Pre-camp Coordination 2017

Wikis > Pre-camp Coordination 2017

Retro Computing Hardware

(added by @mattgodbolt and @borjasotomayor)

We’re planning a retro hardware session and would love people to bring along their old computer hardware. We’d also love people to come along and share their first computer stories, or first production systems horror (or otherwise!) stories. Pretty much anything is welcome: we plan on grabbing a slot on Saturday with a decent sized room and seeing where it all leads!

So far we have the following:

We will also have an HDMI monitor and a SCART-to-HDMI converter for any hardware that is able to use them as a display.

Edit this list or ping Matt or Borja if you plan on bringing something along.

Creatures on the Loose

(added by @sandor)

I’ll be holding at least one (hopefully two) stagings of my new puzzle game, Creatures on the Loose. Currently thinking of doing it during+after the last session slot on Friday (it takes roughly 2 hours), and then after the closing plenary on Saturday. I’ll put a sign-up sheet on the Big Board. Capacity is 40 people, with 5 teams of 8.

ORDCringe

(added by Jeanne, @jmochicago & @jeffsolin )

 

In the spirit of Sarah Brown’s CRINGE sessions, we share a cathartic moment by pushing past our fears and getting the embarrassment out of the way early. Kind of like a psychic skydive that you can use as an adrenaline-fueled surfboard for the rest of ORDCamp. Dig deep…drag out those childhood diaries; stories of your first kiss/beer/bad performance review; angsty high school poetry; your rejected online dating profile; regrettable emails; unrealized song lyrics; crazy failed business idea; or unshared love letters. For extra ambiance, we’ll be happy to project any and all humiliating photos of you submitted to us by Thursday before ORDcamp. Come as you are, in all of your vulnerable and magnificent glory…no audition needed. We’ll supply the unconditional approval and mutually-experienced imposter syndrome. We just ask that you try to keep your soul cleansing submission to 5 minutes or less.

This session will likely be late (late) Friday night.

Tea is the new Coffee

(added by Craighton, @craightonberman)

A coffee session at ORD Camp a long time ago resulted in the design of a Coffeemaker. A tea session a more recently led to a Tea Maker. So I’m going to bring a bunch of traditional teas from Spirit—teas that expanded my previously coffee-focused mind—and we will drink them and get tea-drunk. I’ll tell you about what I heave learned about traditional tea, but I would invite folks who have a passion (or expertise) in all kinds of teas to join in and bring their favorite teas and brewers!

I’ll bring: 1 gallon water heater, gaiwan-style tea makers, teas (oolong, green, white, black), paper sample cups, 6 small carafes for sharing, what else?

This session will likely be Saturday late morning

(added by Elizabeth Koprucki: @ekoprucki)

I am bringing some Chinese and Indian teas to highlight some recent developments in tea (newer than 3D printing, in one case). Innovation isn’t just limited to apps and machines. We’ll look at the influence of season, terroir, and processing and taste some different varietals.

Saturday late morning sounds great, although I was also thinking about 4:00pm Saturday. It is teatime after all!

Champagne Sabering

(added by Fitz, @therealfitz)

This year, Shane Glynn, Dan Nelson and I are going to do a session to show you how to open a bottle of champagne with a saber (if you don’t know what this means, here’s a demo).

This is going to be a hands on session and, thanks to Lagunitas, we’ll have a few cases of 220z beer* bottles to practice on (and consume), but if you’d like to bring your own bottle to saber, please feel free to do so (you may want to put your name on it and set it out on the patio to keep it chilled — sabering works best on chilled bottles. We’ll not only show you how to use a champagne saber to open bottles, but several other fun and non-conventional things, such as a meat cleaver or a frying pan!

This session will likely be Saturday night right after dinner.

* It turns out that you can saber just about any bottle that contains a carbonated beverage!

