I ran across Eric Raymond’s advice on running conventions today. It has a number of interesting ideas, including badge ribbons, a voodoo board, a central hospitality suite, and recognition dots.

I made the mistake of heading to Barrymore’s Music Hall on the weekend for their Hallow’een party. It turned out to be a bit of a let down: the price at the door inexplicably jumped to $25 despite being advertised as $20, the band was poorly chosen, and the starting wiccan ceremony was mind-numbingly boring (kinda like going to a Catholic ceremony, except that the person leading the ceremony wasn’t a missionary from some third world country, it was an escapee of the ‘burbs).

The classiest moment of the night was when the MC nominated one of the judges for the “crowd favourite” costume prize. The judge and his posse had dressed up as the crew of Serenity. Which probably wouldn’t have been clear unless the MC had pointed it out.

Last year the ceremony was much more fun (it featured bad acting, toplessness, and movement), and the main act was a fantastic Beegees cover band. Anyhow, next year, I’ll probably head to the honest lawyer.

We had our first successful campus Green Party meeting on Thursday night, and I have to admit that I found it kind of invigorating. By nature, I’m fairly disorganized and I tend to avoid people, but I was at the top of my facilitating form. I was including as many people in conversation as possible; leading discussion to help people come up with new ideas; and by keeping a good balance between on-topic work, and off-topic social chatter. The best part was the energy of the other folks there: they seemed really pumped by the idea of organizing social events, and getting students to vote Green.

I’m really glad that I stuck with the organizing. The first few events that we put together weren’t too encouraging. We got lots of interest, but that didn’t seem to translate to getting volunteers to share the workload. I credit the Make Poverty History event with the turnaround. Four of the six people at the meeting volunteered at the MPH table, and another signed up at the event. I guess the moral of the story is that by asking people to volunteer, you get more volunteers. By asking people to help out, you build a relationship and make them feel like they have have something to contribute.

The trick now, of course, is to turn our proto-success at Carleton University into something larger. We need an active Green Party club on every university, college, and high school campus in Canada.

For anyone that has a brain-shaped jello mold, but lost the recipe, here’s a boozey alternative.

In a quest for a thesis topic, I’ve recently returned to the Wonderful World of Java. I’m poking around to see what opcodes that the JVM consumes look like. The nicest library that I’ve seen for consuming Java bytecodes thus far is bcel, it doesn’t force me to use weird patterns, just a nice easy getInstructions() call on a method object.

I digress. As part of my project, I wanted to create a enumeration that would wrap an array using Java 1.5’s generics. Something that would force the hasMoreElements() and nextElement() calls to return something other than Object. It took 10 minutes of searching to figure out that the syntax is:

class ArrayEnumeration<T> implements Enumeration<T> {
	public ArrayEnumeration(T[] a) {...}
	
	public boolean hasMoreElements() {...}
	public T nextElement() {...}
}

That’s 10 minutes that I’ll never get back.

On Monday our campus club took part in WUSC Carleton’s Make Poverty History event. The event consisted of a bunch of tables (mostly dealing with why making poverty history is a good idea, although a couple of other campus groups attended as well), a DJ, and a “drape the campus in white” event. The draping consisted of hanging a white banners from Dunton Tower. In addition, we had the local candidate speak at the event.

In order to make it look like we were there for a reason, we took the MPH platform, and dug around in GP policy, and found three points that addressed each of the MPH demands. We essentially said “The Green Party will make poverty history by…”

The listing is below:

The Green Party will improve foreign aid by:

• Promoting “fair trade” not “free trade”
• Giving money to promoting sustainable, local community level projects through microfinancing, etc
• Providing 0.7% aid target, and forgive debt for countries with a
  sufficient human rights record

The Green Party of Canada will support fair trade by:

• Placing tariffs on imported goods that are not produced in fair trade conditions
• Adding clauses to include fair trade tariffs in multinational agreements, eg: NAFTA, APEC
• Proposing that the WTO, IMF, and World Bank be place under control of the UN General Assembly

The Green Party will cancel foreign debts by:

• Providing full debt forgiveness to countries implementing democratic reform, and minimum human rights

The Green Party will end child poverty in Canada by:

• Ensuring a basic income for all families (raising minimum wage, providing top-ups to EI, minimum wage, etc)
• Providing full funding for day-care/kindergarten
• Providing family resource support centres to provide assistance to low-income families

When people came over, we explained the points, why they were important, and asked them if they wanted to sign up onto our contact list. We also handed out free buttons. People seemed quite interested, in what we had to say, in the free pins we were giving out, and in signing up for our mailing list.

Analysis

With this kind of thing it’s always worth putting together a quick analysis. I’ll use the “PIE” format that I learned at the Peace and Environment Resource Centre. It consists of three classifications “Preserve” for things that should be done if we repeat the event again; “Improve” for things that were good, but could have been done better; and “Eliminate” for things that were a waste of time, or counterproductive.

Preserve

• The basic idea was really good. It got us involved with other campus groups, as well as got us good visibility.
• The points were a good idea. Although it seemed like most people didn’t read them, it definitely made us look like we’d done our homework. Other campus party clubs got folks to drop by their table, but they all seemed to be folks that knew the tabler. We got the most political virgins.
• The Green table cloth was, as always, a winner.
• The pins were good.
• The volunteers did a great job. We need more volunteers involved in future.

Improve

• The points were just blobs of text on a white background. No pictures, no colour, not even much of a visual break between the points. That could be why nobody read them.
• We could have been more proactive in our canvassing of students. If we had had handbills with each of the points listed above on it, then we probably would have been able to have someone standing out in a more trafficked area handing them out.
• More coverage would have been great. We had the deputy leader on campus and we didn’t even get a general interview for him. If we’d given the Charlaton more of a warning, we may have been okay.
• Although I did get other volunteers involved, I didn’t delegate as much as I could have. That meant more work for me, and a less professional overall event.

Eliminate

I don’t think there was anything that we shouldn’t have done.

I’ve just tried the i-hacked tutorial on making shims to open combination locks. It works, although there are a few points they neglect to mention:

• The shims don’t seem to be reusable: with use, the tips are bent and folded back over on themselves. The folded tips make it difficult to wangle the shim into another lock. By widening the tip of the shim so that it is rounded, it may be possible to produce a more durable shim. Although making the shim out of two sheets of folded aluminum seemed promising, the two-lock barrier has not yet been broken (but the first lock is a bit easier to open).
• Using the shim involves a weird combination of pushing the shim into the lock, and pulling the lock down, relative the the “U”.

These tests were performed with the remains of a “Coke C2″ can.

Serendipity sucks. Not the movie. The weblog. The default theme is ugly. The source code is ugly. And it munges my posts.

I am now testing WordPress. It may not be any better, but it looks nicer, and the WP homepage has the tagline “Code is poetry.” Which is enough to give them the benefit of the doubt, as far as I’m concerned.

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