Spring Break 1997 Demo Party Report

Where shall I begin?  SB97 really started for me way back in January,
but most of what I was doing back then was all the organization stuff, which
I'll talk about later.  For the actual party I guess I'll jump to
around noon on Friday, April 4th...

Friday (you're welcome)

First big thing that happened Friday was that I was hanging out with our new
3D modeler Terrapin, who also goes to UCSD, and he asked me if I wanted him
to whip up a quick SB97 intro-animation.  Our group hadn't had time to work
on any sort of demo for it, but Terrapin was really enthusiastic about doing
things so I said "hell yeah!" and he went off to work on that.

A little bit later, Rimbo picked up Nemesis from the airport and brought him
over, and that's when things started to get busy.  Nemesis is the musician
for Miracle as well, and they had been hard at work to put together a demo
for the party.  We finally got Grimace's phone number and gave him a call
(he's the Miracle coder), and so Nemesis was able to get to work tracking for
their demo on my puter.

Rimbo and I went over to Terrapin's then to see how he was doing, and the
animation was looking pretty damn awesome already.  He'd already been
working on a complex character model for some time, and he was just fewling
around with Character Studio for the first time with it.  The animation was
going to be a little dance sequence, and then a camera-move-out to reveal a
big ol' Spring Break 97 logo.  Obviously we were going to have to set it to
music, so we packed up Terrapin's equipment, picked up his girlfriend Lava
for dance choreography, dropped by the killer espresso place on campus, and
headed back to my dorm, which fast  became CCM-central.

The next few hours were full of activity, with Nemesis getting to work on
a new tune for the Miracle demo, Rimbo helping out with some chord
progressions ("Just do C-A-F-G!"), and Terrapin and Lava hard at work on
the dance animation.  Seeing a local group in action like this really showed
me why the localized Euro groups get so much more done than the usually
remote NA groups.  The feeling of cooperation and production in my dorm room
that night even made lazy *me* want to sit down and code something!
Unfortunately that 240 pound lump of tracking divinity Nemesis was using my
puter, so I was reduced to irc'ing on my roommate's machine (making last
minute arrangements with people who were coming to the party the next day,
honest), letting my adrenalin build for the next day...

We eventually had to take a pizza break, and then not too long after that a
belated E-Megas/Miracle arrived from West Hollywood.  Unfortunately he had
been dropped off a long way from campus and had walked for hours to get to my
dorm room.  Not a good way to start off a party for him, but at least we had
plenty of Coke on hand to help remedy the situation.  My displaced roommate
returned from the movies, and he and E-Megas started talking Anime.

Meanwhile the development party was slowing up.  The dance had been basically
laid out, and Terrapin was going to take care of the camera and SB97 logo on
Saturday.  So he and Lava were ready to take off.  Rimbo decided to head home
also to take care of the cheezy dance tune for the anim.  The campus security
officer, who dropped by and almost wrote me up for another noise violation,
convinced us that E-Megas should crash at Rimbo's, so all that was left in
my room was Nemesis, focused entirely on his first 16-player CTF Quake game
(finally able to connect via my ethernet).  A quick calculation revealed that
I had to get up in 3 or 4 hours to start setting up the party, so I decided
to try and sleep.

Saturday

I woke up to find Nemesis still sitting there Quaking of course, and fell
downstairs to discover that the cafe near my dorm didn't open till 10:30,
meaning no bean for me.  Had this been a regular Saturday, people would have
died.  But luckily, I was pumped on adrenalin , so I was able to get going
anyway, packing up my stuff for Rimbo to take over to the party place when
he arrived.

Soon enough we were walking into the party rooms for the first time, with
empty tables and chairs all set up for us, and a phat generator hooked up
and bulging with juice to power all the machines.  We got all our equipment
into the room, and I set about to hooking everything up.

