A little side-track on the weekend; a friend of mine didn’t believe me when I said this product was being sold in the checkout line of my supermarket, so I bought a bottle to prove it, and since that’s $13 (!!) wasted, the least I can do is amortize the ha-ha by sharing it with my weblog audience.

There’s this sleep aid product called “Rescue Sleep” that’s sold, as I said, in supermarket check-out lines, in that impulse rack that has gum, candy bars, Archie comics and small booklets telling you how to predict the future. I occasionally look for new sleep aids because I am a very poor sleeper. It comes in a little spray, which looks normal enough:

Good enough, and maybe you might even convince yourself that $13 is a fantastic price for such a trusted name in such sleep aids, until you actually take the time to read the ingredients list:

This stuff is hooch!

On one hand I’m somewhat horrified, but on the other hand I’m delighted that even in the modern day and age, the world hasn’t yet grown so sophisticated to completely and utterly reject the idea that alcohol in a sleep aid is an “inactive ingredient”. I was recently reading a book that mentioned this very situation, except it was talking about 1897, not 2007. Such opportunities still exist for grifters, snake oil salesmen, and confidence tricksters, even if they’ve replaced a slick suit and a crooked smile for a hiptop and caps. The more things change, the more we still get ripped off.

The hardest part of my “job” is neither the collecting of artifacts and information, nor the by-its-very-nature obsolesence of the things I surround my life with. It’s not even the lawyer threats or the endless arranging of my time such that I can do the work of 387 meth addicts.

The hardest part, by far, is remembering when I cared.

And by cared, I mean absolutely lived for these things, these textfiles, these software programs, all these printouts and parts of computer history long gone. It has been to my dismay as I travel through my no-dress-rehearsal life to realize how absolutely talented our minds are to dull and dismiss anything we keep close to ourselves for too long. I really really care about this stuff, but it is a different sort of caring than I once had. Whereas in some ways these late-night collection runs and warez trading still bring the smile and memories to my face, I am not “in the moment” anymore.

As a youth, I would watch download progress bars like a jeweler working on the Hope Diamond. I would wait, breathlessly, for someone to respond to my sub-board posting on a BBS that probably had 200 people to its name and a single line for them to share. I would read, intensely, the textfiles I downloaded and printed out, studying them in school or on a bus or walking along the highway to and from the local diner that had arcade games. This was an entirely different form of living and in that way I was very much alive but a different sort of alive than now.

The human mind’s ability to sort through its world and experiences and produce a shopping list of not-accurate-but-will-do-for-now rules to follow from them has given us some pretty amazing triumphs, as well as the occasional terrifying disaster. It is what we do, and as we get older, we change so that things we’ve encountered before have a warm but distant glow to them, demarcating that we can avoid the whole intense study phase and move right to the decision phase. But a warm and distant glow is nothing compared to an intense burn.

Discoveries delight; rebuttals sting. Anger flares. Secrets smolder. Like a deflated balloon looking up at a ceiling it used to knock against, I can recall a great many events in my young life that cut lines of indelible ink across previously open sheets of paper. The thrill of newness, of realizing I’d stumbled into a whole new place for myself, and the seemingly-endless chain of connected miniature revelations that these breakthroughs would drag into my life. I can see these things, but I don’t quite feel them the same way, even recalling them and being the very person who experienced them.

The challenge, therefore, is for my work to reflect in itself a sense of excitement, of caring, of non-dismissive regard for the great and wonderful things that have come and will come again, refashioned. I am capable, as any readers of this weblog or patrons from nearby restaurant tables can attest, of a nuclear level of cynicism. If I don’t concentrate, and this is a good percentage of the time, I can receive the gift of a fan or admirer at an event or in my e-mail and return it with a useless self-deprecating kooshball of quasi-acknowledgement that does me no favors and the other party even less.

This is wrong, as wrong as a person can be.

