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When Geeks Go Camping
mikep.maine writes "CNN and Business 2.0 have an interesting article on Tim O'Reilly's Foo camp for geeks - not just any geek - people like Google founders, Tim Bray (invented XML), and venture capitalists. Stashed away in the rolling hills north of San Francisco ... Foo Camp, a new breed of geek gathering organized (somewhat) by O'Reilly & Associates. The idea: Get 200 or so smart folks with a lot in common together in one place at one time, let them pitch tents, toss in a Wi-Fi network, and see what happens. Turns out, quite a lot. You are as likely to bump into a founder of Google (both were there) as the vice chairman of Warburg Pincus. Yes, they had Wi-Fi and marshmallows."
Well, I consider myself a geek, but when I go out camping, all I need to take with me is a couple of gallons of gasoline and then I got entertainment for a whole weekend.
If you went camping with your geek friends and you woke up the next morning and your butt hurt and you couldn't remember what happened would you tell anyone?
no...
Want to go camping?
they had Wi-Fi and marshmallows
I suppose that's a typo. You meant mushrooms, no?
Do they all sit around the campfire popping pimples and telling network management horror stories while holding LED flashlights under their chins.
I'll stick with the city, thank you very much.
We'll go snipe fragging!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Chaos Communication Camp sounded more fun. Wish I could have made it.
sulli
RTFJ.
So, were the VCs there for comic relief then? Please say so, it'll be very hard to sleep tonight when I keep grinning like this...
Hate me!
There's not a lot of difference between outdoorsy boyscout types and computer geeks -- I have several friends who enjoy both, and I'm sure there's a lot of overlap between both groups in general. Both camping and hacking require an ability to pay *very close* attention to relatively tedious tasks, and offer a similar feeling of relaxed accomplishment.
My dad and I go camping all the time, and he's the one who's encouraged me to get into computers!
Camping is the anti-tech. It's the ultimate getaway when over-teched.
Camping is not about wi-fi. It's about burning things. And reading fiction.
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
I think Slashdot'ers should organize such things!
I'd go.
put all the wi-fi access points in one spot :)
and you have yourself an outdoor lowpower microwave
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
This storyline on UserFriendly is about geeks camping. It's one of the best storylines, IMO. It continues until July 04, 2000.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
Ladies and gentlemen of the audience, you are cordially invited to supply your own joke here.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Geek camp? I guess the fact that the campsites don't have showers won't be a problem for these folks.
Um, Sebastopol's not near any rolling San Francisco hills. I lived their a few year ago. It's at least an hour and a half north... if traffic is good.
:(
:(
And on a side note. I wish I would've stayed friends with the folks I knew at O'Reilly, Then perhaps I could've gone to geek camp
damn
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Camping is the anti-tech
Codswallup. Camping is very high tech. It may not typically have many electronic parts, but it is very high tech in almost every other way. Heck ever when it comes to transistors GPS and two-ways are devices many wouldn't care to do without.
*And* you've missed (or made light of) the entire point. Get away from the office and chat with your peers about the work that makes you peers. They happened to do it camping. Sounds fun to me!
Maybe we should have slashstock at a national park somewhere.
Around the campfire sat the founders of Google when someone came around and tried to scare them with a SCOst story..
Elites have been grouping together in these kinds of retreats forever. Bohemian Grove is one of the older ones, although it tends to attract more of an "old money" crowd and I believe is all male as well. Then there's that one out east that Clinton made somewhat well known during his tenure.
All in all, I don't really see why its news. That VCs were there just explains its about figuring out new business schemes under the guise of fun. I guess Tim O'Reilly's presence there somehow adds a sheen of approval over all of it.
As far as camping goes, the most advanced thing I take with is a gas stove. Why the fuck you'd want Wifi or any of the other trappings of city life in the peaceful woods is beyond me.
"It is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue"
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
It's always interesting reading his journal and here's his take on the camp.
/ FooNotes
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/10/11
Camping is not about wi-fi. It's about burning things.
Actually, I'd say that a great deal of the thrill in geek-camping comes from having lots of sophisticated electronic equipment in a setting where it's not really supposed to exist. The surreal superposition, the defiance of nature and embracing of technology -- I mean, cool, eh?
