The photo tour is above, and some cool videos are below. And BTW, if the pictures interest you, there are 60 Mini Maker Faires happening around the world this summer.

http://youtu.be/3BKi6wqX1IM

Related articles

• Cool Clothes and Styles of Maker Faire Attendees (makezine.com)
• Hands-on with the MakerBot robot petting zoo at Maker Faire (video) (engadget.com)

2. Is there anything more annoying when watching fist fights between invincible characters? Hey Thor and Loki, you’re both gods! I’m pretty sure you can’t settle your differences with fisticuffs. Same goes for you, Neo and Agent Smith. Punch each other as hard as you want–you’ll still end up right back where you started. Even if you DO know kung fu.

3. Call me a heretic, but the universe that Joss Whedon created in Firefly is so much more interesting than the Marvel universe that Stan Lee created. I know it’s smaller in scope and would have sold many fewer comic books, but it also made for a better action movie than any of the Marvel films.

I was already excited about the trip. My band Shakedown at the Majestic had booked a festival gig at Liahonaroo, a “family-friendly art and music festival,” 30 mins outside of Nashville. I didn’t want to spend the whole weekend away from my family, so I figured I’d fly in on Saturday afternoon, play the gig that night, and fly out first thing the next morning. Fun, right?

But late Friday evening, I saw that my friend Mark Brown had posted details on Facebook about a live taping of Prairie Home Companion in Nashville on Saturday. In fact, it started an hour after my plane was scheduled to arrive, and ended with plenty of time for me to get to the fairgrounds…

AND it was happening at the historic Ryman Auditorium, which is basically the birthplace of bluegrass…

AND the guest performers were Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, and Emmylou Harris…

AND there were tickets still available! That’s both a crime and a miracle.

So, on Saturday morning, I had brunch with my wife/kids at Kitchenette, walked home enjoying the sunshine, and then I hopped on a plane to Nashville. (Side note: There’s nothing more thrilling as an amateur musician than traveling far away to play a show; and nothing more terrifying than checking your instrument at the baggage counter.)

Got in at 3:30 (my beloved bass was fine), picked up my rental car, raced to downtown Nashville, found the auditorium, found my seat, and plopped down just as the band was warming up and Sam Bush was playing his first of many solos that night. I was probably the youngest person in the whole venue, and I just sat there grinning for two hours, soaking it all in.

Afterward, I hustled down to Broadway (Nashville’s version of 6th St. in Austin), grabbed a BBQ sandwich and heard a crazy awesome country trio, then out to the fairgrounds for my own gig.

The festival was fun, with lots of good performers from the Nashville songwriting scene (some of whom are on the country charts right now). I met up with my friend Mike, a disgustingly good guitar player and songwriter for Engines of Commotion and his own solo projects. He filled me in on some of the details about Nashville:

• Songwriting is everything. Everyone is striving not so much to be a star themselves, but to write a hit song for a star.
• Full bands are rare, because drummers and bassists expect to be paid for gigs. If a guitar player wants a full band, he/she probably has to pay for it, so a lot of shows are just songwriters or duos performing on their own.
• Everyone seems to know who’s on the country top 100 charts at all times.
• A prolific writer can sell full catalogs with hundreds of songs.

Anyway, it was a different kind of show for us, but it was fun. The night was fer-eeeez-ing, which was bad for us attendance-wise, but good for us because everyone was in the mood to dance and stay warm. And if you’ve ever heard us play, you know that our music was written to be danced to.

Afterward, Mike gave me a lift to his place, where I was crashing for the night. Having lived in the city for…gosh…8 years?, I assume that everyone my age and younger lives in small, rented apartments. So I’m always surprised when I pull into a friend’s giant driveway leading up to a giant house. He gave me the tour of his grown-up house, and we talked music until late at night.

Next morning, I was back on a plane to NYC. If you can only spend 18 hours in Nashville, that’s the way to do it.

“Screw lead singers.”

That’s what I couldn’t help thinking when I saw The Shins perform on SNL last weekend. I say “The Shins” because that’s what they were announced as, but the lineup had been completely shuffled.  James Mercer was still fronting the band (which should probably just be called “James Mercer,”) but the drummer, bassist, and lead guitar player had changed.

Screw lead singers!