For some odd reason there were a lot of UCSD students studying in the lounge
outside the rooms that early in the morning.  I didn't think much of it until
I had just got my computer and stereo up and running and was kicking off the
party by blasting out Drift (check out n-waters.zip on cdrom.com!!), and
turned around to see all the people who were studying had disappeared...  Now
I wasn't really sure if there were any noise regulations of which I should
have been aware for the party.  I know that if I turn my music up that loud
in the dorms anytime, day or night, weekday or weekend, that my RA hears it
four floors down and writes me up.  And so I was feeling a little nervous
when the third or fourth song was cranking out of my stereo and some guy in
an official looking UCSD shirt came up and introduced himself as the guy in
charge of the facility.  Just as I'm thinking "crap - how low is he going to
make us keep the noise level? :(", he shouts to me over the music, "Just came
by to make sure we had laid everything out properly for you and that you were
all set up alright."  Werd.

So after not too long other party-goers started showing up and bringing in
their equipment.  I don't remember the order clearly now, but I think
Behemoth was first to arrive, who quickly got to setting up his computer
and synth.  The local trio of Beek, Psykosi, and Pfister showed up with
a computer apiece (pfear Pfister's 486/33!).  Somewhere along the line
Jester and Cinder showed up, but I never really found out who they were
until the next day - I just thought they were kewl local people who just
showed up to party.  Eventually Rimbo arrived after picking up MPuffin from
the airport.  He had flown all the way from Austin, Texas to come!  Panic
also showed up, and we just were hanging out for most of the morning and
afternoon.

I wasn't sure what was up with the ethernet lines in the party place, because
I was under the impression that the the UCSD network guy was supposed to meet
me that morning, but instead he happened to be gone until the middle of the
next week.  So I figured the lines must be set up and started playing around
with the Network Setup IP's they'd given me.  After I couldn't get them
working Psykosi suggested letting the computer know where the router was.
That helped.  And soon enough SB97 was online.  Of course, we immediately got
on IRC, and Phoenix noticed our hostname was "pcdemo.ucsd.edu".  Pretty 31337
considering *I* didn't get to pick it - the school already had it set up that
way!

But IRC'ing was of course not the main use of the ethernet, and tho Nemesis
spent a couple hours on it during the party, neither was Quake.  Turns out
most of the partiers weren't used to 800k/s connections and true leeching
power.  I had to laugh when they started d/ling something and were wondering
why the connection had slowed down so they waded through the open desktop
windows and one person noticed, "no wonder it's slow - you've got half the
Kosmic archive d/ling!"

Also of interest Saturday afternoon was the fast tracking compo - based on
a sample set Rimbo put together.  It only ended up with two entries, but a
lot of people took a stab at it - even people who didn't have
computers present were able to participate when others were experiencing
"tracker's block" and generously donated their machines.  Some had other
troubles tracking though, such as Nemesis, who fell dead asleep on Rimbo's
keyboard and was totally immovable for a few hours, until I convinced him to
wake up and eat some pizza.  Tho the entries weren't played till we were in
the theatre on Sunday, Beek really started people talking on Saturday, when
he cranked out his tune in 4 hours or so of straight pattern after pattern.
The impressive part was that the tune was really quite good, and I think a
few potential competitors gave up when they heard it Saturday.  (Btw, this
kid is only THIRTEEN years old so you may want to keep an ear on him.)
However, I probably enjoyed the tracking compo a bit less than everyone else
because I couldn't blast my stereo for its duration.  It kinda over-powers
any headphones present. :)

Around the late afternoon-early evening Darkheart/Digitalus showed up with
his CD-R and other equipment.  Unfortunately, his comptuer decided to be
extremely stubborn, and Darkheart was faced with innumerable problems, like
losing device drivers, having hardware malfunctions, and picking up a really
annoying mouse disease that appears to be contagious.  Terrapin mentioned it
happening to his computer Friday, Darkheart had it happen to him on Saturday,
and then it hit Behemoth after the party.  Weird.  Anyway, Darkheart
admirably maintained a positive spirit through great frustration and finally
Saturday night his computer began to function properly.  Lucky, too, since I
had some stuff I needed to backup on cdrom. ;)

The day was also marked by many curious UCSD people who occasionally
wandered in, some of whom seemed very interested in what types of things
we were doing.  One guy came in who must have been 40 or so years old,
was working on doctoral research involving computer imaging in the
biomedical industry, and sat down and watched some demos with us.
Unfortunately, I really messed up on the campus-wide mass email by getting it
out too late. But considering the number of people who made it anyway, and
the number of people who emailed me saying "wish i would have known about it
sooner," I think that I could generate a good amount of demoscene interest
here.

