Call the Mayor Day – Feb 9th, 2010
Filed Under Art, Events, SF Bay Area | 2010-02-09, 14:41
I moved to San Francisco because of the art scene and the amount of all around fun you can have in this city. I now call SF my home for both me and my business. Unfortunately there is currently a “War on Fun” that is attacking the venues and events in our city. It is slowly chipping away at what makes San Francisco unique.
On Tuesday, February 8th you are invited to make your voice heard and help stop the tearing apart of the essence of San Francisco. From the Facebook event:
Before you say no, read this article.
http://sfappeal.com/culture/2010/01/whats-shaking-down-sf-venues-call-the-mayor-day-thats-what.phpCall Gavin Newsom and tell him we do not want our clubs and venues raided by the police department, and we seek better solutions to preserve SF Venues, Arts & Culture. Be sure to remind him you are a registered voter in the city of San Francisco.
Telephone: (415) 554-6141
Fax: (415) 554-6160
Email: gavin.newsom@sfgov.orgMany thanks to Debra Walker, candidate for dist 6 Supervisor for this idea, presented at Flux Summit on Jan 21, 2010 at the “What’s Shaking Down SF Venues” panel.
In addition to encouraging people to call from home, my friend Ani Niow is also a temporary phone booth being setup in front of City Hall that you can use to call Gavin from his doorstep.
If you’re not sure what to say, metaphorge has a good list of talking points.
image via SFAppeal
Join us on the SXSW Nerd Bird Flight
Filed Under Events, Geek, SF Bay Area | 2010-01-28, 13:18
SXSW Interactive 2010 is only a few weeks away. If you’re like us, you’re still procrastinating on buying plane tickets to Austin. If that’s the case and you’re flying from either San Francisco or Los Angeles, then you’ll want to book the following flights on Southwest. We’ll all meet up in Las Vegas for the second flight to Austin. If you’re flying in from somewhere else on the west coast, look to hook up with Southwest Flight 718 from Las Vegas.
If you’re flying from San Francisco (SFO->LAS->AUS):
3/11/2010 (Flights 674/718)
Depart 10:00am Arrive 5:25pm
If you’re flying from L.A. (LAX->LAS->AUS):
3/11/2010 (Flights 853/718)
Depart 10:30am Arrive 5:25pm
Southwest has an open seating policy (we all love ‘open’ things, right?) so all the geeks will be able to congregate on the plane, confusing other passengers by speaking in acronyms, websites, and snippets of code. Southwest does have a couple of planes that have WiFi service, but it’s not possible to know whether we’ll be lucky enough to snag one. Maybe we can get some strings pulled…
Thanks to @dotBen for starting this idea. He’s even got a Google Spreadsheet going with who will be on the plane and some FAQ. Dave McClure has also setup a Plancast.
SXSW 2010 Proposal Was Accepted!
Filed Under Events, Personal | 2010-01-19, 13:16
I think it’s safe to officially say that my proposal for SXSW 2010 has been accepted. “How To Not Be A Douchebag At SXSW” will be a core conversation at this year’s South By Southwest. A huge thanks to everyone that voted in the PanelPicker (apparently we were pretty popular), and of course thanks to SXSW for accepting the idea!
I’m organizing the conversation, but I won’t be educating alone. Violet Blue, John Adams, and several others will be helping lead the conversation. I’m excited that this was chosen to be a core conversation since it means we’ll get to hear the opinions of everyone that attends.
The rough draft of some of the questions you can expect to be answered during our session:
- Who is “that guy” and how do I avoid being him?
- How do I self-promote without being a douchebag?
- What words instantly make me sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about?
- How do I not come off looking like an obnoxious PR flack?
- How do I pitch my product/service/technology?
- How do I handle an open bar?
- How should I ask questions at panels and presentations?
- What is the proper Twitter/Foursquare etiquette at SXSW?
- How can I treat the locals graciously?
- How can I make a connection with someone I’m attracted to and not come across like a marketing dweeb? (i.e. — hooking up, the undouche way)
It’s looking like we’ll be scheduled on Friday, March 12th, so make sure your flights get in the day before because you won’t want to miss this! Not only will you get educated, there will also be a limited number of appropriate stickers and buttons.