Yes, there are salesmen and jerks and all the hazards of human interaction, but there are, so many more times, that person for whom your own old hats are glittering new headgear, expanding their minds. I get letters all the time with this tone, of a kid who just wants to talk, chat, engage me for a while. Entertainingly, the eggs of their questions usually come wrapped in a nest of complimentary platitudes that sound exactly like someone who is sweating over every word to avoid offending me in any way.

At conferences and parties, I’ve caused that jolt of recognition as someone figures out I’m that textfiles guy. They’re not putting on an act, they’re not cynically regarding me as a point of ridicule; they’re honestly surprised and happy to see me. After the first few times, it becomes difficult to give each new person that same smiling and open-faced regard. But that’s what makes it difficult: I must.

GET LAMP is as much a story about the excitement of the text adventure genre as it is about “history” in the sense of “a connected series of events”. I’ve shown the occasional bit of film to people, and the opinions range. One thing that’s obvious to me is that it won’t be anything like the BBS Documentary was, and will approach the subject matter with a lot of talking heads but with a ton of artistic insert shots too. (These are embryonic plans and could change, of course.)

But here’s the germ of the idea: for the young, the first time they sat down at a text adventure, even one of Scott Adams’ two-word-parser “Grand Adventures”, I’ve found that people were overcome, literally washed away, with the sense that they could do absolutely anything with these games. For those who program or who programmed in environments prevalent back then, the potential horizon was a lot shorter than the player thought… but that’s the skill needed with any linerar/semi-linear tale: making the reader/player feel they’re in control, can step away at a moment’s notice from the “plot” and change things however they wish. That feeling, which I simply cannot feel like I once did, has to show up in the film and hopefully make everyone feel washed over with a sense of possibility. If done right, that will be a wonder to behold.

I realize my good fortune in having this be the “worst aspect” of the life I live. But like any shortcoming, you can ignore it as unimportant and do so at the peril of waking up one day to find yourself not growing up but dying down.

I have a little brother, and his name is Brandon. He’s 19 months younger than me, and where I went into film school and computer administration, he went into landscape design, snowplowing and construction. He works with landscapes like I work with textfiles, if that’s any endorsement. He’s really, really good at it. He’s been at it for something like 10 years, and has worked both for large landscaping firms, and for himself. Currently, his company, Landscapes by the Country Gardener, is serving the lower New York State counties.

Why do I mention this? Mostly with regards to the way my dad has been trying to leverage his two sons’ talents to help them both out. Since I’m the “Web Guy”, there’s been a project for years to get my little brother’s company up on the web, available to anyone who even thinks about having landscaping done in his surrounding area, and ensure him great success. The thing is, this whole “search engine placement” situation is overloaded with way too many folks investing an awful lot of time and money into getting the attention of the endless waves of web-browsing cattle. “All I need is a few days” they say, and they steroid-pump their websites with “keywords”, hidden phrases, searchbot-detecting assault scripts, and a dazzling array of this-side-of-spam techniques to make people like to them. They call themselves “Search Engine Optimizers”.

The fact that right now, there are guys who get up, drive to work, sit down in an office, and have the words “Search Engine Optimizer” on their business cards makes me want to run out to my car with a wi-fi antenna, a list of IP addresses, and a baseball bat. But, looking back, it’s hard to believe that someone got paid to write “Lemonade Stand” too. I’m glad the world found a place for all those people who were making $50,000 a year “coding” HTML around last century.

For my own websites, I’m not overly concerned with getting specific people (or even getting a high search ranking). Folks stumble in, stumble out, stick around, disappear forever. I’m appreciative of the letters, but I don’t sit and watch the access logs and hope for just a few more folks. My place is in just collecting stuff and working on my projects, and sharing what I’m up to. I guess, ultimately, I have a product, too, but that’s not why I do what I do; it’s just a nice 3-DVD side effect.