There’s no job security for bass players and drummers. Not only are they routinely left out of songwriting credits and publishing deals (where all the real money is), but as soon as a band gets big enough, the lead singer inevitably starts to wonder why he’s paying these musicians so much money when he’s clearly the talented, marketable one.

Every time I see that situation, I get all riled up (and believe me, it’s hard to get a bass player riled up). Gwen Stefani, Rob Thomas, Brandon Flowers, Patrick Stump–those guys had some incredible supporting musicians on stage with them. Gwen and Brandon might have actually been the least talented in their respective bands, and Patrick was just the voice for Pete Wentz’s songs, as far as I can tell. But the singers are the ones at the front of the stage singing the songs, and backstage doing the press interviews. So they can take their stardom to the next level, while the bassists and drummers drift away to wherever it is that washed up bassists and drummers go to.

So yeah, Mercer, congrats on the new band. Broken Bells was awesome, so maybe you deserved to up-level your Shins bandmates…I hear you plucked some great musicians from Modest Mouse and Fruit Bats. But I think I liked you better before you were a supergroup.

Still, I have fun every year. The best part for me is seeing my circle of SXSW friends expand and mature. My first year at the show, I fell in with a fun group of junior reporters, editors, bloggers, PR people, and developers. I’ve largely stuck with the same tight-knit group of friends; we only really see each other in March, and every year we expand the group just a bit. And each year, we’ve grown up just a bit–we now own companies, run magazines, launch startups, and have the skills to create really interesting things. And instead of working the doors at parties, we’re hosting our own.

The other great thing about SXSW this year is it was my first year not being responsible for writing anything about the show. No one was expecting copy out of me, so I could actually enjoy the panels and talk to people without rushing to file a story.

This whole not-writing thing suits me, because the really fun news at SXSW is the stuff that can’t be written about. Stealth startups, budding business partnerships, not-yet-announced financing rounds, alpha apps that totally suck right now but have a ton of potential…seeing that stuff is what pulls me back to Austin, year after overcrowded year.

Corinne was uncomfortable but not in unbearable pain late monday night when she went into labor. When we finally decided to head into the hospital, the doctors didn’t really take her seriously because she was so stoic about the whole thing.

(*a side note about Corinne: She will be sure to let you know about paper cuts, stubbed toes, mild headaches etc. But when she’s in real discomfort, she turns inward and goes completely calm. This is surely a sign of intense inner strength, and it makes doctor evaluations difficult.)

By the time the docs got around to checking her out, they discovered that we needed to get moving or the baby would be born in the triage ward. An hour later, Joseph was born, Tuesday morning at 5:49am. It took three pushes.

It’s been fairly smooth sailing since then. The whole family was home on Wednesday afternoon, sleeping soundly in their own beds. Corinne’s mom came Thursday, and has been a huge help with Joseph and Ada, especially since I’ve been working long hours this week to support my team at the Consumer Electronics Show.

We’re anxious to see how tiny Joseph changes in the coming weeks. We’ve been told that babies start to show personality after two or three weeks, but I’m hoping he stays just the way he is now: a happy, adorable little lump.

Anyway, I’m walking home after picking up family dinner at McDonald’s tonight, a situation that has literally NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, but Corinne was desperately hungry and didn’t feel like ordering from the falafel place that we usually go to when she’s desperately hungry. So I’ve got my big bag of food and my other bag of drinks, and I’m feeling pretty good about things. I’m a provider, I’m thinking. I work hard, and I keep my family fed. Like a dad should. 

I get home and lay out our high-calorie spread. It’s Ada’s first Happy Meal, so we marvel at how adorable the tiny fry carton is, how sensible the apple slices are. Corinne suppresses her gag reflex over Ada’s McNuggets, opens her Chicken Selects, and we tuck into our food.

Only Ada won’t eat anything. Not fries, not McNuggets, not apples, not anything. She only drank half her chocolate milk! We were confounded. Billions of dollars in R&D and consumer research have been spent to scientifically guarantee that children will like Happy Meals, and she won’t eat it. She’s flying in the face of decades of science!

