Health & Fitness
A Karmic Meeting: AT&T's Hack-A-Thon Project
You never know who you are going to meet. I met one Alex Donn of Seattle who had received a request to respond to my email this very morning. Karma was working overtime to make this meeting happen.
Karma. Steve Jobs believed in it. I believe in it. We've seen it in the movies. How one tiny change can affect a whole stream of events. It took many tiny changes to make my meeting with Alex Donn possible.
Who is Alex Donn, you might ask.
Alex Donn is the idea man behind AT&T's Hack-A-Thon project. He's worked for two years to bring it to this point where he's spearheading efforts to bring software hacking to community centers, supportive businesses and schools around the country. The format is to have teams of random strangers - both technical and not technical - come together to design applications for AT&T phones. They work for 24 hours straight (or a few hours, go home and sleep and come back and work). They are fed and nourished. Contestants are evaluated and winners are declared.
The primary goal is to educate. The secondary goal is to get apps pushed out on AT&T's platform. Alex is prototyping a system to get apps from the Hack-A-Thons pushed out to AT&T's platform for consumer applications. The first application is near ready, and I expect will be announced shortly.
Why This Meeting is Karmic
I will add an * at each point where some change happened that made this meeting relevant.
Boyle Heights Hack-A-Thon
* I was meeting with one Brent Bushnell of Two Bit Circus some weeks ago. Brent was in the final days of the Circus' Kickstarter campaign to bring a S.T.E.A.M. Carnival to the Los Angeles area. I was very late getting to the meeting because my map sent me to Compton (I guess there's a 678 South Ave 21 in Compton also). This made me 45 minutes late at the correct address. If I was on time, we'd have had our meeting and would've been done.
* So Brent asked me to go back to the Boyle Heights Civic Day of Hacking with him as he had some equipment that needed watching. He was busy for a while, so I said hello to some now familiar maker faces: Diego from DeezMaker in Pasadena (he designed and makes the Bukobot and Bukito 3D printers) and Jean Kaneko of the Exploratory. If Brent had met with me right away, I wouldn't have met Jaime.
* Brent had some stuff to do, and had put off an interview with one Jaime Moore, who was there to take some video of the event. So he introduced us. We had a funny little conversation and multi-tasking session with Brent talking to Jaime and Jaime talking to me and Brent talking to me... and vice versa. If Brent had had his interview with me, or with Jaime separately, Jaime and I wouldn't have interacted.
It's been some time, and Jaime sent me some of her video and said hello. I finally found some time to look at the materials and links that Jaime sent. Questions back and forth. No special karmic activity here. My last question to Jaime was yesterday, her response this AM. She would get some answers for me. * Little beknownst to me, she emailed one Alex Donn in Seattle for the answers. A bit Karmic, but not necessarily relevant to the events today.
She invited me to the Santa Monica Hack-A-Thon this weekend. (I will be at LEGOLAND both days for Star Wars days)
The Karmic Meeting Today
* I was at the Comic Bug in Manhattan Beach doing a LEGO activity with some homeschooled youth and ran late for my lunchtime walk with Friend Denise. So we decided to just catch something quick to eat instead of walk. If I was on time, we would've taken our walk and we wouldn't have been having lunch where we were having lunch.
* We had a choice of three or four eating places, but we chose the Flame Broiler across from her workplace. If we'd eaten at any of the other locations, we wouldn't have sat where we did.
We were talking about LEGO and Making and homeschooling and more. No special Karmic activity here. I talk about these topics a lot.
* One Alex Donn from Seattle was sitting at the table next to us and introduced himself. Super Karma here!
Hello Alex
We spoke of many things, of locations in Long Beach that could be part of the Hack-A-Thon tour, of the new events he's planning and of what it would take to make it happen at either the Scout Sea Base or the Cultural Alliance in Long Beach.
It's very doable.
And the rest is possibly Karmic History, but only time will tell.
More Karma?
* My brother Phil, who is working on the release of his B2B Android Application, has been asking for some help organizing a new Android development club for all ages that he would like to start. - the first meeting is June 20th at 6:00 PM at the Cultural Alliance Long Beach - 727 Pine Street. I think Phil will help with a Hackerthon.
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