Brandon’s business is different. He builds walls, flattens hills, arranges landscapes, plants trees, makes sidewalks. And trust me, he’s really friggin’ good at it. He sits down with this pad of paper and sketches out his ideas with his customers, and they’re like little intense blueprints. And then he sticks to the blueprints. Kid knows his shit, is what I’m saying. But he only needs a few dozen people to hire him in a year, and those people are very geographically special and specific. (Well, unless someone flies him somewhere to do his work, which would be weird but very welcome.)

He’s mostly forced to use methods that are almost paleolithic compared to what others think should be done: he advertises in the local papers, puts up posters in the local supermarket bulletin boards, and he’s even tried his hand at the yellow pages, which have continued to hold their death-grip on ludicrous charges for an ad. A few jabs have been tried for the modern internet age, including his website and a couple postings on craigslist, but that’s weird to him; he’d rather be out doing stuff.

As a result, the Landscapes by the Country Gardener site got 250 unique visitors in March. I got 500,000.

“Do something”, Dad says. “I’ll try”, I say.

What’s interesting is how different two brothers can be, and how the two of us, with our skills, have built up an outlook at the world that are completely offset from each other. I love my little brother, and I’d do anything for him.

Maybe even become a Search Engine Optimizer.

Principal shooting finished up last night for a side-project: a music video in support of a song on MC Frontalot’s new album, Secrets From the Future. For some segment of the population, the idea of the director of the BBS Documentary doing a music video with the head of the nerdcore hip-hip movement for a song about text adventures may actually blow some sort of gasket.

Yes, text adventures. On Secrets from the Future (which you can order here), there is a song called “It is Pitch Dark”, and it was written in support of the GET LAMP documentary. It is absolutely loaded over with reference to Infocom games, home computers, parsers, you name it. And it rocks.

I had two sets of friends help me with the production; one set of three (Charlie, Robin, Matt) came over on Monday and cleared out space in my basement. Charlie also made some great set suggestions that I implemented. On Tuesday, another set of three (Nick, Oliver and Fred) were crew and set photographers while I shot the video with Frontalot.

Shooting a music video, especially if you choose to do one with no on-set sound, is either wonderfully easy or stupidly difficult depending on how complicated you want things to be. From watching, oh, 69,105 music videos throughout my youth and later life, I’ve come up with several philosophies about what makes one good:

• Music videos should play to the strength of the performer. You should highlight what makes them compelling and unique, and study their history to know strengths they might not have.
• If the performer has no strengths and is not compelling, then you should instead surround them with compelling and unique stuff. Sometimes, you might not even want the performer in there at all.
• If you have a compelling and unique performer AND can also surround them with a compelling and unique environment or event chain, even better.
• Music Videos tend to make very bad “Film Shorts”.
• The most compelling moments are often the most obviously unexpected, improvised, or bloopered.
• No video is for everyone; don’t make it for everyone, or you’ve made something meaningful to no-one.
• Once you go in a direction, really go in that direction. Don’t half-ass things.
• If your video is less compelling than Duran Duran’s video for Rio, you have failed.

So, in my case, I sought out MC Frontalot’s performing strengths and worked out these strengths into a video. We shot for about three hours in the basement of my home in a set that will seem familiar to some folks who know me, although it was majorly tarted up for the video. Of course, we shot in high definition as well.

The set itself had lots of space for dancing, gesticulations, and odd angles. We did roughly 8 setups (moving and readjusting of cameras and lights), although in some cases I did major zoom so that it might as well have been another setup. We ran through the song with him lip-synching roughly 12 times. We ran through the song with no lipsynching probably another 6. I shot 70 minutes of footage.

There had been plans for a second night of shooting, but I canceled it. Frontalot’s performance is, to me, so extremely geeky and intense that I think shifting in a second-unit set of shots would just have diluted things. There was concern by some of the crew about this choice, but I think the choice is a good one, and Frontalot and I worked out another potential set of dates to shoot more footage if I turn out to be wrong.

The set is geeky; there’s so much equipment jammed into each shot that people will spend hours combing through them trying to determine what is what. Frontalot’s act includes lots of technical references, and the inclusion of such items as Apple Lisas, a 14.4k modem, a KOZMO.COM dropbox and a pile of 1982 IBM-PC manuals will hopefully do his first video proud.

