tbradshaw.net

For quite some time I had been debating on whether or not to try out for the Big Cats this year. After helping out for just about every event last year, I really thought that I’d make a great addition to the team. My enthusiasm to join the team was curtailed a bit after the majority of the Big Cat season was over and there were some difficult situations with one of the key members of the group. I didn’t know if I wanted to deal with it. (That person turned out to think I might have tried out just because of them, funny how it was the opposite… I almost didn’t because of them.)

The internal debate over trying out for the group ended after hearing a new exuberance from Dave about the group and I decided to go for it. The tryouts were pretty fun and I found them mostly enjoyable–more of an informal romp than any type of real interview.

I was a little disappointed when I heard that the selections were going to be made by secret ballot from all the current members, though. I’ve been through that process too many times to count with my experience in competitive legislative debate. For those that follow that kind of thing, the current Big Cat squad consisted of one major voting bloc, a minor voting bloc, and a few squirrels. My odds were further slashed when I considered that I was likely to be a major-role noncompete with both voting blocks or in a worst case (but likely) scenario I was going to be some degree of a blacklist on the major voting bloc (for reasons mentioned at the top of the post). (No reason to guess on squirrel votes… or they wouldn’t be called squirrels.

Needless to say, I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t make it. However, I guess even I didn’t realize how much I wanted to make the team until I got the email stating that I didn’t. I guess since I am–more or less–personal friends with everyone on the team, it’s hard not to have a fairly high level of rejection from the ordeal. At least when I participated in political games competitively, the people that would vote for or against me were just adversaries. This time they were all friends.

The results were a little surprising at first, probably just because I was disappointed that I didn’t make it. However after going back over the voting process that was used, both secret balloting and the balloting method, the results are exactly as would be expected. The winners were: the clear favorite of the major voting bloc, the clear favorite of the minor voting bloc, two high compete non-threats, and a dark horse slider. The math works perfectly. If I would have known before hand how the selections were going to be made, I could have saved them some interview time. It turned out to just be a pre-game, heh heh.

But enough election game theory, it doesn’t really matter too much now. As I learned working the chambers in student congress, if you’re good enough you can even win no matter what. I wasn’t good enough and I clearly don’t have what it takes to impress the Big Cat squad enough to be on the team. Eh, I suppose I was always on the outside before anyway. Some things don’t change.

Update: I can’t sleep. Can ya believe I’m up till like 6:00am thinking about this? What a sissy!

It’s finally happened! I checked KATS just now and was elated to see that my finanical aid appeals have went through and as of today, the money has been dispersed!

This has a lot of exciting implications. One “side effect” is that my entire balance to the university has not been paid in full. This means I can finally consider enrolling in my next semester of classes! Another aspect is the fact that I can finally make payments on bills that have been deliquent (like car insurance), and importantly I’m going to be able to register my vehicles now. (I haven’t had a valid license plate in almost a year!)

The check itself is going to be available on Thursday. And then I’ll spring into action paying debts (especially credit card debts), and then putting a little bit of that towards the upcoming Jager Olympics.

If I can pull off the class work, this is going to be an awesome finish to a semester.

During my annual trips to Cambridge to visit my good friend Leary, one of the highlights is spending time at The People’s Republik. The pub is great and it’s great because of the awesome people that frequent the place. “The Regulars.”

Leary is one of those “regulars” and because of that I was let into their tight nit social group from the very beginning. The cast of characters at “The Peeps” are as diverse as the city of Cambridge and all of them bring a little bit of color to The Peeps and makes the place such a fantastic place to visit.

Sadly, some of that color is gone now. The Ed, a lawyer that I had the high honor of building bar straw constructions with on my final day in Cambridge, has taken his own life.

I’ve found the news strangely disturbing. In an “absolute” sense, I really didn’t know The Ed. We spent several nights together at the bar, joking and participating in random banter, but I knew very little about him. He was fun, friendly, and added a kind of distinguished and intelligent craziness to the experience of those nights. However–in a more “relative” sense, I still consider him a friend, just as I feel about all the great people that I’ve met in Cambridge during my stays. As Leary would put it, “He’s good peeps.”

I have no idea why he decided to leave, but I’m sad to hear that he’s gone. I hope now he’s comfortable and whatever was bothering him is gone as well.

I’ve found myself behind on blogging again, (big surprise I’m sure). One of the bigger occurances in my day to day schedule lately has been the reintroduction of my motorcycle!