Chocolate Table

(added by Robert Kaye, @MayhemBCN, mayhem@gmail.com)
I still love chocolate. After all these years, I still really, really love chocolate. And now I want to share my passion again with fellow ORD campers again!
For the past few years, I’ve organized the “Chocolate Room” at the Google Summer of Code mentor summit. People come from all corners of the world to attend these events, so it is the perfect opportunity to have everyone contribute a little for a massive impact. It started with Google sponsoring me to buy chocolate in various european countries and then to bring it to the summit. Over time people jumped in and started bringing their favorite chocolate from their corner of the world. I brought this to ORD Camp in 2015 & 2016 and it was a great hit, so we’re going to do this again this year!
Once again, between now and ORD Camp, I’m going to buy as much tasty chocolate as I can stuff in my suitcase. I’ll be picking up a collection of German, Spanish & Catalan chocolate here in Barcelona and I will pick up some interesting Swiss chocolate on the way to Chicago. Expect me to turn up with several kilos of chocolate to kickstart the chocolate table.
I need your help to continue and to strengthen the Chocolate Table at ORD Camp chocolate table 2017:
Please bring a two or three bars of interesting/great/curious chocolate. In previous years I requested that people bring interesting chocolate from their own region, but that wasn’t bringing in enough diversity. This year, the chocolate can be from anywhere. Please find some great chocolate!
But, and this is a big “but”… Sadly, there is a lot of crappy chocolate in the US. Please, be very choosy when you select your chocolate. Pretty much all Hershey’s/Cadbury/Mars products are out, sorry. Scharfenberger, Vosges and even Ghiradelli qualify! Artesianal, hand crafted and/or small batch of chocolate is great. Imported chocolate is likely to be good. If you can find the chocolate at your average (american) supermarket it’s probably not worthy to be brought to ORD Camp. (A lot of the chocolate I am bringing can be bought in supermarkets in Europe, but the quality is vastly different! Sorry.)

I’ve spent the last week of 2016 Germany and I found quite a bit of crazy chocolate:

  • Earl Grey tea chocolate
  • Dark chocolate with coffee beans from Kenya. 
  • Milk chocolate with coffee beans from the red soil of Ethiopia.
  • 50% milk chocolate from madagascar.
  • Milk chocolate with salted butter caramel.
  • Caramel Nougat
  • Tyme passionfruit caramel chocolate
  • Scotch Wisky chocolate
  • Cherry schnapps marzipan chocolate
  • Milk chocolate with cinnamon
  • Dark chocolate with pink peppercorns
  • Green anise dark chocolate
  • Milk chocolate with hot masala spices
  • Hot chocolate mixes with guarana!
  • Ritter sport with tortilla chips
  • Chocolate with Cardamon

I’ve also got a pile of more mundane supermarket chocolates that are still amazingly tasty — so far I’m €100 into this game for this year. 🙂 I’m also going to go digging here in Barcelona for crazy chocolate as well — I’m bound to turn up more tasty stuff!

Not everyone needs to bring Kilos of chocolate, but don’t let me stop you. 🙂 If everyone could find 2-3 bars of the most interesting, esoteric, tasty sounding chocolates that come across their path, that would be ideal. Remember to bring your chocolate on Friday and then deposit it on the Chocolate Table. Then come back frequently and sample all you like!

Questions? Hit me: mayhem@gmail.com or @mayhemBCN

ORD Bar: Whiskey Tasting

(Added by Andrew Huff, ah@gapersblock.com)

At past ORDcamps Scott Robbin and I have led a conversation about liquor, followed by a tasting, at the end of Saturday’s sessions. We’ve covered a wide variety of spirits, from bourbon to gin to rum, as well as aspects of the distillation process. This year, we want to bring it back to bourbon, which is where it started back in 2010. But we were thinking it would be interesting to show the breadth of what one distillery does: different sibling brands, different ages, etc. — sort of a global flight tasting. Let’s see what similarities and differences we can discern.

ORDbar will be scheduled at the very end of Saturday, as programming shifts to socializing. We’ll have a broad range of whiskeys to taste and compare, as well as mixers and garnishes — and as in previous years, it’d be great to have help with provisioning. We’ve got a spreadsheet set up where you can list what you’ll be bringing; please lend a hand if you can! And if you’re flying in and don’t want to stow a bottle in your checked bag, we’re happy to make a liquor store run and you can pay us back. We also appreciate any donations to help fund the fun; you can paypal me at ah@gapersblock.com.

