Diary of a Mad Scientist

Holee smokes,

NC class, got overfull, we had 33 people and an intern or two in a classroom and laboratory at the community college in Pittsboro. People were beating down the email doors and getting really upset that it was full and that I wouldn’t make one more exception for them. that’s way bigger than I"m used to doing. Atlanta will be the same way (30 students). I turned away another 25 probably for the Pittsboro class. My last two classes in Seattle experienced the same problem (one person who was turned away in Seattle got upset that my ad hadn’t mentioned that there would be a cutoff number for attendance…)

To deal with the ridiculous demand for those two classes, ‘we’ scheduled a class at the community college in Wilmington NC for Febuary 24-25 (’we’ is Cape Fear Biofuels and I), and a second one in Atlanta for March 25-26 (’we’ is Vegenergy and I).

I"ll be coming back here to the East Coast over and over again it looks like. Which is good cause I"m actually managing to do ‘fun’ things here in between classes, like hiking (today, near Boone) and socializing (Asheville) and staying off the computer (not so good except for my hands enjoying it).

I’m going to cut off attendance at a slightly more reasonable figure for those two classes. Same thing happened in Seattle - I tried to accommodate everyone for the first class, got 30 on the menu before we finally had to schedule an overflow class there- and of course a high percentage of the first 30 didn’t show up. This time around I"m making people pre-pay and so far if any of them are canceling for personal reasons, they’re all doing so with reasonable notice.

The Friday night session with the NC biofuels groups looked amazing. I missed most of the talks though since I was setting up in the lab down the hall, mixing up turmeric and phenolpthaleine and acid-base ingredients and such, listening to the audience applaud the speakers in the background. They really have an incredible biofuels initiative here, many groups approaching the distribution/production/education picture from many different angles.

here’s Lyle’s blog about the evening:

http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000370.html

Mark