And reading fiction.
So load up Slashdot while you're out in the forest.
The coolest voice ever.
Lesson 1: navigating in a wood-like enviroment.
Lesson 2: starting a fire without matches
Lesson 3: starting a fire with matches
Lesson 4: starting a fire with matches and gasoline
Lesson 5: preventing wild life from coming too near to your fire.
Lesson 6: How to extinguish a burning rodent.
Lesson 7: treating burn injuries
Lesson 8: How to leave a burning forest.
Lesson 9: How to look very, very innocent
Propose a campground as the next venue.
There were 11 other people on the committee and a couple hundred more in the discussion group. Geez.
Do they all sit around a campfire and Instant Message ghost stories??
No fire needed for toasted marshmallows!
You know what?
They're only campers if they wait in the same spot for a whole round and then kill you. PWNED!@#(@!
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
caption this picture if you dare! It's from the camping expedition...
g e/ foodoc_38.jpg
http://www.searls.com/doc/foocamp2003/roll1/ima
Oh my god, don't you all get it?
It's a dupe from last summer!
Like X-Mas was a dupe too, from last winter...!?
I thought it was +1 funny.
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
For relaxation, campers ... disassembled a Toyota Prius, then put it back together again (it was a rental).
Sounds like fun!
http://tomgould.com/
> But a computer is fucking heavy. My pack is heavy enough with food and
> shelter and extra clothes. About the most high tech thing I take is my
> iso-butane stove and my water filter.
Dude, your priorities are off. A butane stove? That's way heavier than a
laptop, and totally unnecessary. (It's *much* more fun to cook with real
fire. Take a box of strike-anywhere matches.) Water filter? C'mon, get
real. If you're seriously worried about the water, boil it, but in most of
North America (as long as you're not right downhill from a big city) the
ground water is potable as it stands. Just watch to see if the birds are
drinking it. Extra clothes? What *for*? It's not like you're going out
to the mall every afternoon and need to look hip. Shelter? Shelter? I
suppose that means a tent... personally I'd just take a nice plastic bag
(to put the computer gear into if it rains) and maybe a hat.
I suppose you're also taking a sleeping bag (dude, just wear a light jacket),
a big old pillow (put your head on your pack, stupid), toothpaste (water works
fine), shampoo and conditioner, a toaster, and a car door so you can roll
down the window if you get hot. By the time I finish taking superfluous
stuff out of that megapack of yours, there'll be room in there for a full
tower and 20" CRT. Make it a 17" PowerBook instead and you can say you're
travelling light.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Depends on how you camp. My tent is kind of high tech (if you consider aluminum poles and canvas high tech), as is the stove.. Sure, we've got a tent with fiberglass poles, but it seems like the dogs always crash through it in the dark, breaking the poles.
My reason for camping (which I do a lot of) is not to get away from the office. It's to get away from the noise of the city. It's to get back to the way I grew up. I don't take my peers camping. I take my freinds, and my family.
I sure don't need a gps to know where I am. A map, a compass and the sun seem to work pretty good. I sure don't have WiFi in camp. Can yell almost that far. I don't bring my laptop, because I don't go out there to do the same thing that I do everyday.
They brought Venture Capitalists to the picnic says to me that this was a purely bussiness meeting in an abnormal setting, nothing more. I'm sure that the folks who went will remember it for the rest of thier lives. I'd have run for the woods, personally.
josh
How do you help society or mankind if you bring together 200 dot-com millionaires and let them talk about how to make more money by relaying emails?
Yeah I am oversimplifying this, but here in Europe, we have been doing geek camping for years. We have a geek summer camp every two years, alternating between Holland and Germany. And you know what? We let everyone in, not just the rich and famous.
And it pays off. This kind of elitism is bad for everyone. Where do you expect the next generation of good hackers to come from if you don't let them come to your hacker camps? Elitism leads to losing the ground under your feet.
And it makes the whole thing less fun. The harder you have to fight or the more you have to have achieved to be perceived as the "brightest and most intelligent" people who are then allowed in, the less you can just be yourself, the more this becomes an ego show where everyone is concerned about how to look good so he will be invited again next year. It's style over substance.
And frankly, who cares about the Google founders?