Down-and-out since the end of the last season, my ol’ zx600d Ninja needed some quality TLC. I ended up taking it to Motorcycle Universe, just outside of town on K-18. This was a little bit of a divergence from my usual trips to Motorcycle Supply downtown, but the reasons were benign. While Motorcycle Supply has always been great, it was kind of clear that they focus more on parts and “easy” maintenance rather than having to do major work to a motorcycle. Tyson had good luck with Motorcycle Universe after he had a spark plug break off, so I thought I would give them a shot.

All in all, I’m pleased with their work, and they had a lot to do. I needed my stator cover replaced from a drop that happened a long time ago. (I had JB Welded it, previously… and that just didn’t quite cut it. It leaked oil all the time, everywhere.) And the engine had recently decided not to even try and turn over (for reasons unknown to me at the time).

Strangly enough, the mechanics at Motorcycle Universe said that they found the entire engine full of water. Clearly this must have been a result of sitting outside without a cover over the winter. But I was certainly not under the impression that an engine could actually fill up with water like that. In fact, neither were the mechanics. I asked what could have been the source of a bizarre result like water-filled engine. They said they really didn’t know, that a bike had never came in like that before.

Damn.

Anyway, the total bill was a little under $700, which is not that bad for what they ended up doing. They had to disassemble the bike to the point that they could pump all of the water out, then try and get things working afterwards. Not a trivial task, considering dirty water is a rather unfriendly foreign intruder to the internals of a combustion engine.

Also, getting my bike running and back under me would not have been possible without a ton of help from Forrest. I’ve been doing some tutoring for cis690 (C for Engineers) that Forrest is taking during the pursuit of his Civil Engineering degree, and in exchange for that he had my bike fixed. I’m honored that he considered my time that valuable. I can’t think of a better way to make sure that he can get all the tutoring that he wants and/or needs, heh heh.

Over the last couple weeks, my Dad spent a lot of time coming up here to visit me. While we really didn’t get to hang out enough (primarily because I was busy almost the whole time), we did spend a lot of time working on getting a speaker box built followed by a sub and amp installation for my Jeep.

It thumps… in a big way, heh heh. This still isn’t the perfect installation, mainly because the head unit didn’t have RCA pre-amp outs for a subwoofer. So I’m using a small passive device to take speaker level input down to pre-amp input levels. In general, there are just a ton of possible configuration tweaks that can be made, and I just haven’t had the time (or maybe even the talent/skill) to tweak the thing to perfection.

But after Dave gave it a little TLC, even with the levels on the speaker/pre-amp converter too high, it sounds really amazing. Previously I had a couple old paper cone Lanzar 10’s in a sealed box. It didn’t hit amazingly hard, but it was nice and punchy the way that I like it. Amazingly I found a copy of the ol’ MAIA X cd that I used to play on my old subs a bunch and I have been really pleased with the new sub. Not only does it hit lower bass with a solid hit (as I would expect from a 12 rather than 10’s), but it’s just as punchy in the sealed box as the old 10’s were. It’s really just plain better in every way.

Hopefully I’ll see Dad again soon so that he can hear what it sounds like after he did all of the work on the kick ass speaker box, and hopefully we can play more pool than we did last time.

Whelp, for several reasons it’s time that I got a development environment set up for doing PHP web application development.

First, I’m ripping out some software to handle statistic generation for our Bunker Beer Pong League. It’s partially because doing statistics by hand sucks, but it serves a higher purpose by giving me a warm up on PHP development so that I can prepare more for the rewrite of the QuakeCon Volunteer System.

Yeah, it looks like I’m going to have to give up Python for at least the web portions of the QCVS. It’s not that python isn’t suited for CGI, because it does just fine as a language. It’s just that it takes a lot to make python perform fast, and none of the environments that the QCVS runs on fall into that category. Those same environments, on the other hand, have the PHP environment optimized for Great Justice. I’m going to have a little bit more time for development this year, so there’s no excuse not to just use PHP. It’s not that bad of a language anyway, even if it is a bit ugly, heh heh.

So anyway, I’m building up a php/mysql/soap environment on my workstation so that I can work on these projects and I got totally hosed on the mod_php installation. It appears that there’s some kind of issue with cracklib that prevented it from building. Thankfully, this blog entry cleared it right up. Bonus!

