the title of “Click Here”. Over the next few weeks, I will republish those articles here. Computers being what they are, some of the content is out of date but much of it is still useful. In any case, it’s interesting reading (at least I think so).

It was an enjoyable challenge to write for print. You are always watching your word-count; I would write the first draft of my 450 word article, do a word-count and find out that I was over by 600 words. Taking an axe to my own articles showed me that I could write very concisely when I had to and not lose the intention of the work.

What’s going on in my life? Let’s see…

I went back to New Jersey for a week for Christmas and got to see the most beautiful girl in the world. She’s got long strawberry blonde hair and is 4′ tall. That’s my 7 year old niece Julia. :-)

I’m still working on the SWARM art project with friends. See a SWARM video I produced and some blog updates. about it.

I’m starting a new job as a residential solar power sales consultant at Premier Power. My good friend Barry introduced me to the position and I’m terribly excited at the prospect making a good income at saving the world. I had worked at Valley Yellow Pages over the summer specifically so I could get my sales chops. We’ll see how it goes!

Charlotte and I are doing well together. We’re still in our tiny 24th st apartment… with the new job looming, I’ve thought and said aloud many times, “I can’t wait until I have some money”. I haven’t often thought of how money could improve my life but now I am. Again, we’ll see how it goes.

I helped produce and sell $4,000 of Flaming Lotus Girls calendars for the Christmas season. That makes me pretty happy and proud.

I took a forklift certification class in December (anyone need a forklift driver?)

Went to a couple baby-shower like events recently… Pouneh from FLG and Michelle H. It looks like everybody is getting bulbous bellies these days.

I’ve been helping Tad create the ultimate workbench. I’ve gone over to his house a couple times to cut wood and move things etc… he’s got a LOT of electronics gear in his house and he uses it! Maybe it’ll give you some glimpse to know that he has a $400 electric bill each month, and he lives on his own! Helping him has been fun. I’ll try to post pictures when it’s done. It looks like it’ll be 3 shelves, each capable of holding 600 lbs of gear (and yes, he’ll use it), the main table level is about 4′ x 8′, with the back being occupied by 2′ deep gear like oscilloscopes and the like.

For Christmas, my folks got me a Tom Tom (which will be good for my new job!) and are getting me tickets to Burning Man. I like very much that they have enough acceptance of “those crazy hippies in the desert” that they’d do that for me.

I suppose that’s the most of it. You can find out more about what I’m thinking by reading the rest of my blog. I see that this blog thing is getting quite extensive. I’ve made over 1,200 posts to it since I started it 5 years ago in 2002. I make a point of only posting things that are important to me.

I welcome you to see the New Year card I sent to many people this year. It’s really quite pleasant.

If the card isn’t available anymore, here’s a local version. Originally, the interactive card ended with “Happy New Year” and “May this be a year of peace, love, growth and good news”.

This Yellow Pages salesman walks into a bar and says, “Hi, I’m Lee Sonko from Valley Yellow Pages.” It’s still kinda weird but it seems that I’ve changed careers again, from

• Software QA engineer at Politzer and Haney, Course Technology, Softkey Intl, Shiva, Picturetel, MCI/Newscorp Internet Ventures, American Internet, Riverton Software Corp, BGS, Firefly, ADP and Wavexpress to
• Owner of “The Computer Guy”, computer repair and training company to
• Substitute teacher to
• Customer Support Manager and QA engineer at Wavexpress  to
• Co-owner of Safe and Secure SF,  disaster preparedness consultancy to
• Yellow Pages account executive.

We’ve had a few TV mentions of late :-)

Most notably, there’s a piece on Current.TV and this piece on the local news :-)

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=drive_to_discover&id=5584601

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Richard Hart and his camera man came by a few weeks ago to do a story on us. Alan Wang of ABC7News.com introduced

Here’s a transcript of the video:

Richard Hart narrating:

This is a robot. Well, actually a roll-bot. It doesn’t even have wheels. It just sort of rolls along. But then it’s not supposed to do much. This robot was born to dance.

Michael Prados - “I think a lot of it came from brainstorming about kinetic art. And a lot of the discussion is centered around dance as an inspiration. And so by thinking about dancers and the way they move, we started to think about how we could have machines that had some of those same aspects.”

At the bottom of the sphere you will see something swinging back and forth. That’s a very heavy battery. By shifting it backward or forward like a pendulum you can force the cage to roll backward or forward, even change direction. On top is a black radome connected to an inexpensive wireless network called Zigbee, connected to a laptop which is connected to a common video game controller. But wait, there’s more. Michael Prados, Lee Sonko and a small team developed this for the art festival in the desert, Burning Man 2007. They are busy fashioning aluminum ribs and electronics for five more robots which will all become dance partners; because the black dome atop the robot contains a GPS unit in addition to wifi. So a half dozen robots will be able to talk to each other and synchronize their dance without needing the remote control. At least that’s the plan.

Michael Prados - “We hope that we can impart at least some small bit of it and suprise and delight people with a new kind of machine behavior.”

With the next roll in bots, Richard Hart, ABC Seven News.

Here’s the text of the article

Bay Area Group Building Dancing Robot

Will Be Used At Burning Man

By Richard Hart

Aug. 19, 2007 - The Burning Man festival is only one week away, and, in warehouses throughout the Bay Area, artists are rushing to finish performance projects in time for the annual desert event. One of those groups is building a GPS ballet.