ORD Bar: Cocktails

(Added by @amac macgill@gmail.com)

If I get my act together and flights cooperate, I’ll bring at least two cocktails and infuse there for transition to socializing on Friday night. Both are from Death & Co. to which I have no affiliation other than admiration. The first is a coffee bean and chili infused Negroni. The second is a weird earl grey infused tequila drink called a Prima China. These drinks inspired me to take a shot at infusing, which is much easier than you might imagine. Others can and should bring cocktails as well.

 

ORDtattoo

(added by Justin Massa)

At the first session Saturday morning, we’ll be doing a session on tattoos featuring an actual tattoo artist! We’ll cover everything you have ever wanted to know about tattoos but were too afraid to ask – a tattoo artist will be there and is up for answering anything that you may want to know.

There’s a handful of slots open for people to get tattoos at ORDcamp from a special sheet of ORDtattoo “flash” (aka designs you can’t change) – hit me up via Slack or email (justingmassa at gmail dot com) if you’d like one of those. As of 1/12/17, it’s very nearly full.

If you have tattoos, please come! It would be awesome for you to share how you got into them, what you have, and what they mean to you / others.

Rubik’s Cube

(added by Jeff Solin @jeffsolin)
 

 

About a year ago I was sitting at my wife’s family’s place messing around with a Rubik’s Cube that my niece got for Christmas. I thought “Well shit, I’m over 40 and I’ve never solved the cube outside of smashing it apart and putting it back together.” So I decided to figure it out through youtube, taking notes, etc. It took me a bit but now I average about 45-50 seconds with a lucky sub 30sec personal best. That’s possibly impressive to someone who hasn’t solved one before, but is slow compared to the people that are super good at it…the WR is just under 5 sec! So, I’m decent at it, but won’t be solving 4 with my feet, upside down and blindfolded anytime soon.
 
I’m pitching a session this year where I’d bring a bunch of 3×3 cubes, do a very quick intro to the notations for moves and explanation of parts, then dive right in and get everyone started on learning how to solve it. People can bring their own too and below are some recs for cubes under $10. There are a variety of methods, but I prefer (and learned) the Freidrich Method. I just taught my son (took him a couple of weeks and he’s now sub 50 sec) and am currently teaching my daughter. It’s very helpful to have someone “teaching” you vs youtube only. As always, no commitments needed, just gauging, so I know what a good number of cubes to “borrow” from Amazon would be 🙂 If you’d consider attending and you DIDN’T already click the + on my Slack post or the link in the email, please click one of the options below. Again, no commitment, just gauging.

Would you be interested in this session?

Maybe

Most likely

Definitely

Still reading? Wow. Here are my cube rec’s from Slack if you want buy and BYO.
 
I’ll touch on this is the session more, but these are “speed cubes”. Due to certain rounded edges, they allow you to, for example, turn a side before a rotation of the top is fully complete vs completing a rotation before another rotation can happen (squares perfectly lined up).
 
One of my favorites is this one. Another favorite is this one. And the smallest mini cube that I could find that actually works (tiny novelty cubes barely turn and they suck) is this one. I love the movement on this one but it’s a little hard to tell difference between green and blue in any low-light situation and pattern recognition is a little tougher than others. Finally, I really love the movement of the one I got my son. I knew he’d love it because it has carbon fiber stickers on it and he’s 10. I don’t like the stickers and underneath appears to be a nice stickerless cube so I’m probably going to buy one for myself and just take the stickers off. ALL of these are tunable and can be oiled so much of the movement can be adjusted to your liking. Hope that helps!
 

 

UPDATE:  I bought 50 of these to bring with me. You can either a) borrow it for the session then neatly put back into box so for a return to Amazon, or b) KEEP IT for only $5 🙂 First come, first served.

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