Today, while checking out Planet GNOME as per my usual activity, and I followed a link from Dave Neary’s blog to an article titled “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” by Paul Graham. It’s a would-be graduation speech that wasn’t ever given, but from my read should be exactly what students should hear after high school, or maybe even before high school.

I feel like I followed his advice about as much as I could for being completely oblivious as to how the entire system worked. Of course, he has a couple points about high school that I completely missed the boat on, like “get good grades”… but that’s still a problem for me now, unsurprisingly.

Or, more specifically your web application and phone system sucks. (I know for sure at least your servicemen are cool., my Grandpa is one.)

Due to a failure in direct debit bill paying (apparently they just didn’t set it up like they said that they would), our gas bill is waaay past due. Like, past due to the point of getting shut off. So, like a diligent bill payer that realizes that he owes money, I shoot to the website to make the payment in full.

Only I can’t, because they use the Account Number as a username and then a randomly generated 6 digit PIN number as the password? What the hell is this? Do you mean that I need to have my bill handy just to make a payment? Why would I actually know my account number or giant PIN number? I just want to make one simple action, give you money!

I’m actually typing this as I’m on hold with the gas company to make a payment by phone, and this is why:

First I go to the website to pay the bill. I can’t because I don’t have my account number. I rummage around on my desk for a couple minutes to find the number, while giving them a call, hoping that I can just take care of this faster if I just talk to an operator and give them my checking account information.

Only guess what the phone system wants? That’s right, my account number. While I’m on hold for “24 to 29 minutes”, I end up searching through my email to see if any bills had came that had the account information on it. Turns out they did! Sweet. So I hang up and go right back to the website to give the account number as a username and a PIN number as a password to access my account. Only it’s not the PIN number that I thought it was (I didn’t realize that they were completely random) and that doesn’t work, for like six different PIN combinations that I often use. (Actually, all of them I use.)

So I click on the “Forgot PIN?” button to see if it can be emailed to me. It can’t, instead they randomly generate a new PIN number for you. Okay, fine. *Click*

Internal Server Error. Someone has a bad reference in their code and I get a Tomcat null pointer exception tossed in my face. Super.

More rummaging around in my email finds the PIN number from my original web application sign up. Sweet! I rush back to the website to use my Account Number and PIN number as a password to get in there and pay my payment. I get a little nervous wondering, “Surely the error page that was generated was a transaction. They wouldn’t really change my PIN number in the database, then let a programming error happen before I can actually see the new PIN number…”

Oh yes, that’s exactly what happened. Now I have found both my account number and my randomly stupid PIN number, and I still can’t pay my bill because their web app is broken. I’m on hold now, it’s 4:48pm. I need this payment in by 5:00pm or we’re looking at a service outtage.

Lessons for Kansas Gas Service?

• Your Account Numbers have everything to do with you and nothing to do with me. I don’t want to know my account number. I could give a rat’s ass about my account number. I have a name, an address, and a collection of identifiable information public and private that I already possess that can identify myself with.
• Your web application isn’t “easy” or “convienent” if it requires new swaths of information for me to keep track of in order to use it. There is no reason that I should have to have a bill right in front of me to give you money. You know how much I owe, let me pay it. See first point.
• Why in the hell would you make a person type in an 18 digit number into your phone system in order to be helped efficiently?! I’m a highly tech savvy user and I still made a couple mistakes trying to enter it in.
• Your menus on your phone system are inaccurate. I was told that if I hit one, I would go to a place where I could pay my bill. But then after having to type in a freaking 18 digit number three times, I instead got an automated voice to remind me I need to pay my bill… and that’s it!. I had to wait for your automated phone system to time-out before I was even put into a queue for human assistance.

I know that this could have all been avoided if I would have noticed that the auto-debits were not happening and just paid earlier. But surely I’m not the only customer that needs to make a last minute payment, this isn’t something that one should make difficult.

To make it super simple, I’m going to lay out how it should work:

1. I visit the Kansas Gas Service site.
2. I click on “Pay Bill” (or “My Account” as a poor substitute, then “Pay Bill”)
3. I enter a user account and password of my own design. If I’m an internet-based finance user I already do this all over the place, so I already have a username and password that I remember and want to use.
4. I am presented with the amount that I owe. Perhaps the amount that “must” be paid and the amount you’d “like” to be paid.
5. I say, “Yeah, I’m going to pay that.”
6. I provide all of the necessary bank information for the checking account.
7. You say, “Thank you.”
8. I smile with the satisfaction of a diligent job well done.

