Black Rock City or Bust

I'm off to the playa, this year, more prepared than last, with more glowy stuff than last, and with the ability to keep in touch with a shiny new satellite phone. For those that want to find me on the playa, I'll be at the Happy Birthday camp at 4:30 and Amnesia.

Here's one of my favorite photos from the burn last year.



I'll be back in a week, hopefully with a ton of spectacular photos.

Trade You a Tribonium for Two Unethical Items

As part of the Mooncurser's Handbook, a crazy 30 hour road rally that I wrote about yesterday, we had to take part in a "trading game." This was something new and drastically different from anything that we had experienced in The Game before.

The "trading game" involved collecting items at each of the various clue locations we visited. We were seeded with an initial set of items. Various pieces of information--about how much the items were worth (e.g. vegetables were worth 2 points), special bonuses that we would get if we had certain combinations of items (e.g. if you had four identical items you'd get a bonus of 25 points), and trading restrictions (e.g. if you turned in any more than 12 items at the final location, Game Control would randomly throw items out until you had 12) would be revealed to us as we finished solving each puzzle as well.

The goal of the "trading game" was to maximize the number of points you thought you could get relative to all of the other teams. Since your ranking in the "trading game" amounted to 37.5% of your final score in the Mooncruiser's Handbook Game, all of the teams really wanted to do well in the trading aspect of The Game.

There were many complex bonuses and trading rules that we learned about over time. For example, if you had four "Tribonum" items, which were classified as "rare" and "dangerous", you could get a bonus of 40 points. Or if you were the team that had the most amount of items classified as "drugs", you would get a point bonus that was equal to the square of the number of item that were classified as "unethical." (So if you had 10 "unethical" items, you would get an extra 100 point bonus since 10-squared is 100).

Upon learning how the trading game worked, our team quickly formed an alliance with several other teams in The Game. Our plan: have one central third-party trading coordinator handle the distribution of items. We would reveal all rules to the trading coordinator and all the items that our team had. Since he had a global view of all the items that every team in the alliance had and understood all the bonuses and rules, he could distribute the items so that we would optimize the score for ALL the teams involved.

Furthermore, the coordinator would be able to figure out what items we wanted to trade with other teams so that we could optimize our collective set of items even further. Each of our individual teams had a designated broker that was instructed to try to obtain certain items from other teams NOT in the alliance, and the coordinator provided us a list of items that we could part with in order to trade.

In theory, this would have worked very well if you had enough teams in the alliance and every team cooperated with the rules we had initially laid out.

In practice, this didn't quite work out the way we wanted it to. We still got a better ranking and item distribution by being part of the alliance than not, but several teams dropped out before we handed in our items.

This screwed up what we calculated as the optimal distribution sending the remaining teams into a frenzy to try to fend for themselves right before the trading deadline). We still did well in the rankings, and much better than the teams that dropped out (oh what poetic justice), but not as optimally as we had hoped for if all the teams stayed in the alliance.

We also found it difficult for each team's brokers to conduct trades with non-alliance teams during the Game. First, some brokers weren't really motivated to trade (they were too busy solving puzzles). Second, we wound up continuously changing our optimization strategy and became too greedy with our trades--we tried to trade for certain items at the last minute and wound up not getting them. Our assumption that we could get these items really messed up our optimal distribution; this in turn screwed over a couple of teams.

That said, we found the trading game to be fun and interesting. It added much more intrigue to The Game and made the experience rather interesting. The trading game did make our experience in the Mooncruser's Handbook much more stressful (especially since we had a small team and having to broker cards and conduct trades often distracted us from puzzle solving). Nonetheless, it was a grand experiment and we enjoyed having the opportunity to participate in it.

Thirty Hours of Nonstop Fun

We were in Seattle this past weekend and for thirty hours, we played in a wonderful "Game" known as Mooncurser's Handbook. This is the seventh* "Game" I've played in. For those of you who don't know much about the Game, it's a grueling mobile road rally where you drive around in big white vans (full of crazy gadgets) and solve puzzles and challenges at different locations. The solution to each clue leads you to the next destiation. You're up for thirty hours or more, and tempers flare at 3AM when your team can't agree on how to decrypt a message hidden in a Monopoly board game.


