I went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend. The event, hosted by Make Magazine, brings together thousands of tech DIY enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, science clubs, students, and authors.

The fairgrounds were packed with home inventors. One guy I spoke with loves jet propulsion and spends his spare time building jet packs hoping to fly around his neighborhood using one of his packs. Another guy built a catapult that enables kids to launch rubber chickens. Then there were the obligatory ASP programmers in full-on medieval knight garb beating the snot out of each other with real swords and shields. No dungeonmaster required.

Classes on mashing up your Tivo to display call waiting numbers? Check. Taking apart your keyboard to create a USB heating pad? Yup. Human-sized games of Simon (in the above photo)? Affirmative.

I left the event optimistic about humanity’s ability to create and adapt. Let me put it this way: when aliens descend on the earth and start to enslave us, these are the dudes — the guy with the jet pack flying around his neighborhood, the guy with the rubber chicken catapult, the fellas who own full suits of armor and know how to use them — who represent our last line of defense. Think about it. Aliens will know how to render our high-tech military completely obsolete, but will not have anticipated an onslaught of flying rubber chickens. This reassures me.

As you might expect, any description limited to a small blog post wouldn’t do this event justice, so I recommend checking out the photos I took as well as all the other photos on Flickr tagged ‘Maker Faire’ .

And next year, go.

Other cool posts:

• Geekstock
• Notes from the Technology Underground  
• Video on uTube