Hey All,
My name is Andy Johnson and I dropped by last Wednesday. I have not actually joined yet, but I started a list of things I would like to make to see if I would actually have projects to do and I decided that the list got long enough, so I am going to join next month (going to finish remodeling a house for April 1 and then my free time goes up) and likely take the arduino class, since it looked interesting.
Things I have:
An old server from a company I used to work at. Not sure if it is too useful, but it might be.
My father is a plumber, so I can get access to quite a few plumbing and other tools. I've got two hammer drills in my basement right now, which are pretty cool. I don't think I can just leave them at the hack factory, but if we have a need for something we don't have I can bring things in.
Server rack. I sold my last one to a friend’s company and was going to put this one on CL, but if we have a use for another one, I could just as well donate it.
Family farm: my family has a farm with tractors and all sorts of goodies like that (a broken fork lift as well). I don't know exactly what interest it could be of to the club, but there is a lot of random stuff up that way and much of it is not used (I might bring in a two cylinder motor to putter on and get cleaned up and other things like that).
Skills:
Professionally I am a data analyst of sorts. I studied mathematics, economics and statistics in undergrad and grad school, so I am a good person to talk to if you are looking to do any statistics or machine learning. It does not seem super relevant to a lot of projects, but if I had to select a skill that I have that other people might not, it would likely be this.
Programming: I have worked in VB.NET, C#.NET, VBA, R, SAS, STATA, Matlab, Mathematica along with some webstuff (dreamweaver, html, javascript). I am certainly not a programmer in any real sense of the word, but over the years I have found that I like it and have picked up a few tricks.
Home improvement: I have done quite a few remodeling projects on my house (as well as another house we just bought and my parents house). My father leads the charge on these sorts of things, but I am pretty good at it.
Finding things at auctions: as mentioned above, I have a farm (near Broten, Minnesota) and one of the things I like to do up there is to go to auctions. This means that if there is anything we are interested in getting I could keep an eye out for it. Not really a skill, but could still be relevant.
Basic tool/power tool use: Despite my computer oriented nature, I have been using tools and the likes for as long as I can remember working with my father on things. These days it is mostly limited to working on houses, but hopefully I expand that by joining TCM.
I can also likely beat you at starcraft 2

. I am a bit rusty, but I used to float around the top 500 players in the country.