In addition to lots of writing for the web and the print magazine I am running the annual Mercer Science And Engineering Fair with a lot of heli from the Mercer Science And Engineering Club and loca scientists and engineers. I wear a lot of hats at the fair including being president of the club as well as the webmaster and keeper of the Microsoft Access database. It gives me a chance to brush up on Drupal and MySQL as well as learning the equally arcane features of Microsoft Access.
We are expecting almost 450 students in grades from 4th through 12th to be showing up Sunday to set up their projects at Rider University. We have picked up a number of new sponsors this year including some locals like Covance and ETS (Educational Testin Services) that does the GRE tests. We also have some tech companies like Digi, Qinetiq, and Eurotech that help us out as well. Now if I just had time to update the website to list all the new sponsors.
The fair is free to all students in Mercer County, NJ where we are located. We are one of three fairs in the NJ area. We are one of the feeder fairs to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). It is run by the Society for Science & the Public. They also run the Broadcom Masters program for grades 6-8.
Stop by if you are in the area. There will be hundreds of students, teachers, parents and judges to keep you company.
So that is what I have been up to lately. I did finish the next Bill's Workbench project but have not had a chance to write up the details yet. It has one of Intel's Core i7 Extreme hex core processors (see Multicore, Flash, And Secure Drives Deliver Performance) plugged into Supermicro's X8SAX motherboard with Corsair's Dominator GT DDR 3 memory (see DDR3 Memory Targets Gamers And Workstations) and Corsair's HD50 liquid cooling system. I also tied in the tiny but fast Seagate Momentus XT (see Hands-on Momentus XT Hybrid Hard Drive) hybrid solid state/hard drive. A full write will follow sometime in the near future.