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The Ockanickon Leader Meeting is an opportunity to show polish. The directors deliver prepared comments, and then answer what are usually straight forward questions. This year, I did a large webpage update before the event to make sure I was on the same page as the program directors and went so far as to have a projector at the meeting showing the pertinent parts of the webpage as directors spoke. This went swimmingly until one area director decided to add two new merit badges to her program. So there she was, talking about her six badges, and there I was displaying four on my screen.

We broke for a break and a steady stream of leaders approached me in a daze telling me “the screen said four badges, she said six badged, which is right?” I told them six and got quizzical looks that said “but the webpage said 4” followed by an angry grimace that I’ve only seen before in disappointed children. I think camp finally met it’s goal of having an up-to-date web page that people could trust that inconsistencies were treated like someone just told them there wasn’t a Santa Claus. Maybe I’ll seed the leader guide with errors to keep everyone on their toes and prevent this disappointment in the future.

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I’ve done the OSR Leader Guide for the last five years and each year the criticism grows subtler and more ridiculous:

2006: Please add text.  Pictures of the master schedule and of Scouts doing activities are nice but actual text would take a lot of the guess work out. (Fake)
2007: Please drop the frames.  It makes navigation difficult sometimes and hard to send people links.
2008: Please make the master schedule clickable, so someone can click on a department and go straight to that department’s schedule.
2009: Please add option for on-the-fly printing of each page. The printable versions aren’t always updated.
2010: Please replace all sans serif fonts with serif fonts to make viewing easier in the printed version.

I can’t think of another case where someone was so willing to inconvenience everyone else and harm their viewing experience so he could improve his printing experience.  People like this should replace magicians as the inhabitants of the 7th bolgia of Dante’s Inferno.

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I got a call that someone had reported foul language on the OSR application page.  The ways that could happen are few and most involve a cataclysmic breakage of the page so my inner web master took out his tanto to prepare himself for seppuku.  I was much relieved that the “cursing” was due to me accidentally leaving the “show summary” box checked, so applicants would see an overview of what departments were most applied for and the most common phrases in multi-line sections which in this case included “hella-fuckin-balls-to-the-wall-awesome” because of someone spamming crap a few weeks prior.  The spammer’s genius was in using hyphens so the whole phrase was parsed as one glorious word.

Kids these days.

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I arrived at camp around 1 PM to check on some things and snow began falling shortly thereafter.  By the time I went to leave I was told to stay as the roads were quite messy.  So I was forced to help the Campmaster Corps eat food, watch movies, play Scrabble and kvetch about Scouting until 1 AM when the roads were clear enough to go home.  I now know why the movement has such difficulty attracting adults with such a rigorous service regiment as that.

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The degree to which Comic Sans has penetrated Woodbadge is nothing short of stunning.  Body text, banners, notes, and even our shirts are in Comic Sans.  The rest of the text of the event is done in that font where it looks like things are spelled with logs.  People are commenting about the font mix and I keep thinking “here I will start my rebellion”.

Fall at OSR included repeated volleys of shagbark hickory nuts that are capable of raising welts.  I find people’s prioritization in what they cover interesting: during one volley, everyone used their binders to cover their heads except for our Troop Guide who covered his junk.

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Bill Mischke turned 50 on Friday and I volunteered to help setup, this was run by his erudite field commander-like wife and AnnaMarie Pepper.  The 10 minute discussion of which table covering to use was fine, but the three rearrangements of the cake table taught me something:   Until today, I thought world’s most powerful microscope (that I knew of) was a scanning tunneling microscope that has a resolving power of about 0.1 nanometers.  This is sharp enough to see individual atoms and to resolve material imperfections that can not be directly seen but only inferred due to butting up against the limitations of Heisenberg uncertainty.  This may sound sharp, but I have no doubt that under the right circumstances the descriminating power of a middle-aged Jewish woman planning a celebration for a life milestone is at least twice this.

