My short time at Great Basin National Park ended this morning. Before I left, I spotted a family of birds nesting in the rafters of the visitor center.

Then I headed east. Only a few minutes outside the park is the Nevada-Utah state line.

Starting off the second day here at Great Basin National Park, well…Maybe I should have locked the car last night?

I woke up early to get a early start. In fact, even before the sun rose. I captured the beautiful light from the sunrise on the nearby mountains.

I’m off on a road trip to, and around, Colorado’s National Parks. Day one of my road trip started across the Bay Bridge, passed Sacramento, and through the Tahoe National Forest. I followed Interstate 80 east to Reno.

The Augmented World Expo hosted a two day Memorial Day weekend hackathon at the Santa Clara Convention Center yesterday and today. With a couple of wearable Smart Glasses companies that included Epson, Optinvent, and Oculus, and SDKs from companies that helped with gesture recognition, there were plenty of toys to play with.

Maker Faire came to San Mateo this weekend. Inventors to tinkerers, from young to old, showed off their creations to tens of thousands of attendees. Maker Faire has been going on in the Bay Area since 2006, and is a gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, authors, artists, students, and commercial exhibitors.

At the beginning of the Code for India hackathon last weekend, Karl Mehta, Founder of Code for India, interviewed Amit Singhal. Singhal is Senior Vice President of Google overseeing Google Search. He has worked in search for over twenty years and has been an academic researcher. At Google he leads the effort to build a more natural search system that understands exactly what you mean and gives you exactly what you need. Prior to him joining Google in 2000, he was a senior member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs. Singhal received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science from IIT Roorkee in 1989, an M.S. degree from University of Minnesota Duluth in 1991, and a Ph. D from Cornell University in 1996.

Last weekend I participated in the Code for India hackathon at Google here in Mountain View. With 19 challenges from organizations around the world, and hackers participating at a Google office in Bangalore, India, the dual-location hackathon was sure to have an impact felt around the world.

This weekend, NestGSV, AT&T, Vuzix, and a few other companies hosted a wearables hackathon in Redwood City. Having checked out the sponsors ahead of time, I became very interested with the Vuzix Smart Glasses. It was going to be the centerpiece of my hack.

In fact, this was nearly the perfect platform to build my hack on.