Hello my name is Bill Cassidy and I've been a volunteer in the DASH community for about 2 years now.
I'm going to tell you a quick little story about how I became a part of something so awesome it's hard to explain in so many words. Because of that I will be using a whole bunch of photos and a super sweet video of some DASH guys buying John Mcafee a Soda from the Dash soda Machine.
I flew out from Orange County California to San Francisco. Dan (aka Oaxaca), another DASH community member picked me up at the airport in his yellow 70 Mercedes which apparently was running on homemade vegetable oil. We were headed to his shop in Half Moon Bay to pick up the truck so we could haul the soda machine to the Marriott on Mission street in downtown San Francisco. Dan was kind enough to take the scenic route but it wasn't that impressive because we have the same type of landscape in Southern California.
We arrived at his shop and he was excited to show me what he did for a living. We've been interacting for over a year now online and this was the first time we actually met in person. I never knew what he did so I was interested to learn more. I wont go into much detail because I respect his privacy, but Dan roasts his own coffee beans and he has a huge machine that is taller than a 2 story building. I didn't get to see it work but it was pretty damn awesome. After Dan was done showing me his gig we got the truck and headed to his house to get the Soda Machine.
We arrived at Dan's house and he introduced me to his dogs I was excited to see the soda machine though. He was stalling, not really but it seemed like it. My patience was wearing thin. Dan finally brought me to his Garage. He also finally agreed to be in a photo, although only half of his face.
We took the drive into the city I don't remember which way. We had to stop at a grocery store to get some extra soda's for the machine. I had only been to San Francisco one time but never in the downtown part of town. It was pretty active, crazy but Dan had a good feel for the place so I felt pretty comfortable. We arrived at the Marriott shipping and receiving bay and found a great French man who was pleased to help us unload it and drive it in with his handheld forklift.
Dan also agreed to be in another photo but only if it was really far away.
We go to setting up the machine I was thinking we would be out of there within an hour. We arrived with the machine at the Marriott around 3 pm. We didn't get out of there until 11:45 pm. Dan had two solutions for this thing to get going and neither of them worked. We ended up having to go to a computer store to buy a 150 dollar TPLink router thing. DASH Core developer MooCowMoo was kind enough to sit with us for hours on team viewer from I don't even know where getting Soda Machine up and running. We were determined to make it happen and we did make it happen and it felt really good. Dan also finally agreed to put his whole face in a photo, he's on the right in the khaki pants.
We left everything there for the nigh, laptop and all so we wouldn't have to go through the same stuff we had just gone through. Dan wasn't going to show up until later the next day so I had to be sure to get some sleep and get there early. I arrived at 6:45 am and got to work loading up the machine, running some tests, making sure everything worked good. It did, 3 times, but then we ran into some issues and moocowmoo was back at it again doing his magic. about an hour an a half later we had the soda machine up and running again with no issues for the rest of the day.
The soda machine was a big hit we sold 47 sodas total that day. A lot of people were interested in how it worked on the inside but it was super easy to explain because we had this computer monitor displaying the Dash InstantSend Transactions right next to the machine. The geeks loved it (sorry geeks for calling you geeks).
All and all it was a great day for the machine, we had a lot of fun. The rest of the Dash team was pretty busy doing what they could, but at the end of the day we all took the time to take a photo op in front of the machine.
(From left to right: Sean Ryan, Evan Duffield, Aaron (aka fiatflux), Dan (aka Oaxaca), Perry Woodin, and Me (Bill Cassidy)).
Oh and if you didn't watch the video here is John Mcafee getting his Soda at the DASH Soda Machine, but I highly advise you to watch that video.
And this is Good Bye, See ya later Soda machine. Hopefully you find a new home.
If you wanna learn more about DASH or get involved with the community join us on slack. Thanks for reading my post I appreciate all you steemers out there!