Over 120 players on 22 teams lined up to get instructions from Game Control this past weekend before getting the next challenge.

Twenty-two teams played, and we finished in the top third, despite having two players drop out at the last minute, having two members who have never experienced one of these intense adventures before, and having a team where most of the players have barely met each other.

It takes a massive amount of effort to organize the game, and the organizers (aka "Game Control") usually spend six months to a year to get everything in place. In addition to the large amount of time to create the puzzles, Game Control even runs a couple of beta Games to iron out the kinks and minimize the amount of snafus that happen in the field. We clearly noticed all the planning and foresight in the Mooncruser's Handbook when we played it as nearly everything appeared smooth and well-thought-out when we played.


Our team assembling a "cube" puzzle at 2AM underneath the Space Needle at the Seattle Center.

The Mooncurser's Handbook had a couple of different aspects from previous Games I've played in.

First, there was a "trading game" where you had to "trade" items of various values with other teams out in the field. This aspect was designed to increase team interaction with all the other teams in the game. Various pieces of information would be revealed to you at different times about the values of these items and "bonuses" payouts you would get if you had certain combinations of items. We enjoyed this aspect of the game, despite it distracting us from solving the puzzles. We also found it difficult to manage this process because our team was small and we couldn't dedicate a single broker to conduct trades with other teams. [We formed an alliance with several other teams to minmize the time we needed to spend on this. More about this in a later post.]

Second, this Game actually had a scoring system, which emphaized the competitive aspect of this activity. I'm a competitive person by nature, so I loved being able to see where we ranked and how we were doing. Finish time and the ability to finish solving the puzzles quickly accounted for 62.5% of your score; how well you did in the "trading game" compared to other teams accounted for the rest. Mystic Fish [our team] did resonably well in the trading game and this helped boost our final ranking a bit.


Our team trying to solve a DNA-inspired puzzle at UW Bothell.

Third, this Game actually fed us food at three different "pit stops" throughout the adventure. We found this to be a welcome relief and enjoyed our ability to mingle with other teams playing (and also conduct trades with them so that we could increase our ranking in the "trading game.")

Fourth, Game Control implemented a bunch of mini-challanges before the Game began and during the pit stops. We had to play with and compete against other teams to jockey for starting positions and other advantanges (like extra items that we could trade with). We loved the Galactic BlackJack where we had to earn the most chips to get a huge starting time advantage after one of the pit stops. One difference between Galactic Blackjack and Vegas BlackJack: all the cards had symbols on them instead of numbers so you had no clue initially what each card you were dealt were worth!

Finally, this Game had significant interaction with many of the clue sites. This was something that I've found previously lacking in many other Games I've played in. There's just something really cool about going to a bowling alley and having to bowl a game where you have to score 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, STRIKE, and SPARE to get the data you need to solve your clue and where you had to inner-tube down a river to copy down the ciphertext of another clue. This is a welcome relief from having to spend 3 hours in your van once you get a sheet of paper and trying to brute-force solve a bunch of what appears to be random text.


Team Golden Nugget playing Limbo in order to read pieces of the puzzle off the stick. The lower you went, the more pieces of the puzzle you got. [Each time you went under the stick, you got words like NAVY, WAX, HARBOR, EASTER. Answer: SEAL (e.g. WAX SEAL, NAVY SEAL, etc.)]

The Mooncurser's Handbook was one of the best I've played to date. The site interaction at each location was fantastic--being able to run around a park and use the direction that sculptures were facing and finding your way through a 2-acre cornfield maze to find parts of a clue was phenonmenal. All the clues were well designed and nearly all of them were bug-free (you could tell that Game Control tested them extensively before deploying them in the Game).

There were a couple of things we thought could be improved.