I don’t know a release date for this yet, and there’s a lot of work for me to do in post-production, but I had a great time. Thanks to everyone who helped, and look for this in the future (and on the GET LAMP DVD, where it’ll be a bonus feature).

Oh, and I’d like to mention definitively: MC Frontalot is a really, really nice guy.

I was chatting with one of my oldest friends, and while going over a few things, he said “TIM needs a new home”.

“What?” I said.

“Let me forward you the e-mail trail,” he said.

When I was 19, living for the first time in my own apartment with multiple roommates, I’d started to get into this whole phenomenon called MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons. I was introduced to them by my friend John, who had been traipsing throughout the Internet for a while before me up at his (far-away) college. We’d been buddies in high school and kept in close touch, and while I was generally using BBSes at this time, I’d been able to get into the Internet at large via the “Terminus” system at MIT (an 8-line dialup they had with semi-flexible open access). These MUD things, which felt an awful lot like text adventures you could share with others, were fascinating. I didn’t take much interest in the standards of role-playing and building, but I really did like the real-time communication and the ability to walk around in “spaces” and build my own attachments to these “spaces”. That ruled!

Within a short time, John and I, who had founded a humor magazine together back in high school, found enough in these games to warrant a parody. So, in March of 1990, we used Richard M. Stallman’s AI lab account (which he freely shared with people) and put up a MUD. Many games used a program called ‘TinyMUD” that resulted in names like “TinyHELL”, so we naturally called ours “TinyTIM”.

Within an ever shorter bit of time, we were fighting with the other users of the GNU.AI machine to keep TinyTIM (TIM) up. We moved to another hosted machine thanks to a very kind user at the Supercollider in Texas, then he and I had a falling out. We in fact moved many times, had many adventures, and all of this is way too much to go into in a single entry. There’s a history at the TinyTIM home page.

Anyway, I would say that for many years, my home and space was on TIM. There’s a lot of people who know me that way, as Sketch the Art Cow of TinyTIM. It’s a major part of me, and who I am. I probably spent 15 hours a day on it, every day, for years. Some day I will mine these stories for you.

This is also why there will be a MUD presence during GET LAMP; I’ve interviewed Richard Bartle, creator of MUDs, and will hopefully round out with a few others as well.

Around 10 years in, the unthinkable happened; I started to live a very different life from wanting to run TIM. Textfiles.com had taken off; I was starting to get my face into some very global/high profile places, and knocking myself out over a place that would max out at 200 attendees when I had a site getting 100,000 visitors a month was starting to be less appealing. In one of those ugly situations and cascading set of events that always seems to happen, the “Sketch Retires from TIM” got about as ugly as it could and I was both jumping and pushed. This, also, is worth mining.

From that time, people who were truly my friends and not just holding friendships of convenience have stayed in touch, and one of them is R’nice, the battery that drove TIM. A programmer, genius, and amazing fellow, he’s one of my most closest friends, and my leaving TIM broke his heart. It was he who told me that the machine had lost its current (generous) hosting location and needed a new home.

So what else could I say? I took it in.

The machine arrived today, packed in a huge crate; a backup form of it is currently up and running at the old site, and this one will replace it. There’s some adjustments to be made, some hardware upgrading to do, and so on. But here, seven years after I quit, the place I co-founded will be running in my basement.

How do I feel about this? Well, I never disliked the place; I just outgrew it. I had (and still have) management opinions, but I’m a different person now, with different goals and things to do. I want to make sure the old clubhouse doesn’t get torn down; I’m not interested in being Lead Moose at the Lodge.

This is TIM’s seventeenth year; may it have many more.

The weekend was spent, as mentioned previously, at Shmoocon, which is either a hacker conference, a security conference, DEFCON East, or The Potter Family Speech Extravaganza. Here’s some Potters for you.