Santa’s Defense Forces Engage in Operation Yule Storm
Filed Under Events, Pranks, SF Bay Area | 2009-12-24, 12:11
December 12th, 2009 – Santa’s Defense Forces (consisting of the 12th Nutcracker Regiment, the 103rd Sleighborne Division, and the Sugar Plum Service) converged on San Francisco, CA. The primary purpose of the mission: to protect Santa during the annual Santacon (aka Santarchy) gathering in SF. Additional orders included protecting other high value individuals such as Jesus and Frank Chu as well as spreading holiday cheer to civilians.
I was part of the embedded press corp and took photos and video of this highly successful mission. You can check out all my photos in the Operation Yule Storm set. I also highly recommend checking out the full mission report for Operation Yule Storm as well as the back-stories for both the 12th Nutcracker Regiment and the Sugar Plum Service.
Some live reporting on the scene during the Castro Dance Party:
And some of my favorite photos:
Journey to the End of the Night Halloween 2009
Filed Under Events, SF Bay Area, Video | 2009-11-03, 17:39
The Halloween edition of sf0′s “Journey to the End of the Night” had a massive turn out. Well over 600 people showed up to play. There isn’t a final count as we ran out of waivers and maps for everyone and only 600 of those were printed. But regardless of the limitations, the getting kicked out of venues, and other hiccups, everyone had a great time. And I have to point out the best description of the event (via ombwah): At one point whilst ombwah was pouncing on a fleeing rabbit. A police officer asked me.. ” whats this, a Jump into the street and Die game?
Rather than playing in this dangerous game of dodge traffic and chasers, I spent the evening being one of those chasers to dodge and helping out at Checkpoint 3 (yes the one where we got kicked out of the garage). What follows is my proof submitted to sf0 (photos are also up on flickr as usual):
My evening started late as I scrambled to turn a briefcase into a backpack using only climbing rope and a carabiner. Success finally and I jumped on my bike to race down to Justin Herman Plaza, where a small group of eager players was already forming 30 minutes prior to the actual meeting time. I rolled around the corner to meet up with my fellow chasers. We were briefed, tied on pink ribbons, made plans and then disappeared into the night to stake out good places to ambush players.
Dressed in my white slacks, white jacket, and baby blue t-shirt I looked like an old vice squad officer on vacation from Miami. The nondescript black briefcase that looked like it could be either holding drugs, large sums of money, or divorce papers was a nice addition. Inside the briefcase was 2kg of candy, a pink ribbon, and a video camera. The plan was to pop open the briefcase in front of players and watch them scatter. That was the plan at least.
I locked up my bike and started wandering the streets, briefcase in tow. The first few players I encountered didn’t quite get it. I popped the briefcase, asked if they wanted any candy, they said “no thanks” and just continued walking to Checkpoint 1. One player did go for the offer of candy. After asking about any illegal additives, he reached into the briefcase, brushing the pink ribbon aside, grabbed some candy, said “thanks” and continued on to Checkpoint 1. Absolute failure.
I gave up on the briefcase ploy, tied the ribbon around my arm and just started yelling at people. The bus stop on the corner of the block was packed with people, every single one of them keeping an eye on me once my identity was known. There were many looks of confusions, often followed by a quick sprint away from me from other players. It seems that many of them either weren’t listening when the game was explained or didn’t see my chaser ribbon as I stood in the middle of a crosswalk, players streaming by each side of me as I yelled “I could tag every single one of you right now”. Fortunately for them I didn’t have the heart to tag someone only a few blocks from the start of their journey.
After feeling like Moses in a crosswalk, I decided visibility was what I needed. That meant more ribbons that would make it obvious that I was a chaser. After a 15 minute hunt for my misplaced bike, I headed back to the plaza to grab a handful of chaser ribbons from Sam. I affixed them to every part of my body and headed back out into the night.
I spent some time biking north of Market, and west of Checkpoint 5, hoping I’d run into those players that thought they were being sneaky taking a long way around to different checkpoints. Nope, either I was too far ahead of the pack, or they were taking more direct routes. I headed over to Checkpoint 3 to give them a hand.
While dismounting from my bike in the safe zone of Checkpoint 3, I saw a player approaching. I feinted as if I were going to give chase and he scrambled. Carrying my bike, I half-chased him down the block. He screamed “I’m in a safe zone!” to which I yelled back “Then why are you running?!” Light bulb went off, he stopped and I directed him to Checkpoint 3.