That’s not so hard. I just finished the phone call with your operator, Tina, to pay the bill (2 minutes late after holding, hopefully that will be okay) and here is the process that she used:

1. Address for the service? - I gave our address.
2. Name on the account? - I gave her my name.
3. Last four digits of your social security number? - I gave her the last four digits.
4. (While she’s typing) - I told her I want to pay the total amount due.
5. She asked for the bank routing number. - I told her the bank routing number.
6. She asked for the account number. - I told her the bank account number.
7. She verified with me the amount to be paid. - I told her that would be super.
8. She gave me a confirmation number - I wrote it down.
9. We exchange pleasant goodbyes - I hated Kansas Gas Service a little less.

Besides the glaring fact that a social security number is a crap way to identify someone (a person password is better), Tina and I got the job done in less than 120 seconds. Why can’t your web app do the same?

Anyway, the bill has been paid, I’m done ranting.

So recently on Planet Gnome a thread has came up about minimum wage. Some humorous supply and demand curve diagrams were drawn that generally illustrated that minimum wage causes unemployment (though, no scale or anything to imply the ferocity). It was all kind of humorous until Dave Neary posts this rediculous blog entry about the subject.

Here is the post in full:

Funny supply & demand curves

RML: Supply of employment is not a linear entity, nor is demand. People must work to eat. Employers must hire people to have the resources to make lots of money.

In addition, the minimum wage only affects a certain class of job. A computer company will not be able to hire anyone at the minimum wage to hack kernels, because that is a different market to the one in which the minimum wage plays a role.

In the market where the minimum wage might play a role, it’s more like perfect competition. There are N low-wage job positions to be filled, and an infinity of people willing to fill them. At 5 dollars an hour, all N will be filled. And at 6 dollars an hour, all N will be filled.

The question is what is the minimum quality of life we as a society want the bottom wage earners to have. If a mother has to get 2 jobs at your alleged point of equilibrium just to be able to pay rent & buy groceries, that’s a problem. The minimum wage is set very simply - what is the minimum someone needs to be able to be paid to survive? If people are working full-time for less than that, that’s society’s problem.

Wow. I didn’t know anyone really thought that way. At least not in this day and age. This type of analysis doesn’t even stand up to even the most basic of intellectual evaluation.

Let’s look at this a little bit, piece by piece. One thing is for certain, the market for minimum wage jobs isn’t like the job market for kernel hackers, like Dave said. But then he goes too far with this:

In the market where the minimum wage might play a role, it’s more like perfect competition. There are N low-wage job positions to be filled, and an infinity of people willing to fill them. At 5 dollars an hour, all N will be filled. And at 6 dollars an hour, all N will be filled.

To start there is no such thing as perfect competition. Not like there isn’t anywhere that actually comes close to the model because it’s an ideal. There’s no such thing as perfect competition because it is a flawed and disproven model. We’re talking “world is flat” type mentality. Second, he talks about the number of jobs that are available for those at low wages. The clear problem here is that he holds N constant.

N most certainly is not a constant. N is a number that represents the number of jobs that businesses can afford to employ at minimum wage. Even if a person grants the infinite demand for minimum wage jobs (if demand was infinite, then wages would be at 0… but anyway), where does Dave come up with the infinite amount of wealth available to pay for N jobs? By his logic, there will always be N number of jobs to fill at minimum wage even if the minimum wage is $1,000,000 an hour. Surely anyone can see that is not the case.

So why does N vary when wages change, and does it vary enough that we should care if minimum wage is changed. (Or, is the unemployment caused by raising minimum wage negligable.)

I would assert that it isn’t negligable at all. There are a couple facts that help support that assertion. First, the vast majority of workers (at least in the US) do not work for minimum wage, they work for more. Second, unemployment is highest in workers that would work for a “lower than minimum wage” if it were available. A small thought expermement shows why.

Take any given firm that has employees. They have a number of employees that they will support for optimal efficiency, we’ll call this number n. We’ll hold that number constant for this case, to illustrate that adding more employees will not increase output (no room at the firm for them to actually work) and decreasing workers will lower productivity, so they will do anything they can to avoid that.

Now, there’s a distinct possibility that the firm may have enough money that they could hire additional workers. However, they do not have the room for additional workers, so what do they do? If they can get more work out of the employees (or get better employees), they pay their employees more. It’s a documented effect that better payed employees are more productive for a number of reasons, not the least of which is morale. Firms try to hit the sweet spot for the least they can pay employees and still keeping them as productive as possible (ala, happy).