I’d normally go off here on a multi-paragraph description of Shmoocon, but knowing about Shmoocon isn’t Shmoocon’s problem. Every one of the three years of Shmoocon has sold out, often at a terrifying rate. In the 2007 round of ticket selling, it sold completely out of 800 tickets without having a speaker schedule up. This might take a few seconds to truly believe, but they basically provided no information about the coming event with regards to who would be there or what was happening, and it still sold out. There were three rounds of sales, and some sold out in less than an hour. If I recall the opening comments properly, one round sold out in less than 10 minutes.

Therefore, I instead try to get in by being a speaker. Did I mention Shmoocon pays speakers?

The original plan was to get into Shmoocon by speaking about the One Laptop Per Child project. Why choose this? Well, I’d been at an event for game designers a month previously (relating to GET LAMP, and someone brought a prototype OLPC to the event. I was playing with the little sucker, and my first thought was “this would make a really devious bomb”. Why? Well, mostly it was the happy little face it presented, the fact it was going into all these countries that had nothing this powerful before, and the whole social aspect of giving millions of laptops to kids. Anyway, I’d filed it away and when I started to think of attending Shmoocon, an idea popped into my head and I submitted a talk entitled “One Weapon Per Child”.

As it was, the talk was sort of accepted; what was counterproposed was that my talk be combined with two other talks being given about the OLPC, and they’d expand it out into one big event just before the closing ceremonies, collapsing all tracks into ours. Now who am I to argue with that?

As a bonus, a set of coincidences (one of the advisors on GET LAMP had a party at the apartment of someone on the OLPC project) allowed me to bring along an actual OLPC laptop with me to the event. Here’s the lovely Heidi Potter modeling the thing:

If nothing else, these laptops get instantaneous attention. At the event, which is held in the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, the Largest Thing In History That Has Eaten 3 Smaller Hotels, people were constantly queuing up to see the laptop up close, play with it, and of course ask lots of questions I was totally unqualified to answer. People like the idea of this thing. They want it. They’ll do whatever they can to have one, if someone just offers them one.

I never attend many talks at these events, instead going to common areas and striking up conversations with old friends, colleagues and “con buddies” i’ve gathered up over the past 10 years. In fact, of the many talks, not counting my own, I attended probably a half dozen. These included the aforementioned Hacker Foundation talk, wherein I got to stare at the organizers talk about all the great ideas they have and what their goals are, and then be floored by the Hackers On a Plane travel planning, which is pretty out-of-the-box thinking.

The best talk that I attended is far and away A Hacker Looks at 50, which was G. Mark Hardy’s nostalgic harkening of his nearly 40 years in computers, high school, the Navy, and as a consultant. A beautiful pastiche of memories and of lessons learned; the kind of speech I love to give and to sit through. There was talk of whether this should have been the actual Keynote, but I think this sort of talk is best given to a willing, volunteer audience, and the room was well and truly packed. The recording will be an excellent purchase or download when I can acquire it.

I’m always happy to sit through the Own the Con presentation, which is a naked re-examination/explanation of the money, organizing and management of Shmoocon, held during Shmoocon. Nice! You get the funny stories of things going wrong, an understanding of the stuff nobody thinks about (for example, the carrying bags provided to each attendee arrived at the Potter home in three pallets on the back of a semi), and you get a chance to thank the group for putting the whole thing on.

So, one of the interesting situations with my own talk was that two of the guys in it (Sean and Scott) knew each other well, while I’d never met them, and none of us had met Ivan, the fourth member of the “group”. This was also the first time for Sean and Scott speaking in front of a group like this, and what a trial by fire to suddenly address hundreds of people! We talked on the phone a bit, and it didn’t take long for Sean to suss out my “seat of the pants” style; I pay a lot of attention to the venue being addressed, and I tend to approach things in chunks, like “introduction”, “danger expressed here”, “funny story about guy I know”, and so on. I never use Powerpoint or any visual aids. All this said, though, we hammered out some rough ideas and agreed to meet at Shmoo on Friday.