Up on the roof of the parking garage I found two agents pulling players aside, whispering questions to them and then zip-tying bells to their ankles and shows. As I attempted to figure out what in the world was going on, the parking garage security guy came up and told us we couldn’t use the 9th floor of the parking garage. Long story made short, security kicked us out and we setup shop on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the garage. They were cool with this. The one security guy even stood at the doors and helped direct confused players to the line we had going.
Boy was there a line. At on point there were so many players in like that we had to give up asking questions and just started zip-tying ankles, one after another. I have no idea what 30-40 of the players that came through Checkpoint 3 looked like, but I could probably identify them by their footwear. I spent the next couple of hours at Checkpoint 3, watching as friends, familiar faces, and complete strangers came to get their manifests “signed” with a zip tied bell or the occasional sparkly pipe cleaner.
Then it was off to Noisebridge for the after-party where some players had already arrived after traversing the entire course in about 2 hours.
Cell Phones at Burning Man
Filed Under Burning Man, Events, Geek, Twitter | 2009-08-25, 14:17
While thousands are counting down the days until they arrive in Black Rock Desert for Burning Man this year, there’s already a number of people out there on the playa getting things ready….. and they’re calling and tweeting back to us looking for someone to bring the things they forgot. Yes, that’s right there is cell service on the playa this year. How do I know? I got a call from Rubin while he was sitting at the space reserved for our camp (Ardent Heavy Industries). In addition several others are tweeting up a storm: @SFSlim, @steve23, @Rubin110, @TKimball, @JosephPred, and more. And of course foursquare had to get in on the action and quickly added Black Rock City to their database so people could check in. As of this writing, SFSlim is the Mayor of The Man but we predict this to change once Steve23 hears wind of it.
The cell service appears to be limited to AT&T and Verizon, but from what we hear people are getting 5 bars inside Black Rock City. Apparently the service is mostly coming from a temporary tower that was installed on some leased land near Frog Pond, which is less than a mile from the trash fence that marks the border of Black Rock City. How are they doing it? According to @ChrisPetrell it’s a combination of solar/wind powered tower with a satellite uplink. It’s not official Burning Man cell coverage and the Burning Man Org has nothing to do with it, but DPW and other volunteers already on the playa are using it. In addition to this temporary tower, there are also permanent AT&T and Verizon towers south of Empire that people are reporting service from. And finally, there is a theme camp that is providing a GSM->VOIP gateway. I’m assuming this rumored theme camp is the same as the OpenBTS project I posted about last year.
But before you get your hopes up, know that the chance of this service making it through Burning Man without melting down is slim to none. Joseph Pred notes:
Important cell phone update: Temp site only supports 23 Verizon/CDMA users and no SMS. AT&T/GSM supports 35 users with SMS but limited EDGE.
This means you’ll have quite the battle with 40-50,000 other attendees if you need to make a call home. Rubin mentioned that he was already having trouble and the event is not due to start for almost a week. I think it’s still appropriate to tell your boss/significant other/etc that you are not contactable while out on the playa. Besides, do you really want to get that call about the firewall going down while you’re in the middle of 2pir surrounded by an actual wall of fire?
What do you guys think about cell phones on the playa? Good, bad, who cares?
original Man image from Dan Garcia
How To Not Be A Douchebag at SXSW
Filed Under Events, Geek | 2009-08-20, 14:19
Last year I had a blast at SXSW Interactive. It was both enjoyable and informative. However I quickly noticed that there are a lot of.. well douchebags at SXSW. It quickly became quite humorous to pick them out in a crowd and discuss what made them douchey. While it was all a lot of snarky fun, I realized that some of these people probably didn’t even realize how douchey they were being! So I decided that this year I should hold a panel to help those in need. The panel is aptly titled “How To Not Be A Douchebag at SXSW”. Here is the the proposal that was submitted:
Description:
Aimed at both first-time and long-time attendees to SXSW Interactive, this biting and humorous, yet useful panel takes a look at the common actions and behaviors to avoid if you don’t want to be described as “doing it wrong.”Questions that will be answered:
Who is “that guy” and how do I avoid being him?
How do I self-promote without being a douchebag? (i.e — when should I give out my business card?)
What words instantly make me sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about? (i.e. — what are douchey buzzwords?)