However, I’m getting a little off the point. The point is simple. Firms that have full employment, but need more productivity, pay their employees more. This means, that if a firm has more money to spend on employees, they almost certainly do not pay minimum wage. This is certainly the case in the US, where like 90% of workers work for more than minimum wage.

So, that means that the remaining firms that do pay minimum wage do not have any additional money to pay their employees. This means that if the wage mandated by law goes up, they must cut the number of labor hours proportional to the wage increase. More simply put, increases in the minimum wage always increase unemployment. Or to contradict the bizarre notion of Dave Neary, it lowers his N to N2 and means that the difference between N and N2 go hungry.

To pretend that supply and demand for minimum wage employees doesn’t exist is to not only assume infinite supply of labor, but also infinite wealth. And if we had infinite wealth, we obviously wouldn’t need something like a minimum wage, would we? Everyone would be “rich”.

Now I’d like to propose a couple scenarios for comparison and contrast.

Joe has a family of four, himself, his wife, and two kids–one 14 year old girl, one 17 year old boy. It takes them about 15k a year to survive without any type of subsidy or charity.

• Case 1: Joe goes out to get a minimum wage job, the minimum wage is set at 10k a year. Joe doesn’t bring home enough bacon, but the family gets by at a minimal level on welfare and charity. Wife and children can not get jobs, because the impoverished neighborhood they live in does not have any more jobs available. Wife and children beg on the streets for extra cash, his boy maybe steals something easy to take now and then.
• Case 2: Minimum wage doesn’t exist, and Joe gets a job that only pays 8k a year. Wife also gets a job at the same place for 6k a year, son picks up a job for a paltry 2k a year. While none of the jobs are at the previous “minimum wage” levels, now the family has a combined income of 16k. The kids get new shoes, and the parents have the dignity of bringing home enough money to provide for their families.

It’s simplified, for sure, but it makes a lot more sense than the infinite wealth that was assumed with the bogus model that Dave Neary was proposing.

I know a lot of those that read my blog have been following my grades pretty closely. For some readers (my Mom, for instance) it’s just a concerned curiousity, or for others that are fully aware of my financial situation, a really concerned curiousity.

I’ve been getting pretty worried about my grades, myself recently. So I’ve decided to take another look at my situation and see how my future stands with attaining a 2.0 and reviving my financial aid.

This time, rather than just giving my honest assessment of the range of possible grades, like I did previously, I’m just going to be ultra pessimistic and look at the worst case scenario.

As before, here’s the rundown:

• arch301 - Architecture Appreciation - I’ve gotten straight 86%’s on the exams so far. Assuming no curve what-so-ever, that’s a pretty rock solid case for a B in that class. Yeah, it should be an A. But I haven’t really attended the class regularly… ever… so straight 86%’s aren’t half bad for a crappy student such as myself.
• econ510 - Intermediate Economics - This class has boring lectures, and so I rarely attend. This is also one of the classes that gave me a “sneak attack exam”. (I just didn’t see it coming until it was pretty much too late, and I even had to reschedule it for an early morning.) That exam didn’t go well at all. So, assuming no curve what-so-ever and that I complete three homework assignments before the end of the year (pretty likely), we’re look at a C in that class. Should be an A, just like arch301… but once again, I don’t go to class.
• cis520 - Operating Systems - So this is probably the biggest disappointment. Turns out like 15% of the grade is from attendance quizes. I just don’t understand it. Dr. Dan is definitely a good enough instructor that he doesn’t need to have the attrocity of attendance quizes. As Mo astutely recognized, attendance points are the very first marker of a worthless class (the second being busy-work). Only this class isn’t worthless, it’s pretty kick ass overall. It’s a shame that I’ll get hammered for attendance. With no curve what-so-ever, I bet I get stuck with a C.
• math551 - Applied Matrix Theory - Yeah, the pattern continues and I continue to suck. I haven’t been to this class much, aced the first exam, bombed the second exam, got a final to go. This was the worst “sneak attack exam” ever! He moved an exam from April 18th to April 6th! I go and I redownload the syllabus to find out that the entire schedule for the exam had been changed since the first 10 times I downloaded the syllabus. Even Cole didn’t see it coming, and Cole’s a damn good student! Anyway, if I ace the final, I could get a low B or a high C. If I don’t ace the final, I’m betting a D would be a good guess, maybe even an F.
• cis690 - Game Programming - Enrolling in this class has been a blessing. This looks like my only solid A for the semester. I’ve done a lot of work integrating and merging codebases from various students, and we’re looking to have a great demonstration at this weekend’s open house.