First, teams with a larger size (7+ players) had a distinct advantage--data gathering at many clue sites could be done in parallel and the more people you had, the quicker you could get the data you needed to solve each clue. As a smaller team with only 5 players, we felt the crunch of not having enough people particularly hard.

Also the clues weren't as challenging as other games we played in. While we enjoy an easy clue every once in a while, it would have been good to have more of a mix of clues that focused more on the actual solving of the clue than on data gathering. (We spent more time gathering Community Chest cards for a Monopoly clue than actually solving the puzzle, for example. Once you noticed the pattern in some of the clues, the solution came very quickly). Finally, the trading game, while fun, was extremely overwhelming and very sophiscated; with a small team, we would have prefered something that was a bit simpler and less grand.

That said, we had a wonderful time. We were fortunate to have been able to play in the Mooncurser's Handbook and we tip our hats to Game Control for all their effort in entertaining us and provinding an experience that will be hard to forget. If we had to pick a moment that we thought best exemplified the essence of the Game, it was that, despite being up for more than 36 hours and tired as heck, Game Control cooked us burgers at the end party.

I'll be posting some more thoughts about the game in the next couple of days.

*The other six Games I've played in include:

• Griffiths Collection (Bay Area, CA)
  
• Genome (Bay Area, CA)
  
• Justice Unlimited (Bay Area, CA)
  
• Goonies (Bay Area, CA)
  
• FoBiK (Bay Area, CA)
  
• MSIG 1999: Mythos (Redmond, WA)

Building a Burning Man Theme Camp

I'm helping to build a theme camp at burning man this year. We've decided to have a birthday theme since one of the campers going this year is turning 30 while we're out on the playa. We couldn't think of a better way to celebrate than to have a birthday party every night (complete with 7-foot inflatable cakes) and to build a theme camp around that.


Gooferville - Karaoke Crazed Camp at Burning Man 2004

Building a camp isn't trivial, especailly if no one in our camp has really done it before. (We've all been part of a theme camp at some time or another, but this is the first year that we actually have the fortitude to create one ourselves). There's a lot of infrastructure to invest in, and collecting the necessary items (like a $20 used couch) involves a lot of creativity and combing thru the used crap listings on craigslist.

Here are some of the things we're trying to figure out for our "It's Your Birthday" camp as Burning Man 2005 approaches:

• Shade structure - The desert is hot, and every camp needs to have a shade structure. We've discussed everything from building our own parachute-covered-geodesic-domes to renting a yurt. In the end, we're leaning towards buying our own festive candy-striped color canopy.
  
  
• Something fun for visitors to do - Burning man is participatory, so every theme camp should have something that visitors can do. We're going to have several birthday parties at random times during our camp, as well as random birthday-party activities (like birthday spankings--I kid you not) that we'll try to keep up and running throughout the day.
  
  
• Decorations & lighting - 7 feet inflatable birthday cakes, rope lights, EL wire, and a really cool sign. Not to mention party favors and birthday party hats for camp visitors joining in the celebration.
  
  
• Booze - cheap vodka, kool-aid mix, fruit, water, and water coolers for mixing. Need I say more?
  
  
• Power and Gas - renting a generator is key. And they're super-loud, so you want to figure out the total wattage (we're planning on drawing no more than 1000 watts peak) and get the lowest you plan to draw. You'll need gas to power the generator (about 1 gallon per hr at 1000 watts) and containers to store the gas in (the most expensive part if you don't own this already)
  
  
• Furniture - cheap used couches, chairs, and carpets, found on craiglist keep everyone happy and comfortable on the playa.
  
  
• Music - every camp needs something to blast some tunes on. A 250W+ stereo would be ideal, but given that there is a high likelihood that it may get ruined, this isn't an easy item to rent or otherwise obtain cheaply. We're still trying to figure this out.
  