Who cares about some egomanic bloggers who write up profound sounding essays on their blogs to keep their name in circulation? The people who are really important and interesting are people like Brewster Kahle (archive.org) and John Gilmore (eff).
I was just going to suggest that somebody push you off a cliff, in case you feel like inventing something else.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Here's my 'Geeks go Camping' story. I go to the national Rainbow Gathering every year and camp for a couple weeks. For the majority of you that don't know about Rainbow, it's a gathering of twenty to forty thousand freaks of all stripes. All kinds of people go, not just hippies: there are large Christian, Jewish, and Krishna contingents, even an AA group. It's free, but donations are accepted (they go mostly toward food, which is also free) and it has a mostly non-heirarchal, anarchistic sort of organization. Volunteer wherever you want, or don't, donate money, or don't, it's all good. I usually work at least six hours a day at the medical tent while there, and pitch in money the years that I can afford to.
One camp there, called cybercamp, is a meeting point for geeks. I don't know if they have ever set up a local wi-fi network, but a lot of folks bring laptops. One of my friends there, Rob Savoy, is very involved in open source (he works on the gcc project, porting the compiler to new platforms). He also helps set up our old fashioned communications system, consisting of walkie-talkies with a repeater.
Like I said, it's a free event, and cash isn't used in the gathering except for donations, but people love to trade. Trade circle, as it's called, looks like a hippy version of a middle eastern bazaar. One year another friend of mine made a killing there, scoring a number of interesting, um, items by burning custom CDs for folks (eek! copyright violation! damn hippies want everything for free.)
If you live out in the boonies and you hear that a national Rainbow Gathering is coming, don't freak out. These hippies don't (generally) shoplift, and we won't steal (many) of your children, but we will pump hundrds of thousands of dollars into your local economy. Most every place that has had one says, "come back any time!"
So that's my 'geeks camping' story, and my little plug for the Rainbow Gathering: coolest anarchist gathering anywhere, non-anarchists, geeks and libertarians welcome too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Since when is a VC considered a geek? It seems to go against a true love for whatever you are investing in. Since the VC are the first to pump and dump, meanwhile leaving the tech firm they invested in holding the bag. Much of the time this stifles technology, as opposed to helping.
I've met a few VC's over the years and would put them in a completely different kind of boat than anyone who cares about anything beyond lining the wallet, hence the term 'venture capitalist'...
When I used to work at a small start up company, we weren't full of those stereotypical portly nerds that drink mountain dew all day long and have a goofy laugh.
Instead, we had nice upstart individuals that were well motivated and very athletic. (if it's any consolation to you, they didn't take showers after working out)
Whenever there were any sorts of group events, we'd have at least two individuals with experience with hiking, backpacking, rock climb, scuba diving, spelunking, sky diving, flying jets or planes, rocketry, maguyvering stuff(a lot of them were engineers in mechanical, electrical, chemical, etcetera btw), and even inventing little items for personal use with fellow hobbyists.
Yes, I believe it is the insatiable quality of nerds that keep them above the rest in society. Always prepared for any event. If you stuck them on an island without electricity or any signs of human life, they'd be able to make a quaint existence on it until someone rescued them.
For examples of weirdness and whackiness for self made items. Check out this forum for flashlight enthusiasts.
A bunch of them make their own flashlights, or even offer modifications to Mag-Lites to make them into hand-held HID setups just like the UnderWater Kinetics Light Cannon 100 HID Dive Light
Yes, nerds are too overprepared.
but in most of
North America (as long as you're not right downhill from a big city) the
ground water is potable as it stands
I'd advise you to Google for "beaver fever" but you probably wouldn't get the result I'm thinking of (SafeSearch probably won't let you search at all...) And darned if I can remember the formal name for it. Somebody else remember? Anybody? Bueller?
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
D'ya think Tim might have some issues surrounding exclusion from the Bohemian Grove?
Giardia Nasty stuff
"My fingers Emit sparks of fire in Expectation of my future labours." William Blake
And it's not fun. My brother got it in India, and the medicine he had to take was measured in grams, not milligrams.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
An importan question:
With everybody there being an equally good candidate to be the guy whose underwear are run up the flagpole, who would they choose?
A Good Intro to NetBS