Guess that was our first and last family meal from McDonald’s. I suppose that’s fine. But, they did just install a new soda dispenser that lets you use a touchscreen menu to add in syrups and flavoring. Pick from the 34 base drinks, and then add orange, cherry, strawberry, raspberry, lemon/lime, or whatever else. There’s gotta be at least a couple hundred drink options.

(Word of caution re. Raspberry Coke Zero: don’t do it.)

In his video on The Big Think, Clayton Christensen says America has retained its innovator’s status through our immigration policies, by stealing the best minds from Asia. (This is hard to refute.) But conditions will soon be favorable enough in India and China that those math/science/engineering geniuses will just stay put, and then we’ll be a nation of humanities grads.

That’s what I was wondering as a I read Stiglitz’s Vanity Fair article. We can reform and improve our education system, but my question is, can we do it in a way that emphasizes the hard sciences? That’s a cultural shift more than a funding shift; and if it doesn’t happen, we’re improving the education system just so we can make more humanities grads.

Note: I have nothing against humanities grads, except on a macro level. I minored in Philosophy, read a lot of interesting thoughts by Greeks and Cartesians and empiricists, and had fun doing it. And a journalism degree isn’t much more useful than a humanities degree–I got lucky. (As did Corinne with her anthropology degree.)

Anyway, Christensen is right when he says that our schools are failing to teach math and science in a way that is intrinsically motivating.

A tiny example with a sample size of 1: I was good at math once–I even skipped a grade in math when I was 12. But a string of bad teachers in JH/HS completely turned me off to it. I went from being a year ahead to a year behind, took Algebra 2 my Junior year, and decided to never take another math class. Once you’ve decided in high school never to take another math class, that has a huge impact on the areas of study that are open to you. The sciences are out, computer science and engineering are out, economics and business school are out, even marketing is out.

I went to college knowing I wanted to major in Comms and be a journalist, but as I said: I got lucky and found a good job after graduating. Plenty of journalism grads, philosophy grads, and humanities grads don’t. Meanwhile, we’re importing engineers and scientists, and even so, can’t fill our engineering openings.

I remember reading an article about James Dyson, the British inventor (who makes a killer vacuum–we just got the DC41 and love it!), and he was bemoaning the fact that he literally can’t fill his engineering positions. There just aren’t enough industrial engineers in Britain to fill the available jobs. The same is true in Silicon Valley. TechCrunch did a series of articles four years ago with the then-presidential candidates, and one of the main questions was what they would do to fix the H1B visa shortage. The engineering talent pool just wasn’t big enough, and we needed more immigrants.

His conclusion: It’s going to be a long, long time before our economy gets better.

I was thinking of my 11th-grade history class with Ms. Wara as I read Stiglitz’s column. Ms. Wara taught me that World War II ended the Depression. Stiglitz says yes, that’s true, but why? Because arming ourselves for a world war was an unprecedentedly large public spending campaign. Basically, the U.S. poured rivers of cash into the economy, and did much of the heavy lifting to shift the structural focus of the economy from agriculture to manufacturing. It was a belated shift, but it had to happen and a world war provided both the rationale and the popular support.

“The long-run prospects for the economy would, of course, have been even better if more of the money had been spent on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure rather than munitions, but even so, the strong public spending more than offset the weaknesses in private spending.”

We have no world war to spur us on in our next structural shift: moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Stiglitz argues that, while the shift has been underway for years (and we’ve been feeling the pain of it for years), it’s going to take massive amounts of public spending on infrastructure and educational upgrades to get us to where we need to be, but the public support just isn’t there.

OK, so, the freak out comes when you have Stiglitz on the one hand saying “it’s going to suck for a long, long time,” and then you’ve got Clayton Christensen on the other hand saying “actually, even Stiglitz’s solutions might not fix the problem.”

Christensen is one of the brightest business minds in the world (and possibly a wizard), and he delivered a sobering message on The Big Think: The brightest business mind in the world is pessimistic about our future.

You should watch the video yourself (it’s only a couple minutes), but his point is that prosperous societies don’t innovate. He actually says that “prosperity is the enemy of a technical education.” That the children of prosperous parents  study “Greek philosophy and Asian mythology,” while the children of struggling parents study math, science, and engineering. Which one of those societies will have a higher GNP? Which of them will invent the next generation of amazing technologies? And which will be a nation of humanities majors?