Introduction

I’ll be honest, I used to be as plugged in as anybody else. I’m a geek - I work with software. Sue me, it pays the bills. A few years ago I had an epiphany while working late on a PowerPoint presentation for a “big” meeting the next day: although I had spent the last fifteen hours working hard, I hadn’t actually created anything with a real tangible value. I created a slide deck that outlined a business concept. Even at the best of times that’s merely an abstraction. I’d spent my entire career like this. Push a button, write a line of code, draw a flow chart, create an abstraction of a real life problem.

If you stop what you’re doing for a moment and examine the situation it’s easy to question the tangible reality of anything you’re working on at any given moment. Everything I’d ever created to that point relied on a computer and a screen and maybe added up to a couple of gigs. My work was no more important than a finite quantity of 1’s and 0’s. Our society will tell you that being a knowledge worker is the way of the future and the height of professional accomplishment. I disagree. I think it sucks.

Sitting there in my lovely window facing cube at 11:45pm I decided it was time for a change. I wanted to try making real things. Stuff you can hold. I had never thought about it till that day but it finally hit me that there’s a certain futility in doing work and having hobbies that are completely reliant on microchips because when you’re done you’ve accomplished…what exactly? What can you point to and say you did with your time? When the meaning of your life or your sense of self is based on Microsoft Office documents, the number of people who “like” your status on FaceBook, how many hits your website gets, or your accumulated XBOX Live Gamer Score, you have truly reached the uppermost echelons of real world uselessness.

I made the decision then and there that away from my workplace I would begin to UNplug. UNplugging is the conscious act of stepping away from technology for some period of time for the sole purpose of making or doing something tangible in the real world. Taking a break from your normal electronic routine and experiencing life and expressing your own creativity. I got started making things about a year ago and I’ve built up a pretty interesting body of work in that time. This blog is about my trial and error, failure and success at making real stuff.

I recognize the inherent contradiction of having a blog about building things to escape the tyranny of the internet as a form of entertainment, but I’m doing it for a clear reason: it really is the easiest way to disseminate information to my friends, family, etc. who have an inkling of what I’m doing but don’t really get to see the process.

The process is actually what’s important. Since I UNplugged I’ve taught myself a number of skills to help me bring ideas in my head into the real world. If I had an idea that required sewing, I taught myself to sew. If it required welding, I taught myself to weld. The skills I learned were just the means to the end. The end was making something cool: creating a finished product from raw materials.

Since I’m starting this blog a year into the process, I’m going to start with my current project and then gradually add posts about some of the things I’ve already made. I take a lot of pictures as I go because they’re worth a thousand words and half the time they jog my memory as to how I solved a certain problem. Expect this to be a pretty pic heavy site.

Aaaaand with that...

I’m off to go make something.