How do I not come off looking like an obnoxious PR flack?
How do I pitch my product/service/technology? (i.e. — to schwag or not to schwag?)
How do I handle an open bar?
How should I ask questions at panels and presentations?
What is the proper Twitter/Foursquare etiquette at SXSW?
How can I treat the locals graciously?
How can I make a connection with someone I’m attracted to and not come across like a marketing dweeb? (i.e. — hooking up, the undouche way)
Joining me on this panel will be the lovely Violet Blue of sex blogger fame and the experienced John Adams from Twitter. There’s a good chance we’ll pick up a fourth member before SXSW so if you’re interested in joining us, let me know. But in the meantime we have to convince SXSW that this is a panel the people want to see! In order to do this we need your votes. If you’ve got a minute, please head over to our proposal on the SXSW Panel PIcker and give us a thumbs up! But hurry, voting ends on September 4th.
Journey to the End of the Night
Filed Under Events, Personal, SF Bay Area | 2009-06-23, 10:00
Journey to the End of the Night is near and dear to me as it became one of the catalysts that convinced me to move to San Francisco when I played in the first game in 2006. I was living in Chicago at the time and realized that it was time for a change of scenery. I had always had this thought in my head that perhaps California was where I needed to be, and that San Francisco seemed like my kind of town. But I had never been to San Francisco, let alone California. So I booked a flight out to stay with a friend for a few days. Coincidentally the newly joined kind of weird but creative-inducing web game I had started playing (sf0.org) announced it would be holding a street game that weekend I was in town! The evening was an excellent introduction to San Francisco, and while I started off the day saying “I’m thinking about moving to San Francisco”, I found myself definitively saying “I’m moving to San Francisco” while sitting on the beach in the early hours of the morning.
This year Journey was held in Oakland, which I figured would be an interesting break from the now familiar city of San Francisco. I would be thrown into an environment I wasn’t familiar with and that would be exciting. The result of 6hours and 12+ miles walking? Tons of exercise, an exploration of new and different places, engaging conversations with friends, seeing old faces, and a new found appreciation for Oakland. While I failed to write up a full account from the first Journey, this time I documented in excess. GPS tracking (open in Google Earth), videos, and photos as well as the full text of our evening. You can check out my proof at sf0: Journey to the End of the Night: Oakland by Rabbit (and if you’re a player, toss me some votes!)
Sleeping in a Beer Can
Filed Under Events, Funny, Websites | 2009-05-14, 14:01
With large multi-day festivals one of the problems is where everyone goes to sleep at the end of the night! Sometimes the festivals are located near hotels, but a lot of the time you’ll find a sea of tents housing everyone. But the organizers of Smukfest, a large music festival in Denmark, hit upon a novel idea: after spending all day drinking beer, why not sleep in a can?
The giant cans (11.5 feet high and 7.2 feet in diameter) are dubbed “Can Sleeps” and have a lockable door, a refrigerator and a roof that opens for light and air. Inside you’ll find all the comforts of home, a refrigerator (can shaped of course), tables, chairs, mirrors, shelves, etc. The bed itself is lofted and comfortable large enough to sleep two adults. All of the furniture is of course from a nearby neighbor, the Swedish Ikea. Currently Royal Unibrew has a contract on them, but in the future I’m sure more brands will start jumping on the wagon. It’s a wonderfully unique approach and I can’t wait to see them when we take Dance Dance Immolation to Denmark for this year’s Smukfest. And yes, they do come in six packs.
photo by micfour
Thanks to Springwise for some translation.
DDI at How To Destroy The Universe Part 6
Filed Under Events, Fire, Fire Art, News, SF Bay Area, Video | 2009-04-27, 17:25
On Saturday, we pulled Dance Dance Immolation out of storage for the first time in almost two years, dusted it off and got it running again. The event was “How To Destroy the Universe Part 6″, an industrial party held at the new NIMBY location in Oakland. We ran one of the longest and most problem-free runs in the history of DDI. BoingBoingTV came and filmed and we had a chance to shoot the infamous sfslim with fire. We also got to shoot fire at several Noisebridge members, the newest blogger for Laughing Squid (Burstein), and a bunch of others. Many photos and videos were taken. My photos can be found in this Flickr set and this album on Vimeo.
If you’ve never seen Dance Dance Immolation, here’s what it looks like in action:
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