Friday, of course, didn’t happen beyond chatting a bit in the lobby. Saturday did, but with no Ivan. This was fine, in some ways, because “our” part of the talk was different from Ivan’s; Ivan had facts and information; we had theory and speculation. Scott, Sean and I sat down in the pub and I gave them a crash course in public speaking and presentation, most of which they already knew. Sean, particularly, cuts an amazing profile and presence. He’s tall, he’s buff, and he’s smart. I see many years of him winning an awful lot of arguments. Scott is Chris Elliott’s previously-unknown smart brother. These were excellent team-mates to have.

For my own bit, I was quite happy to scale back (and back, and back) what my talk was going to be about, yielding the floor to the other presenters. Sean had nailed a whole ton of attack vectors to the OLPC project; I gave him a handful more to try out. Scott was going after the implementation of software itself, which is far out of my purview. I let Scott have the OLPC for most of the weekend so he could investigate; I heard it was a hit at a couple dinners Scott went to. Just to make it clear: it never got hurt and it never got broke. Good Scott.

I didn’t meet Ivan until about an hour before the talk. Ivan is a plastic Silly Putty egg of brilliance and energy, holding back the incredible flexibility and knowledge within. He’s also quite young, although I had to be told his age by others, so I was cheating. You would think he was in his 40s when you dealt with him. I sprung upon him our idea, to have him be the opening introduction and talk and then the other three of us punch OLPC in the face for the rest of the time. He was fine with it, and he adapted his talk flawlessly for this.

Looking at the schedule, I knew we were asking for it. Four people schedule for an hour; this almost never works, especially if you accept questions at the end. As a result, we knew we’d have to be time-aware. I took that on, and my intention was for my talk to be less than 15 minutes.

In a nutshell, my small presentation was this: I made a “One Lapdance per Child” joke, I said I would bring together the important events of Molasses, Electrocution, and Goatse, and then told a story in which each of these were the center of the story. In all cases, the events were hilarious, but if you imagined yourself in the thick of them, they were well and truly horrible; it’s one thing to think of the Molasses Flood of 1919 and yet another to imagine those poor horses stuck and covered in the goo screaming their heads off until someone could shoot them. Security, I said, was just the kind of situation where you have these hilarious-sounding events but which could easily and quickly turn to ones of horror. Security, in fact, was the intersection of the ludicrous and the dangerous; people spend all their time dreaming up infinite bizarre scenarios to prepare against them, and must justify this time, and also are expected to respond near-instantaneously for entirely unexpected variations of these events. I then said we were going to do a little bit of this ludicrous speculation against the OLPC, but that underneath it ran the current of danger and horror that can potentially come with any cultural shift.

This all took seven minutes.

Therefore, I was the highest paid guy at Shmoocon.

In fact, we all came in way under time; not because our talks were short, but because we kept on track, slammed out the facts, didn’t lollygag at the audience with lame self-conscious meanderings. We blasted out that info, love it or leave it. Oh, and I even managed to get one fact wrong in such a short time: The Flood was in January, not June. So anyone who eventually hears that.. remember, I really meant to say January but my mind was moving onto the next thought.

Ultimately, we had a ton of time for questions, and I had to answer basically none of them; it was almost entirely Ivan getting the shit pounded out of him; brave, brave Ivan. Dan Kaminsky complained about the overabundant security. Others complained about not enough security. One particularly beautiful Oprah moment was the woman who stood up and said “Throughout this presentation, I never heard the word PARENT.” followed by those delightful golf claps that accompany any open-ended murmur that mentions family. Ivan handled all this brilliantly, I thought. In 20 years, I’m going to get free drinks when I mention I once was on a “panel” at a “conference” with Ivan Krstic, I may even get a few saying I was at Sean Coyne and Scott Roberts’ first major panel, as well.

Cons get me out from behind my desk and into a world where people talk about dreams and hopes and plans and implementations. I like them for that reason, and I’ve always benefitted from them. And who could ask for more.