  
• Food and something to cook with - every camp needs a grill and a stove that everyone can share to grill a steak or to cook that box of mac and cheese. We're still scouring the web for a cheap bbq grill, and we're
  
  
• Shower - the official burning man prep site recommends:
  
  Bring a shallow crate (like a painting would be shipped in) about three feet square. Line it with slit open garbage bags so it will hold water and used it as a pan/pad under the solar shower. It caught the shower water that then evaporated during the day. No muddy spot in camp. No soapy water (gray water) dumped on the playa. The crate somehow later caught fire.
  
  To save on camp costs, we're requiring that everyone bring their own water for showring, drinking, etc. Hauling a ton of water for the camp is painful and expensive, so distributing this function seems to make the most sense.

How to Take Good Photos of Most Things

I take lots of photos at parties and work events. Nothing freaks me out more than when a bunch of friends insist that I be in a photo with them. I have to hand my camera over to a stranger who doesn't know the difference between aperature and sutter speed. These photos often wind up misframed and poorly exposed. I usually delete them afterwards and pray that my friends won't ever ask me to e-mail these hideous photos to them.

So I thought I'd write up some photo-taking tips. In the likely case that I'll have to hand over my camera again to someone at a future event, my hope is that they will have read this and take awesome shots as a result.



Tip #1: Frame the image properly. Framing is everything, but don't frame everything. You can fix exposure problems in Photoshop, but if you frame your image poorly, your photo is ruined. A couple of basic tips:

• Use the rule of thirds when framing your photo--make sure your subject is in the top/bottom or left/right third of the photo. Off-center is key. Never have your subject smack-dab in the middle. (This is by far the most common framing error of novice photographers).
  
• Fill the entire photo with your subject for a more dramatic shot.
  
• "Aim for the Chest" - if you're taking a group shot of people at a party, then aim the center of the camera at someone's chest. That way, the heads appear in the upper third of the photo, and you've filled the photo with people rather than the ugly dark background of a room that your flash couldn't capture. I quickly delete photos off my digital camera where the photographer put our heads smack dab in the middle of the photo: you get the bottom half of the picture with people in it, and the top half of a background of who-knows-what.

Tip #2: Take lots of different shots. Where possible, take a lot of shots with different settings. You'll have a lot of crappy pictures, but your odds of getting that one "great" shot increases dramatically each time you press the shutter button. (To get the "great" shot of one of my friends water skiing above, I had to click the shutter about 35 times!) Try taking each shot with a different setting. Some things I do to vary my shots include:

• Changing my exposure compensation to -1 and +1 stops. In fact, if you know what you're doing, you can even vary the exposure to try to get that perfect shot where everything is lit up properly and the photographs are vibrant and compelling.
  
• Changing how much I'll zoom into the subject: I might take a bunch of shots capturing more of the background than the subject, and vice versa.
  
• Changing the aperture to vary how much I want to blur the background

Tip #3: Pick an interesting vantage point. Try shooting the photo from different points of view. Experiment around. Be creative. Some of my best shots are from the ground up (my party photo above) or when i'm lying prone on the floor (my puppy photo below).



Tip #5: Blur out the background. When used appropriately, nothing looks cooler than having a photograph where your subject is in focus and your background is slightly blurred. This draws attention to what you want your audience to look at and elimiates that confusing "busy" factor where you have way too much detail in your photograph of things that you don't care about. (Notice how in my photo above, your eyes are drawn to the puppy's face since the background is out-of-focus. This makes the image so much more exciting).

Here's where aperture comes into play: to blur out your background you need to use a large f-stop (e.g. f/2.8 if you have a fast lens). The larger the aperture (you'll need to read your camera's manual to learn how to change this setting), the more blurry the background. But beware--if you don't focus properly on your subject, your background will be sharp and your subject will be blurry! Caveat lector!

Want to learn some more? Check out some of my favorite tutorials (which I still find useful every once in a while):

• Phil Greenspun's very comprehensive photo.net tutorial
  
• Kodak's photo tips for beginners.

Ode to My Roomba

I recently brought a Roomba Discovery robotic vacuum cleaner off eBay. I was looking for a new toy to play with, and heck, for $150, I just couldn't resist. I've been running this thing continiously for the past day and I've become quite attached to it.