Speaking of watching demos, I must mention Saturday's most memorable moment.
Rimbo at one point was showing some people Little Green Men on his
computer and the bass thudding out of his subwoofer attracted other people
over to watch.  But some of them wanted to see it from the beginning, so they
went accross the room to watch on Jester's computer.  Well I was sort of
caught in the middle of two out of synch systems playing it and I wanted to
hear Spasm95 clearly, so started the demo on my machine as well, drowning out
the other two systems, testing the structual integrity of the party place,
and getting nasty look from Rimbo.  Three computers fast turned into six
computers, all running the demo simultaneously, and considering recent San
Diego events one wonders what a non-scener would think about the whole
affair. :)

We also discovered some other great new demos on Saturday.  E-Megas got
Rimbo to grab from /incoming/TG97/demo/rc-sand4, and I must say if you've
never heard of Rectum Cauda you must stop reading this and go watch that
demo RIGHT NOW!  Of course we had to watch Sand 1-3 as well, and Psykosi
was playing one of the textmode entries to TG97, textdemo.zip, that includes
a scene from one of my favorite movies. :P

Unfortunately, at around 11pm we got kicked out of the party room until 8am
Sunday.  Most of the people then went over to Beek's house nearby to crash.
However, the animation for Sunday still wasn't done, and there was a bug in
the Miracle demo when we plugged in Nem's tune for it, so it looked like
another CCM-party in my dorm.  It turned out much shorter than Friday night
tho, as Rimbo had to go home to get sleep before returning at 7:30am to
transport my equipment back to the party and Nemesis fell into a kind of
stone-dead-sleep in the middle of my floor after Grimace let us know that he
had the bug taken care of and would dcc the tune Sunday morning.

So all that was left was to finish off the animation, set up a script to
play the intro dance, do some credit screens, add a few more fun Terrapin
animations, and then make sure we could synch the music relatively well
using his computer to handle video output and my computer to play Rimbo's
dance tune out of FT2.  Not the neatest solution, but it worked out pretty
well.  So Terrapin started up his computer rendering (5 or 6 hours on a p166
w/ 64megs) and took off.  I then took care of a couple last things for the
demo playlist, made sure all the competition mods I had played right, and
decided to get to bed so I'd at least get three and a half hours or so of
sleep.  Then I went to turn off my roommates computer and windoze politely
informed me it had set the clock forward an hour for daylight savings,
leaving me really only 2 and a half hours until...

Sunday

Amazingly, Rimbo showed up on time Sunday morning and even more amazingly I
was able to convince Nemesis to wake up and get off my floor so that he could
go with us to the party room and go back to sleep on the floor there.  I
managed myself to stay awake with a bottle of holy water (water with caffeine
in it - can there be a more perfect drink?) until I got to the party place
and could begin work on a 2liter Coke.

Eventually around 9am the other people started stumbling in and getting back
into the party.  Darkheart began burning cd's and a couple people gave me
last minute entries to the main music competition.

But soon it was 10am and time for me to take my machine downstairs into the
theatre to start setting up for the demofest.  The setup there was f'ing
AWESOME.  It's one helluva trip to have a 30' screen hooked up to your
computer and the sound system...  Well, the only words that can do it justice
are:

:P~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ascii silliness aside, it wasn't a _perfect_ setup, just EXTREMELY close.
The projector apparently could only handle resolutions with a 4:3 aspect
ratio, leaving an ugly 40 pixel bar under the picture in 320x200.  But while
that looked bad when we were setting up, after an hour of demos the bar was
totally unnoticable.  And the sound system also had a rocky start, at first
not giving us the deafening volume that I was expecting.  But we eventually
got it working well through my stereo receiver's pre-out, and the tech guy
got permission to switch on the theatre's main amp after a couple demos.