I’ll write a separate summary of Shmoocon shortly, but I wanted to highlight a most intriguing idea which the fellows from the Hacker Foundation are floating and putting together. The idea is simple enough: Hackers on a Plane. Here’s the pitch.

Basically, there’s the DEFCON convention, coming this summer to Las Vegas, and shortly afterward there’s another edition of the world-famous Chaos Communications Camp, which a 5-day camping expedition in Germany that combines hacking, engineering, and a whole host of amazing activities.

So, let’s say you want to attend both of these events, and you want to do it in a style so slick your grandkids will be talking about how cool you were back then. Well, the Hacker Foundation has done it with Hackers on a Plane.

First, let’s get this number out of the way: $5,000. That’s the cost. Don’t run away. Here’s what that gets you:

• Attendance through a special distinguishing badge at both DEFCON and the Chaos Communications Camp 2007. You’re a welcome guest at both events with a badge that almost nobody else has.
• After DEFCON is over, you’re picked up that Monday at McCarran airport in a specially-chartered Maxjet.
• A Maxjet is not just some run-of-the-mill pissant Jet; these things are designed to be the ultimate in comfort. Every seat is a business class seat, with 160 degree recline and a 2-2-2 configuration; there are no middle seats, only aisle seats.
• The normal carry limits are out the window; you will be able to haul a lot more stuff than you ever could across international lines. No drugs and weapons, of course, but the limits are a lot different than you’ve ever experienced before.
• On the flight, meals and alcohol will be served, all completely included. (No $3 beers, etc.)
• Previews of presentations to be given at CCC will take place on one end of the plane.
• This is a nonstop flight directly between Las Vegas and the location of CCC 2007. You will walk off the plane and “be there”.
• 50% of your $5k is a tax-deductable (!) donation to the Hacker Foundation, a registered non-profit that provides financial and advising assistance to groups working to spread knowledge and seed hacker spaces (labs) throughout the US, attempting to duplicate the situation of such spaces in Europe.
• At the end of your time at Chaos Communications Camp, you will be flown, business class, from the location in Germany back to wherever you’re located in the US.

So basically, we’re talking a full-fledged travel package (minus hotel in Defcon) that will give you a unique way to enjoy both of these events in high-life style. These guys have worked hard to come up with a fundraiser that will be long remembered. It’s a killer.

However, they need people to sign up, not just folks who think it’s a good idea. Spread the word, please. If you have a company that expenses trips, or you have extra cash and want to make a charitable donation while living like a king, here’s the big chance. Contact the Hacker Foundation for more details about it.

I’m always happy when people think out of the box like this. I know they only have a couple weeks to pull together deposits. If you were thinking of attending both events, this is the way to do it.

Under the “humble beginnings” department, I present to you my first film; “Headrush”. Created in 1986, this was the final project for a film class I took in Sophomore year at Horace Greeley High School. It was shot on 8mm film, and required the soundtrack to be played on a record player timed to the beginning. I knew this was a tall order, so the soundtrack is a (copyrighted) piece of music that had a lot of notes and beat changes, ensuring that it would be more likely to synchronize to whatever was going on.

I described the film as “What it would be like to go through Horace Greeley High School after you hit your head.” Some kids were impressed. Some were not. My film teacher hated it, and as I recall, she gave me a C. (I still have the graded paper around here, and maybe I’ll dig it up one of these days.)

There’s only a dozen physical cuts in the film. The rest of them are done “in-camera”, with me basically painting scenes using the available light and background. This was, I contend to this day, a way to get around the limitations of the medium; cutting was hard work and the effect was jittery bounces in the film. I employed stop-motion shots in some locations, have two subliminal messages (one easy to spot, one harder to spot), and feature a cast of dozens, including my friends and my little brother. At one point you see a shadow running along grass. That’s my “director’s cameo”.