Roomba just randomly moves around the floor picking up whatever crap it finds. It's kind of like a cat, but instead of shedding hair everywhere, it picks up dirt and leaves my carpet happy and clean.

Apparently you can hack Roomba. iRobot, Roomba's maker, will soon release an API that you can use to create random Roomba accessories--including attaching a digital camera (so you can photograph all the crap your vacuum is sucking in).

Either way, digital camera or without, I hopefully won't find myself in the nasty situation where I haven't vacuumed for 6 weeks anymore. All I need to do is to press a button, and voila!, Roomba chuggs along and automates my cleaning.

The gadget gods are smiling today.

Wesley's List of Stuff to Bring to Burning Man

I wrote this as a personal list of stuff you need to bring to Burning Man. I assume you are going to be part of a camp so I didnt include a bunch of community things normally supplied by a camp (e.g. shade structures, furniture & chairs to sit on, grill, camp shower, etc.). If you are going as an individual without the support of a camp, you should check out one of the links below for a more complete list of things to take with you.


Cargo Van full of Burning Man Crap on the Playa

Remember everything you bring to the playa will get covered in dust no matter what you do. Whatever you bring may get trashed or lost, so don't bring stuff you're too attached to. And washing all of the playa dust out of your stuff is nearly impossible.

Transportation, Shelter & Sleep

Sleeping Bag (get a cheap bag; Costco or WalMart sells cheap ones for $10)
Pillow
Air Mattress & Pump
Place to sleep in: Tent, RV, Cargo Van, or SUV
Eye mask
Earplugs (everyone around you will be partying and w/out this you won't get any sleep!)
Heavy-duty aluminum foil (if you plan to sleep in your vehicle, you cover your windows to keep the light out)

Food, Water, & Personal Items
Water (2 Gal/Day per person in addition to what your camp will provide) & containers to hold them
Food (non perishable/canned tems are key; stuff you can boil in a pot or heat w/ hot water works well)
-Mac & Cheese (makes a great casserole if you mix in tuna or salmon)
-Cheese, Crackers & salami
-Cup-O-Noodles
-Beef Stew
-Red Bull and other drink mixers
Googgles (you will need this when the dust storm mits)
Face Mask or bandanna (again, helpful during duststorms)
Water Bottle
Camelback or other water-holding backpack
Suncreen (SPF 30 or higher)
Plates, bowls, cups, forks, spoons – things you need to eat with
Plastic zip-lock bags to store all this stuff to keep some of the dust out
Trash Bags (we need to pack all the trash out)
Plastic Drink Cup (you bring this with you on the playa at night to parties for alcohol) that you can attach to your costume
A couple of rolls of toilet paper (there are porta-potties but they run out of TP frequently)
Your own stash of alcohol – for the pre-parties and for new friends
Gifts for your new friends – BM is a barter economy; those asian lycee jello things are really popular at night on the playa
Chapstick
A couple of towels
Handy wipes
Moisturizing lotion
Vaseline

Getting Around on the Playa

Old, trashy bike (you'll be unhappy without one)
Extra tire tubes and mini bike pump
Headlamp, EL Wire, LEDs, or whatever else you want to light up your bike (you don't want people running into you at night)

Clothing & Costumes

Sunglasses (bring 2 pairs, one will break or get lost)
Costumes (jumpsuits or flightsuits are key; they have lots of pockets to hold stuff
Clothing you need to wear on the playa: shorts, shirts, pants, a couple of sweatshirts, etc.
Wide brimmed hat and baseball cap
Lots of costumes made of fake fur
Light-up stuff and blinky shit (EL Wire, glow-sticks, etc.)
Shoes (trail running shoes work well)
Socks (bring several pairs
Flip-flops

Other Things to Bring

Camera (disposables work best unless you have a trashy camera you don't mind breaking)
Flashlight & extra batteries

I'll be updating this list at http://www.weschan.com/burningman.html