For the past month I’ve been working on something really special with a stupendous partner, Andrew Hyde. We paired up at SXSW discussing our hand-crafted business cards and came out of it with an idea for Record Monsters. Record Monsters are laser cut puzzles in vinyl records. You simply pop out the pieces and put together something like the Stegosaurus (above) or the Mosquito (on a 45). We also have Triceratops, a Butterfly, an Ant, and more dinosaurs than you can name. Sounds like fun, right?

We need your help making sure we can start providing Record Monsters to all the good little girls and boys. We’ve been running a fairly successful Kickstarter campaign so far. Thanks to Kickstarter for featuring us on their front page! At this point we only have 72 hours left and are still a stretch away from our $15,000 goal. This money will be used to purchase necessary equipment to make these puzzles and serve our first orders, you the good people of the internet and our family, and friends. Please visit our Kickstarter page and make a donation before the end of Friday.

The best part about this project has been working with Andrew. We first met at Startup Weekend Houston way back in the fall of 2007 before the Houston creative, technology, and music communities had gelled. I credit that 2007 Startup Weekend as laying the foundation for a whole mess of incredible and hardworking people to meet and form working relationships. Andrew receives special credit and gold stars as the founder of Startup Weekend; bringing it to Houston meant that we all got to know him.

The reception to the project has been stunning to say the least. Both Andrew and I underestimated people’s desires for re-imagining their music memories into tactile objects. So far, Record Monsters has been covered by Not Cool, Dude Craft, TrendHunter, Make, and Ponoko.

Keep watching over the next month or so, we will be adding new puzzles and new pictures.

Record Monsters Kickstarter Page

Record Monsters Site

Wordle is a fantastic, free tool for the visualization of web pages, RSS feeds or large blocks of text. I use it quite often as a visual histogram of sorts, to see in weighted form the textual thematics of papers and articles. Inspired by this post by PixelCharmer where she created a wordle of her qualifying paper I’ve created a Wordle of my thesis.

Student activities will include class instruction, design work and preparation for an upcoming course. Students will collaborate with the instructor and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston to develop custom archival solutions for priceless works from the museum’s permanent collection. Over the course of the internship a salon-style discussion series will run addressing unique facets of this design problem and multi-disciplinary approaches to civic issues, presented by members of the community. Students will additionally assist the instructor in the development of a course addressing civic engagement from a multi-disciplinary standpoint. Students will be taught engineering design approach, rapid prototyping, use of online collaboration and documentation methods. Student will have the opportunity to attend a summer course on entrepreneurship and will present the results of their summer internship in a professional forum.

Undergraduate students in any discipline or department are eligible and invited to apply. This is a full-time, 8 week summer program commencing in June providing a $4,000 stipend and put on by Rice’s School of Engineering in conjunction with Rice’s Center for Civic Engagement. Four positions are available.

For more information please contact the Instructor, Dr. Matthew Wettergreen (mwettergreen @ gmail.com). To apply for this internship, please email a resume, a brief personal statement and why this internship is of interest.