I apologize in advance that I only have it lying around in DiVX Format. The file is here and is 32 megabytes:

“Headrush”, by Jason Scott (1986)

I had a lot of fun making that thing; it was shot in about a day. If you know the place, it almost functions as a home movie. A very weird, surreal, screwed-up home movie.

I don’t think it deserved a C.

Today, I leave for Shmoocon, a security and hacking convention held in Washington, DC and brokered by the Shmoo Group, members of which I’ve become good buddies with. I’m co-presenting with a handful of people on Sunday, a talk in which we cover aspects of the One Laptop Per Child project. This project is basically an altrustic experiment to make a low-cost laptop (originally quoted at $100 but currently a bit less than $200) that can be sent out by the thousands to countries in “need” of technology, enabling generations of schoolchildren to have access to computers they’d never otherwise touch.

I’m doing a short historical perspective before the real fun starts; a backward-looking monologist feathering the crowd with related tangents to the OLPC experiment. When I’m not doing that, I’ll be doing what I love doing: socializing, attending the occasional talk, enjoying a little time around the nation’s capital.

If this is a strange jibe with the whole “I’m shooting a music video” from yesterday, the performer isn’t available this weekend and this event has been scheduled with me for months, so there you go.

Shmoocon sold out, literally within hours, so there’s no easy way to get in there, but the hotel it’s being held in has a huge (almost obscene) lobby and lots of places to hang out that aren’t the actual shmoocon location. I’ll be around all weekend, so stop by, capitol residents!

So, next week I’m shooting a music video. Not too many details to give right now about the content itself, but I did want to touch a little bit on things involved in making one, because it might be of use to people.

Music Videos are basically short films that accompany music; they can range from being exacting performances of the lyrics of a song, or they can be entirely unrealted creations that are essentially using the music as background. A spectrum of quality arises as well, when you compare them to each other.

Thanks to our achieving the era of the Microtheft, here’s a few music videos that come to mind:

• Cylob – Rewind, in which one thing happens, but it’s a really neat thing happening.
• Carpark North – Human, in which you see a lot of strange things happen.
• Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar in which one strange thing is happening, even thought it might take a little while to figure it out.
• Chemical Brothers – Let Forever Be, in which a strange thing keeps happening so much that you eventually completely lose track of it.
• Flock of Seagulls – I Ran, in which… come on, dude, it’s FLOCK OF SEAGULLS!

Talk has gone back and forth about doing this music video for a while, but now it’s gotten the green light. I have 9 days to shoot the principal photography, after which the performer will be unavailable. I have had a demo version of the song for some time, and now I have the finished song. I am funding this video. I will also be staffing it, and co-creating it with the performer.

I bring this out into the open to just discuss the thinking process; most critically, as a person putting together a project, I find it best to design something that is within your means. A more incredible video that you ultimately can’t pull off is even worse than not making one in the first place. You end up wasting everyone’s time, and money, and have nothing to show for it.

Therefore, I am working within my means to ensure the resulting product will be good, even if a certain number of things go wrong during production. I expect to shoot something like an hour to two hours of footage, which will be cut down to 5 minutes. I expect a week or two of post-production beyond editing. I also expect to do at least two shoots without the performer, what’s commonly called “second unit” footage, although I will be playing the part of the second unit as well.

Currently, I’m planning for three sets, one of which will be in my attic, and two in my basement. There will be a sequence shot outside in a “run and gun” fashion, and one inside a college on a similar “run and gun” fashion. I will visit the college campus before shooting commences and take some snapshots to ensure what’s in my head fits with what is there; the same for the sets in my home.

The biggest budgetary concern has already been bought; my HD camera I’m shooting my documentary with. I’ve already got lights, already got props, already have a bunch of other materials one would normally have to rent or buy.

Next, I contact a couple people I’ve chatted with over the years to see if they want to be entirely unpaid crew members. I start yanking stuff out of the “sets” to build them up as I expect them to look. And I wonder, as I go to do this, what could possibly go wrong, and what I can do to prevent it.

Stay tuned.