So over all, I guessed that without any curving in any class, that I would go B, C, C, D, A. But I’m going to be even more pessimistic. Lets say instead of that, cis690 turns out to be a B and I just completely fail math551. That would put me at B, C, C, F, B.

The average GPA, in my current worst case scenario? That’s right… a 2.0. Exactly what I need to meet my upcoming satisfactory academic progress contract. If I pull the A and the D from cis690 and math551 respectively, then I’ll be at a 2.4. Still not good, but acceptable. If anything, I’ve learned a lot about scheduling classes and my life, and I’ll be able to do even better next semester. (Either way, baring a miracle that puts math551 at a C, it’s going to be a retake… *sigh*. The money I’ve wasted…)

Anyway, the point being. I’m not doing nearly as well as I should be, but I’m doing acceptably well to not end up cutting my K-State career short… and that’s good enough for now. I’ll just continue this road of improvement for semesters to come and maybe I might graduate college and actually be a decent student, instead of a punk whiz kid that just barely scrapes by with fortunate circumstances.

Last night I hit a major mp3 milestone for my personal music collection. I finished id3 tagging every single full album in my collection (a little over 400 albums I believe).

This sparkling fresh collection of metadata just makes a geek happy.

Of course, there’s still more to do. There are a number of albums that could use a little more id3-tlc, since they have slightly different artist spellings or something between various albums. But generally speaking, this metadata compilation plus muine (my most favorite music player evar!) has made for a really satisfying music experience.

That’s really all I’ve got for this blog post. Hopefully soon I’ll start tackling some of the really difficult to tag mp3’s, like my collection of Billboard Top 100 hits from 1940 until the present, heh heh.

Disclaimer: This is my personal blog and not an official QuakeCon news outlet. While I might talk a lot about QuakeCon activities–and I might be accurate–nothing I say is official and is completely my opinion on the way things might happen. As Nash says, “I’ll believe it when I see it at QuakeCon.” To be super clear, everything on my blog is my personal opinion only and is unofficial in every way. If you want official, check a press release.

There’s been a bit of discussion about security on the QuakeCon forums, especially regarding theft and stuff. For some reason TomServo seems to be cowboy’ing around and deleting posts. (Including mine, wtf?) Update: turns out he wasn’t going gonzo at all. Part were with permission of the poster, and Alric waxed my post. I’m reprinting my response in that thread here because I think it’s important that as an organization we are completely honest with our attendees about the risks involved in attending such a huge event. This weird censorship isn’t just irresponsible, it’s stupid. Update: Also, most of the censoring activity was because of my, um, “bold” word choice. Fair enough, I’ll leave it here on my blog where professionalism isn’t really a consideration, and be a little more careful on the QuakeCon forums.

In reply to security concerns.

There’s been a lot of positive discussion in this thread, we appreciate it. (Though, I don’t know what all of the deleted posts were about.) As the de facto security chief from last year (it wasn’t planned, it just happened), I figured I would share with you some of the inside scoop.

Theft

I think the most important concern that was brought up is the issue of theft and stolen property from the BYOC. Did it happen last year? Yes. What kind of things were stolen? Well I can’t verify an exact list of stolen items, but I know personally that a couple of video cards and a hard drive were [reported missing]. It may have been worse, it’s hard to say.

The problem with “small” (not saying cheap or unimportant) items being stolen in the BYOC can not be solved by an increase in QuakeCon security. At least as long as I’m a volunteer in the QuakeCon organization, we are not going to frisk every person coming on and off of the event floor, and keeping a close enough eye on 3200 computers surrounded with 5000 people just isn’t feasible. We’d need guards on every row!

In addition to this being a non-preventable problem… I might get worse. The reality of the situation is that QuakeCon is not an event where you can bring a computer that doesn’t even have case sides and assume that no one will touch your computer. In a perfect world it doesn’t matter, but in the real world someone is going to gank that 500 video card that’s just sitting there waiting to be pulled. All of the cool cases that we have with snazzy windows and phat lights… well they are also showcases for “could be stolen”. I would encourage everyone that attends QuakeCon to either have a “buddy system” for supervision, or–even better–bring a case that locks!

