DivaBlog

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

Floor space only at eTech the last couple of days...but its such a great conference that I don't mind sitting on the floor :-)

Last night was the Make! party at eTech. For those of you who haven't yet seen the fabulous Make! magazine, check it out.

So yesterday there were lots of opportunities to meet people who tinker. Like the fantastic Andrew "bunnie" Huang, and Natalie Jeremijenko from the Feral Robotic Dog pack.

The dog thing was perhaps my favorite thing from yesterday. Its not just a geek project, its an environmental activism project. As my only brother is an environmental attorney, I'm always interested in work that supports the Sisyphian task of fighting the good (environmental) fight. The modified robodogs that Natalie and her students build are fitted with a new nose that sniffs for environmental contaminants. They build a bunch of them and then release them into the "wild" at sites where people are concerned about pollution. The dogs roam around (on wheels...they are robots after all) and when they find pollution they stop and "do something cute". Some of them are networked as well and those send data back to collectors. How cool is THAT?