Today I’m returning to Orlando after my first week on the road talking to co-working, hacker and maker spaces in California about +) GWOBorg.

My co-pilots on this journey are Willow Bl00 (codename: Bl00) and Shannon O’Donnell (codename: RaRa). I first met Bl00 in Seattle only a few weeks ago where she gave a presentation on Transhumanism at Gnomedex10. I had never even heard the term “transhumanism” before, lest be schooled on it by a 26-year-old, motorcycle-riding cyberpunk organic chat client sporting a blue mohawk. My presentation on +) GWOBorg immediately followed Bl00′s and within mere minutes after I was done speaking, we didn’t realize it yet, but we had already begun the planning stages of this tour.

RaRa had just embarked on a 6-month journey that was starting in Bali. For the last three years, RaRa has been backpacking around the world and documenting her experiences through her travel blog, A Little Adrift. Before she left for that journey, RaRa helped me make The Karaoke King and served on the crew as our Production Coordinator. Anyone who has ever worked on a film crew knows that the Production Coordinator is possibly one of the most demanding and unsung positions on the crew…high pressure and little glory. RaRa did it with a smile.

Bl00 is the director of maker space in Seattle called Jigsaw Renaissance. While visiting their space in Seattle, I realized that the best way to get the message out about +) GWOBorg was to actually go out and visit co-working, hacker and maker spaces across the United States. I realized that I don’t know enough about these communities and I wanted to learn more. And so I asked Bl00 if she would serve a tour guide of sorts, and introduce me to her world.

Her only concern: “Can we ride motorcycles?” she asked.

Of course!!!

RaRa took a bit more convincing. She had *just* arrived in Bali for an intended 6-month minimum stay. The weekend before she left, she was housesitting for me in Orlando (I was in Seattle at Gnomedex hosting a 24-hour Open Governent Hackathon and meeting Bl00), but I didn’t have enough pieces parts in place for me to convince her to *not* get on that flight. By the time Bl00 and I had a draft of a plan in place, RaRa was already apartment hunting in India. She was literally walking out the door to make a deposit on a 6-month lease when a mutual friend caught her on the phone and convinced her to pause and listen to the possibility of coming back to help me launch +) GWOBorg.

She agreed, and the three of us first met in Los Angeles last week to visit our first space, Crash Space LA. After that, we drove up the coast to visit three more spaces in San Francisco: Mission Social, NoiseBridge and NextSpace.

It’s amazing to meet these groups of geeks who have banded together in this new form of co-working that goes against the traditional corporate model of how things get done. Each space has its own character, enhanced by its unique members, physical location and goals. Everyone we’ve met so far has been amazingly positive, so much so that we’re going to be visiting many more of them.

After a few days of rest back in Orlando, we’re next headed to the midwest to visit spaces in Detroit, Chicago, Louisville and St. Louis. After that we hit Atlanta, New York, DC, Boston, Portland…

We’ll keep visiting spaces as long as we continue getting invites. If you run or are a member of a co-working, hacker or makers space (or would like to start one), contact Bl00 and we’ll see if we can add you to the tour.

And, of course, all of this is leading up to our MEGA Hackathon on the 24 hours leading up to 10.10.10. You can win some prizes, and your space can win prizes too. Check out the 101010 +) GWOBorg Hackathon announcement.

+) Diggz

25 years ago today, the original Back the the Future film was released.  It was the top grossing film of 1985.  Here’s some things you may not know about the film:

Although Michael J. Fox was always the first pick to play Marty McFly, Fox was too busy filming “Family Ties” to sign on to the project.  They replaced Fox with Eric Stoltz.   After 4 weeks of filming (and $3 million dollars), the producers and Stotz agreed he wasn’t right for the part and he left the project.  Fox was then cast and they worked around his tight schedule to make the film.

Michael J. Fox is only ten days younger than Lea Thompson who plays his mother, and is almost three years older than his on-screen dad, Crispin Glover.

When Marty pretends to be Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan, he plays a tape labeled “Van Halen” to scare George out of his sleep. It is an untitled Edward Van Halen original written for a movie called “The Wild Life”.

In the sequel the entire ending scene from the original movie was painstakingly re-created, shot-for-shot:

David Brang of the department of psychology at the University of California, San Diego asked 183 students to visualize the months of the year and construct this representation on a computer screen.

Four months later the students were shown a blank screen and asked to select a position for each of the months. They were prompted with a cue month – a randomly selected month placed as a dot in the location where the student had originally placed it.

Uncannily, four of the 183 students were found to be time-space synaesthetes when they placed their months in a distinct spatial array – such as a circle – that was consistent over the trials.

Time Lords discovered in California – life – 01 April 2010 – New Scientist.

The Large Hadron Collider will shut down at the end of 2011 to address design and safety issues.

Until then, it will run at a maximum of 7 trillion electron volts…instead of its designed max of 14 trillion.

The problem involves the copper sheaths around the superconducting joints in the tunnel.  The copper sheaths are a failsafe mechanism designed to take up the current if one of the magnets in the Large Hadron Collider warms up – an incident known as a … gulp…”quench”.

Apparently where Large Hadron Colliders are concerned, there’s nothing worse than hot magnets.

I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t more handiwork of  the Higgs-boson time travelers.

BBC News – LHC to shut down for a year to address safety concerns.

Remember, remember,
The 5th of November,
Nineteen hundred and fifty five.
Dr. Emmet Lathrop Brown,
Fell down on his crown,
And his dream of time travel came alive.

Take a capacitor with flux,
The doctor did mux,
Add one twenty-one gigawatts of power.
Soon the good doctor  heeded,
A velocity was needed needed,
Of precisely eighty-eight miles per hour.

And so thirty years past,
Good fortune at last,
In a parking lot of the mall, pines twin,
The doctor succeded,
His Deloran indeed did,
Travel forward through time and back again.