General Pictures

[flickr album=72157616996753060 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

Portraiture

[flickr album=72157616997002158 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

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Bill Mischke turned 50 on Friday and I volunteered to help setup, this was run by his erudite field commander-like wife and AnnaMarie Pepper.  The 10 minute discussion of which table covering to use was fine, but the three rearrangements of the cake table taught me something:   Until today, I thought world’s most powerful microscope (that I knew of) was a scanning tunneling microscope that has a resolving power of about 0.1 nanometers.  This is sharp enough to see individual atoms and to resolve material imperfections that can not be directly seen but only inferred due to butting up against the limitations of Heisenberg uncertainty.  This may sound sharp, but I have no doubt that under the right circumstances the descriminating power of a middle-aged Jewish woman planning a celebration for a life milestone is at least twice this.

General Pictures

[flickr album=72157616996753060 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

Portraiture

[flickr album=72157616997002158 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

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The below video is the result of a ludicrous amount of time.  Had I the chance to go back in time and change my response to Bill’s question “can you make a promo slide show for camp?” I would have said “no, I need to catch up on flossing” or something equally dumb as an evasive move such that I could run when he blinked.

The source material wasn’t exactly designed for promotional means.  The photos had a “family photo album” quality to them, which is nice for slide shows and adds a homey touch, but not too good for promotions.  Every good picture of the Water Carnival had someone mooning the photographer.

Some photos simply made no sense, such as this gem:

Joe, doing something....

Joe, doing something....

From the cropped picture it may appear that Joe just discover that his boxers were a bad place to store his loaded mousetrap collection, but it can’t be.  In the uncropped version, one can clearly make out Joe’s shorts and the only place that pain that’d induce this phase could come.  More importantly, this is one of two successive photos where Gary’s to Joe’s right (our left) holding a snake and he’s staring into the distance like someone sent a curling stone into another man’s scrotum.

Trying to find a picture of the water carnival was tough for 3 reasons:

1) The photo was underexposed or noisy
2) Dan Rowley or another member of the Aquatics staff looked like he was about to rip off a kid’s head and sharpen his ogre teeth upon their bones.
3) Some kid is mooning the camera.

Normally the last isn’t a problem as I’m rather good at removing undesirables from photographs as proven by my “no pimple left behind” treatment I’ve been called on to perform for people looking to gussy up a photo.  But, somehow the very gestalt of the picture screamed “ass crack!” such that if it weren’t present, the visceral equipment of perception would be aghast to not find a vertical smile as it condensed meaning from a cloud of data.

I don’t want to lash out at the photo takers as they’re all nice people who been given technology with little training like expecting a boa constrictor to operate a x-ray machine or an 18-year old a voting booth.  Every camera has a review function built into the LCD so while reviewing the photos I entered a near paroxysmal rage when I saw a photo that was both underexposed and noisy, followed by 22 other underexposed and noisy shots.

Finally, there was the actual content.  I excluded several COPE pictures of the mountain board operators seemingly ignoring the kids going down the hill (there’s always the photographer).  Although there were several amazingly framed shots of kids succumbing to sudden gusts of gravity from their carbon fibre death traps as the Health Lodge sign came into view.  One COPE picture actually made me smile in joy for literally minutes.

Richard Ebright - Transcription Expert

Richard Ebright - Transcription Expert

As I thought an later confirmed, Dr. Richard Ebright is an expert in DNA transcription at Rutgers, and he had the courtesy to sally forth and risk death at our COPE course after years of unfolding the mechanisms that create human life.

Gun pictures were tought to get as it was either a child who would probably be blown back as the bullet stayed stationary or a grizzled, slightly crazy adult, getting his last Charlie.  Every picture of the archery staff involved them wearing some sort of non-hat on their heads even in the Norman Rockwellesque “Son, lemme show you how to shoot” ones.  There were about 20 pictures of people cycling, but each was either a kid, thinking he was about to fall, a kid about to fall, or a kid falling. “Oh Shit!” shouldn’t be the face when one tries to inspire confidence.  I could have used a cannondale promo image, but most were out of place.

Considering we started with 13,000 photos I think we pulled out a solid 60.  Tempus fugit!