I can say with 98% certainty that no entire computers walked off without their owners. I think that’s the best balance we can get. We’ll keep an eye out for your case and monitor, you’ve gotta keep track of everything else.

Volunteer Security vs. Professional Security

The next important topic that was brought up the contrast between volunteer security and professional security. In fact, I would say the idea of “security badges” is really an attempt to find a middle ground here and treat the volunteer security staff more as a professional security staff.

I think that the most important elements of security at QuakeCon can be summed up in a few bullet points.

• QuakeCon is now too big for just volunteer security.
• Professional security was awesome.
• The Grapevine police were fucking worthless.

Previously we have had great success with out volunteer security. The time and dedication put in by volunteer security workers was and is always phenominal. But there is just only so much you can expect from volunteer security, primarily when it comes to time and attentiveness.

As the security manager, I insisted that no “guard” be stationed for more than two hours. It seemed to be just about right, the couple times that we accidently went over two hours guards were either really hurting, or had already deserted. (With reason, I did tell them 2 hours and no more. I wish they would have came and told me they left though.) It also takes a lot of untrained security to cover an event the size of QuakeCon. I mean a lot . There will always be a place for volunteer security, probably in the from of badge check and bag check, and they are always appreciated. The truth is that QuakeCon is just too freaking huge. The number of volunteer hours it takes to cover the event adequately for security is mind boggling. (As a hint, at full speed we were staffing well over 24 security locations every two hours. That’s a day’s worth of man hours every two hours. Finding volunteers to fill those positions was very hard.)

Professional security is awesome. After an important meeting with Marty and Alric we had professional security. As a dedicated security staff, they worked in long shifts and covered greater areas with expert work. A single professional security person was able to replace as many as four security locations that were previously staffed by volunteers. It was a dream come true.

The Grapevine police were worthless. Absolutely worthless. Perhaps we were just spoiled with the Mesquite Police being so awesome and helping out so much, but the Grapevine police were only interested in doing their own thing however they wanted to do it. I would go so far as to say that they had a problem with authority, heh heh. Highlights include searching for the police late a night and finding them all at a vendor booth playing video games instead of working, drifting away from security positions constantly so that they can “see what’s going on”, not staying until their replacement arrives, and just outright refusing to help when a computer was being taken from the event.

I have never been so frustrated and disgusted with a group of public servants in my life. (And I’m an active libertarian, so I spend a lot of time frustrated and disgusted with public servants.)

Improvements to Expect in 2005

So with the talk about how things went last year, here’s some things that you can expect this year.

• Professional Security will be utilized
• Grapevine Police will be present, but not relied on.
• Dedicated Security Management Personnel

We will definitely be using a professional security service again to provide the bulk of the critical security needs. Volunteer security will still be needed in a big big way. But having professional security means we can eliminate some of the “worst” volunteer security positions. (I really like the idea of not having to ask volunteers to sit in BFE, bored shitless, for hours at a time.)

The Grapevine Police will be present for “presence”. In case something gets out of hand to the point of illegality, the police will be there to take action. The difference is that instead of expecting the Grapevine police to be competent at security, they will instead be expected to be competent at looking official and authoritative in their snazzy little outfit.

We’re also going to be having dedicated security management personnel, (namely BFD and Polecat) to keep the security teams working smoothly. Last time it just kind of “fell” to the volunteer staff to handle security. We think it went well (we might have just been really lucky), but it could go a lot better. BFD and Polecat are a big part of what could make it a lot better.

Conclusion

So in conclusion. The idea of badging volunteers? Probably not. We’re going to have enough staff members already at QuakeCon that any volunteer that runs into a respect problem or something can contact a staff member and we’ll handle it.

There is already kind of a system for “deputizing” volunteers like has been described in this thread. If you think that you’re the type of volunteer that can handle situations above and beyond the “usual”, then you should talk to BFD and see about becoming one of those staff members. I don’t think that special badges will be necessary, but we’ll certainly see.

Thanks again everyone for the thought you’ve been putting into making QuakeCon better. I hope this thread post helps share the information that we have so that everyone can get a good idea of what we’re doing.

P.S. — I should mention that I was harsh on the Grapevine police officers that were working with us last year. Not every police officer was worthless, of course, as each individual is a different officer. However, on the whole, the Grapevine police deserve the verbal beating. They were awful, absolutely awful.

Travis “Ash” Bradshaw
Director of Staff
ash@quakecon.org