Today we have taken a step in the direction of recycling in Memphis.  Some of our makers went out and collected up scrap pipe from a deconstruction zone downtown.  After the heavy goods were relocated it was time to condense our load into much smaller, more manageable pieces.  Time for Daniel to use one of his toys, and for him to attempt setting the daisies that line our drive way on fire! Check out Flickr for more photos.

An hour and a half later and 3 metal cutting discs down, we had a pile of pipes in manageable pieces.  The discs themselves only cost about $3 for all, so I think we snagged a pretty good deal.  Also, I think Daniel had fun causing all of the mayhem, I can’t think of many things that he likes better than tearing something apart, it is a pretty good stress reliever.  As you can see from the pictures, some of the pipes were pretty massive. The largest one took down 2 discs on its way out.  Thankfully it was the last pipe that Daniel clashed with.

Midsouth Makers-1: Monster pipe-0

It would seem to be that those involved with the Zombie Walk this weekend had an excellent time. We’re terribly sorry to those of you who couldn’t make it, and equally sorry to those who do not enjoy this sort of thing. It was all a great time with a bunch of people just being goofy for the sake of being goofy. Everyone needs a little entertainment every now and then.

The walk started at G.E. Patterson and S. Main out front of Ernestine & Hazels where it progressed north down S. Main to Beale St. From there every zombie traveled down to the New Daisy where the walk ended. There were really tons of types of zombies. It was estimated that 500 people where there participating. We did not get the opportunity to make use of this public event to advertise ourselves like we had hoped, but we still had a blast and that was the great thing. There was tons to see and plenty of material for pictures. Take a look at our Flickr account if you’d like to see more. Let’s try and make it where we have even more people and something even more elaborate next year. It seems to be that stranger you are at this the more you stood out. John was even mentioned in the Flyer’s YouTube video post for this year.

Just to try and get as much of the word out there as possible. THERE WILL BE NO MEETING ON May 28th 2010!

A handful of the members will be at the Zombie Walk (see the wiki) during the normal time of this meeting. Everyone who wants to is welcome to come, whether it be dress up and parade as a zombie through downtown Memphis, or as a potential victim, or simply as a supporter of the event. We hope all members that are capable, will come down and help promote Midsouth Makers in whatever way they can. The event starts at 6:30 PM (I highly doubt you will be able to miss the zombies) at Earnestine & Hazel’s on South Main St. We’ve heard that the crowd is rather impressive and makes it hard to find each other if you don’t all get there at the same time. Well obviously that isn’t going to happen without everyone standing on one foot while whistling the Pac Man theme and the planets aligning in the heavens. So as an alternative, there is an invention we all love, the cell phone. If you would like to have my number to call and meet up feel free to send me an e-mail at dhess@midsouthmakers.org and I’ll gladly send it to you so you can find us. Hopefully everyone is excited about going, and we look forward to seeing you there!

Ok, so I don’t know how many people have heard, but we’ve been invited to Nashville to check out the Hacker Consortium’s space. The current agenda is for us to leave at 8 AM on June 5th, meet up with the guys at HC, hang out with them and checkout the shop, stay the night, and come back on Sunday morning. The Nashville hackerspace has specifically asked for a headcount, and really we need one anyhow for the logistics planning of the trip. We have a potential for some “discounted” hotel rooms courtesy of Hilton. So the one catch is that we need to know how many people are going two weeks in advance to make use of this offer on rooms.

In short it would be preferable to not turn in the request right on the two week marker. So please everyone who wants to go can, but we need to know no later than this Wednesday May 19th. We will be putting in the request on Thursday, so if you don’t let us know before then we’re terribly sorry and hope that you might join us on the trip to Huntsville a few weeks later. Feel free to send in an e-mail to the mailing list, or send in one to info@midsouthmakers.org and let us know.

The goal of this project was a cheap and easy design of a do it yourself raised flower bed. The benefits of a raised flower bed are better soil drainage so that the plant’s roots aren’t in compacted, water logged soil, better control of soil mixture, and extended growing seasons since raised beds warm up sooner in the spring, and stay warmer longer in the fall than traditional flower beds. This was a very quick project to set up, I think we spent more time wandering around Lowe’s than we did actually putting the container together. You can easily go buy a prefab raised flower bed for about $100. The frame itself, plus the landscape fabric to put under it to keep weeds out, cost us less than $60. We haven’t bought any soil or plants to put in it yet, those are coming in a few weeks. This was much more of a spontaneous idea.