Raymond, Tim, Justin, and I decided to go to St. Louis for the grand opening of Arch Reactor the local Hackerspace up there. They had made a post to the hackerspaces.org mail list inviting everyone out to there space.  I asked a few members if they would like to go, and we made a weekend trip out of it.

I had spoken with a few of the Arch Reactor members beforehand and made arrangements to crash at a members apartment.   We left Friday night in the middle of a snow storm.  Lucky Tim is from upside down Vermont and thus knows how to drive in bad weather.  A 6 hour drive took us 10.5, but thanks to my Droid we never missed a beat with Pandora.

Once in St. Louis we found a McDonald’s to get food and then napped in the parking lot.  Then we traveled over to the Arch and did the touristy things.  We walked around the museum and rode up in the Arch.  Being about lunchtime we headed over to Arch Reactor were we hung out for the rest of the night.

The open house was tons of fun.  They probably had 50 or more people show up.  They had a Maker Bot and a CNC, along with a bunch of old and new computers.  There was some cool art, and a few talks.  Tim and I even showed off the photobooth and gave a short talk about it.  OH! and they had life sized Jenga!

As expected after only a few hours of sleep and parting all day with only caffeine to keep us awake, we crashed hard Saturday night.  Sunday morning we had lunch with a member of their space and headed home.  The drive home way way easier than the one going up.   On the way through Illinois we saw a sign for Metropolis, IL aka Superman’s Home.  Naturally we stopped and saw a giant Superman at the courthouse.

Here are the picture I took, I’ll update it later if anyone else has posted their pictures.

I had been wanting to see the Bodies Exhibit for year, so when I found out that it was in Atlanta I got some people together and made a day trip out of it.  It so happened the Saturday we choose to go, was also Valentines day.  Which kind of made it ironic when I saw a bunch of human hearts.

After a crazy early morning drive through the middle of nowhere Alabama and Georgia, we made it to the exhibit.  We go in and started looking at the bodies rather quickly.   There were some crazy looking things in the exhibit.  They displayed, bodies cut open in poses like playing basketball and drawing on a pad.  Also there were babies fetuses at all stages of a pregnancy, and a large intestine sprawled out.  I didn’t really find anything all that disgusting except for maybe the penis that was cancer ridden.    The exhibit was more like a museum exhibit than I thought it was going to be, but it was still awesome to see and I enjoyed every second of it.

After the exhibit, we grabbed some quick food, and headed to the aquarium.  But since it was already almost 3pm and they closed at 6pm we decided to find something else to do.  We through headed through Olympic Part to the CNN building to try and take that tour, but it was already full.   So we decided to hit up a liquor store then head to a bar for a few drinks.  After that we went to some hole in the wall BBQ place that has some of the best ribs in the world.

It was a great day trip to Atlanta.  Though it sucks that we didn’t make it to the aquarium.  I’m going to try again with another group of friends, when we go to Outerz0ne.

Friday was my last final….Math final at 8am…errr!!  But after that I headed to lunch with some friends, then on a 6hr drive to Dauphin Beach for the weekend.  Brian has a beach house down there, and Him, Ray, Greg and I went for the weekend.  Since I’m writing this post about 3 weeks later, I’ll just put a link to pic, and hopfully I’ll stay on top of posts more. :/

Ray’s Pics

Greg’s Pics