This is a robot. Well, actually, a roll bot. It doesn’t even have wheels. It just sort of rolls along. But, then, it’s not supposed to do much. This robot was born to dance. Michael Prados of the Swarmbot Project: “I think a lot of it came from brainstorming about kinetic art. And a lot of the discussion has centered around dance as an inspiration. And, so, by thinking about dancers and the way they move, we started to think about how we could have machines that had some of those same aspects.”

Look closely at the bottom of the sphere, and you will see something swinging back and forth. That’s a very heavy battery. By shifting it backward or forward like a pendulum, you can force the cage to roll backward or forward, even change direction. On top is a black radome connected to an inexpensive wireless network called Zigbee, connected to a laptop, which is connected to a common videogame controller. But wait. There’s more.

Michael Prados, Lee Sonko, and a small team developed this for the art festival in the desert, Burning Man 2007. They are busy fashioning aluminum ribs and electronics for 5 more robots, which will all become dance partners. The black dome atop the robot contains a GPS unit in addition to wi-fi.

So, a half-dozen robots will be able to synchronize their own dance without needing the remote control. At least, that’s the plan.

Michael Prados: “We hope we can impart at least some small bit of it, and surprise and delight people with a new kind of machine behavior.”

Burning Man officially kicks off on August 27, 2007.

——- Links ——-

The Swarmbots project is funded by
The Black Rock Arts Foundation, a part of Burning Man.
www.blackrockarts.org

Home of the SWARM Robots www.orbswarm.com

SWARM Blog blog.orbswarm.com

SWARM Wiki http://wiki.orbswarm.com

We just finished running the Serpent at the Fire Arts Festival. It was a blast!

Karen’s pix

A terrific (47mb) video by Olivier Bonin of the Serpent at the Crucible’s 2007 Fire Arts Festival The thing to watch!!

SF Chronicle coverage here and here (article title: “Hot-and-heavy sculpture gets artists warmed up Enormous flame-breathing creations at Fire Arts Festival are prelude to Burning Man. Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer. Friday, July 13, 2007″)

Here is the schedule of who worked the performance… There’s a lot of Girls, aren’t there?

WED: Jess THURS: Rebecca FRI: Jess SAT: Cherl

__._,_.___

A couple weeks ago, Charlotte and I went to the SOEX 7th Annual Monster Drawing Rally. We got to watch a few rounds of 20 artists make something in 60 minutes. It wasn’t nearly as fun as we thought it would be though since all the art produced was very so-so. Apparently it was a great fundraiser though since the line-up to buy the pieces for $50 apiece was quite long. It had the possibility of being fun with the festive, crowded and hip atmosphere and the bar…

This past Sunday afternoon: played Diplomacy for the first time. I was surprised how much fun it was even though after 6 hours of game play it seemed the game was only a little more than 1/2 finished. Before I went, I thought, “15 minutes per move? That sounds so terribly boring.” It wasn’t. :-)

Sunday morning Charlotte and I helped Charlie with an art contract building a 14′ tall metal wire horse and gold gilded grass around it.

“What are you doing Charlotte?”

“I’m gilding grass.” :-)

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This weekend, Charlotte’s friend Keith came by from Boston. Most notably, he acted as a neutral third party and confirmed what we have long thought was the truth, that our bed has evil tentacles that pull you in. He sat down on it, leaned back and asked in a startlingly sleepy voice, “What kind of bed is this?” Seconds later he was deep in a 3 minute nap.

For reference, he was fully awake before sitting down, it was noon, he wasn’t jet-lagged or worn out from the night before and was well rested.

Charlotte and I have filed with the state. Our new earthquake preparedness service is to be called Safe and Secure SF.

Our business cards read:

Personalized Earthquake Preparedness Services

We help you be prepared! Safer interiors, safety plans,
food & supplies, financial info & data backup.

I have been starting a business with my girlfriend, Charlotte. We are tentatively calling it Safe and Secure. It is an earthquake preparedness business where we go to people’s homes and institutions and ready them for the kinds of earthquakes that we inevitably have here in northern California. It’s turning out to be quite interesting and fun. We are becoming experts in the field. :-)

In my personal/art life, I have been working on several projects getting ready for Burning Man. One is called Swarm. You can take a peek here: http://www.orbswarm.com/. I am also helping to rework the Serpent Mother… that is the giant snake that we worked on last year. You saw pictures of that, yes? Take a peek: http://lee.org/blog/2006/10/03/serpent-links/

Last night, Charlotte and I completed our training as Neighborhood Emergency Response Team members!

This is one vital step in our multifaceted strategy to take over the world!

We have been studying disaster preparedness, fire safety, light search and rescue, triage, basic disaster medicine with the SF Fire Department. We even got to put out a real fire and make a mess in the parking lot with a 3A 40BC extinguisher (the kind of extinguisher that YOU should have in your home, car and workplace… you have one in each, right? If not, we’ll sell you one, at a very reasonable price…).

We got certificates. We’re NERTs!

We got gloves and super duper ity bity flashlights (I almost blinded Charlotte, oops. But the veins in our hands look really cool) submersible to 500ft and guaranteed against… let me read the manual, “Pelican Unconditional Lifetime Guarr… blah blah blah… defects in workmanship… blah blah blah…. THE ABOVE GUARANTEE DOES NOT COVER SHARKBITE, BEAR ATTACK OR CHILDREN UNDER 5.” Ha!

We were instructed never to walk into a building and shout “NERTS! We’re here to help!” People would just look at us funny. We’re supposed to say “Rescue Team!” Already our self esteem is being tested by the industrial firefighting complex. ;-)

This is an important part of our disaster preparedness business. Which, in all honesty, is looking pretty tenable.