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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 received my Blue Yeti microphone today.  It’s huge, capable of crushing lesser microphones as well as the computers attached to them and has some sort of technological juju such that every computer I’ve connected it to recognizes it.  I was in Totem, doing test recordings when I removed my earbuds and a foam pieces decided to stay in my ear. Mr. Anderson quickly volunteered his pen knife to removing it and Dan Rowley recommended a bamboo skewer but as the foam piece wasn’t actually visible from the outside. The next idea ventured was using a fire extinguisher held to the other ear as a way of forcing it out. This was confounded by the fact that I’ve grown rather attached to my tympanic membranes and the foam piece was hallow, that and the ears not being really connected.

Mike Engler provided a pair of plastic forceps that didn’t quite have the gripping strength to pull out the foam piece and I called in the medical big guns of Bridget Kelly who due to a mishearing though that I had a phone stuck in my ear rather than a piece of foam. She was unavailable so I went back to work with the plastic forceps. This is where I learned that if I leave the forceps in my ear and then raise my eyebrows, the forceps point up. Another staffer happened to have a pair of steel tweezers. I eventually met victory during the staff meeting that evening and proudly windmill-slammed the wax-covered foam piece. My ear has never felt cleaner.

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After spending a few hours to clean up the banquet area, the Scrabble board came out and Chris Fosmire, Anthony Celona, and I dueled.  We played with what I call speed rules which stipulate no more than 2 minutes per move, no consulting a dictionary, but allowing the 2- and 3-letter word lists to be on the table.  While I recognize this is both slower than tournament Scrabble and more permissive its pace is break-neck compared to the geriatric version where one can consult one of three dictionaries and actively solicit advice from other players.  I had a few notable plays:

  • In my first attempt to use all 7 tiles to spell ELOPING I created the word GLOTS.  I bullshitted that this was a colloquial term for the area comprising the glottis and epiglottis.  Chris detected my bullshit and I lost my turn, and my chance at ELOPING.
  • Creating ZING to get a triple letter score on the Z led me to play ELOPER and created the word OPE.
    Chris: What does it mean?
    Me: I have no idea, it’s on the 3-letter word list.
    Anthony: Dictionary says it’s an alternate spelling of OPEN.
    Me: That’s a special type of lazy man’s elision if it’s from the South.
    Anthony: Nope, it’s apparently Middle English and was used as AWAKE is to AWAKEN.
    Me: I don’t know if I feel smarter or dumber now.
  • My attempt at scoring big.
    Me: If you leave that trailing I open, I’ll give you a dollar.
    Anthony: IRON.  Your turn.  What were you going to spell?
    Me: QUYTING, probably for the first time in recorded Scrabble history.

I’m not as angry now that I know that QUYTING is only allowed in International Scrabble competitions and not American ones.

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Chemistry is such a love of mine that I could bear to make it a career. The sheer power represented by the most elegantly arranged chart in the history of humanity provides a predictive power only exceeded by celestial mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.  The idea of extracting a living from that fact is somewhat romantic but the realities of industry mean that relationship was doomed.  Actuarial science provides possibly better dinner party conversation and the predictive capacity but none of the power.  Maybe spending time in a clock tower with a high powered rifle with a copy of the illustrative life table would do the trick but would come nowhere near the magic calculating enthalpy or creating thermite.

Anyway, I’d finished running a training session at camp when I met up with someone who took Woodbadge with me.  We exchanged pleasantries on how neither of us had done much on our Woodbadge tickets when he saw the camera stand on my backpack.

Him: Do you enjoy photography?
Me: I guess.  Recently I’ve been having more fun doing prints but I’ve been collecting pictures from the porch of Totem.
Him: Any luck today?
Me: Not really, there was too much snow in the way.
Him: I hate photography.
Me: Really?
Him: Yep.  I hate it so much I made it a career.  I saw some of the most successful people being the ones who reduced the art to monotonous checklists and I thought, “I can do that”.
Me: How has that worked out for you?
Him: I’m booked clear into 2013.

Well, then.

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I was speaking with the OSR Program Director about some preparations for the upcoming program year.  I was following along until he said the following “oh, and I added a folder to the Network Drive that has all the stuff I use in it, everything was scattered all over the place”.  My heart jumped to a level of activity such that I lost my sense of hearing.  The network drive at camp as it currently stands represents three years of collaborative work among at least five people.  When I and two others arrived in the office, each person had a little fief on the drive and all the documents they used went in there.  So, it was perfectly possible to have three or four copies of a single file in multiple places being revised individually.  Additionally, works in progress were stored locally so nothing existed for public consumption until it was done.  The pinnacle of this idiocy was the following document tree contained on a specific computer:

User Name –> Desktop –> User Name –> Documents –> User Name and Year –> Documents (containing a shortcut to the desktop) –> Camp Stuff

This was barely outdone by another person who simply saved everything in a folder as sequentially named “document1.doc” “document2.doc”, etc.

Warring factions fighting over revisions, duplicitously recreated text generated long-hand from PDF output.  How do I present to him the fact that this choice leads to damnation and ruin?

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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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A staff member contacted me to sell his collection of Magic cards and the conversation was laced with talk of past victories, great indeterminate cards and the lure of great wealth on the resale market.  I left work early to give adequate time to review the collection and printed out two copies of my 60 page price list so we could haggle over fees and such.

I arrived, and he presented me with a stack of cards that could have been towered over by a GI Joe…  I reviewed his collection, offered him four dollars (almost as an insult), which he accepted (with glee, boo) and I walked back to my car. I spent more money in gas than I did on his collection.  I spent more money to buy a hotdog, drink and Twinkie than I did on his collection.  I spent more money fixing the hole I punched int he wall after seeing the farcical wasting of time of the visit.  Now I’ve got a new small collection I have to sort, and my hand hurts.

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I’m making a more active attempt to provide a narrative with photos, so I added some sausage-making instructions with some shots I took at camp at night.

[flickr album=72157621490786969 num=10 size=Thumbnail]

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I’m still doing PC repair for the summer camp at which I once worked and today I investigated two doozies.

  1. Operator couldn’t install Office 2003.  The box had a 4 kilobytes of free space on its  3 gigabyte hard drive.  At the time I was looking at the device I had my phone, keychain flash drive, and iPod on me giving me 30 times the storage of that device in my pockets.  Despite having 4 k of free space it ran XP on its 1.4 GHz proc like a champ.  I was slightly impressed.  I cleared off some unnecessary programs and installed Office via USB 1.1 leaving the PC enough space for a whole hour of music in MP3 form at 128k bitrate.
  2. This PC wouldn’t turn on and had a slight rattle.  I found out what the rattle was: the processor and a cooling fan.  This was a Pentium 2 that had a slot CPU that were all the rage in 1997 during the hayday of the serial port.  This one had a 20 gig hard drive and I felt someone had played a cruel trick on the other PC.  Repair that PC will consist of recycling the case and its consecrated to remove the demons that inhabited the ball mouse and 5-Pin DIN keyboard that were probably used on it.

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Returning to camp even in an ancillary role triggers Pavlovian responses to everyday occurances.  Today, I saw some kids running past the camp office and reflexively yelled “slow down, please!”

Camper 1: We’ll never make it to the shooting sports meeting if we don’t run!
Camper 2: I have an idea.  Let’s powerwalk.  Keep one foot on the ground at all times.
Camper 1 (now feverishly pumping his arms like a New Years inspired housewife): You’re *inhale* a genius *inhale*.

The geriatric sports champions of tomorrow are at Ockanickon today!