But once we got rolling, it was just utterly incredible.  It was like seeing
Star Wars Special Edition a few months ago.  And for me it was even better in
some ways, because I was the one in control!  I've always been a big believer
in great music being essential for a great demo, and on that kind of setup
good music is even more critical.  Some modern demos with their wonderful
random morphing/envmapping effects and "experiemental" music are just
terrible compared to old skewl things like Facts of Life that flash the
simple text "BASS" in 20 foot high letters, synched into a huge bass hit
that's part of simply awesome upbeat music, music that gets even better at
extreme volumes.

Unfortunately a lot of the demos have just degenerated into a euphoric blur
in my memory, but there are a few highlights that spring to mind.  Toast.
Toast.  And more toast.  We only watched it once, but that roller coaster is
just SO AWESOME!  It was literally larger than life and just plain
overwhelming.  On the music side of things, I guess the big ones were
Little Green Men (yet again - Phoenix man, you rule) and Babylon with which I
tortured the theatre sound system big time.  I also hit them hard when I had
the groovey Heartquake music turned way up, and then came that "Revolution!"
sample that's set at a volume WAY above the rest of the music.  The only
NAID96 demo I played was Miracle's Never Assume, simply because its music
is incredible normally; and on that system it was much much better. ;)

Speaking of Miracle, we also showed their new demo EsperFlow a couple of
times.  Of course, I love anything with breath-taking Nemesis music
(anyone who can guess who my favorite tracker is gets a cookie), but
graphically it's also one of the best recent NA demos to date.  Grimace is
really magic with transitions, definitely better than any recent Euro demos
I've seen.  (Tho props to Rage's burning paper - killer idea!)  I loved all
the 2D effects of Never Assume, and with EsperFlow he kept the strong 2D
as well as showing off some interesting 3D scenes.  It's a wonderful mix of
effects that flows smoothly through the whole demo, and of course all synched
to great Nemesis music. :)  Credit also to Brazil for coding the trippy
greets effect and E-Megas for some nice scene modeling.

On the topic of productions, there was also Terrapin's animation.  We weren't
able to play it at the beginning of the session because something really
evil happened.  The animation was accidentally rendered from the static
"perspective" viewport, which if you know 3DS or are familiar with the word
'static', means no camera movement, and thus no killer camera zoom-out
to show the awesome SB97 logo.  Of course, at 9:30am Sunday morning when
this was discovered there was no time to re-render the scene from the
camera viewport, so Terrapin needed a little time to improvise.

A couple hours into the demo session he let me know he had set it up to play
the beginning of the static viewport rendering and then cut to a preview
rendering (lesser quality so much faster rendering) for the zoom out to the
logo.  Unfortunately, he told me this when I was working on a TWO HOUR run
of nonstop demos with NO reboots or crashes!  Now, I don't know exactly how
many demos that is (average 5 minutes a demo that'd be 20 or so) but I was
surprised to be going that long.  Anyone who's actually been to a big-time
demo party or ran one feel free to let me know if that's a record or
something. ;)

Anyway, I had to quit the run and power down for some machine switch arounds,
but it was well worth it.  Terrapin's animations were awesome, and even more
so on the huge screen.  I didn't even notice the reduced quality of the
preview renders at all.  They were unfortunately all really short, but he
had strung together a bunch of them, including ones he had done commercially
for Autodesk, SGI, and others.  I just wish he had been able to show some of
the happy-dancing-elephant animations he had done for the Republican National
Convention last year. ;)

Of course, after the animations my computer crashed frequently, VERY
frequently, even after new boots and in successfully tested configurations.
The only rational explanation I suppose is that there was an old-skewl
demoscene god watching over our grass-roots party but was angered by the pre-
calculated animations.... (Psi, is that you?)

But the crashes were really a minor detail that did little to mar the amazing
experience of seeing so many incredible productions on the big screen.  Not
only most of the people at the party, but also most of the non-sceners from
UCSD who I saw sitting in the back stayed almost the entire five hours.
Even more surprisingly, they laughed at the joke demos!  I guessed that
they'd get the jokes in Rope since we played it right after Dope, but Sand4
really got the most laughs out of them.  When I was organizing this I was
being formal in my presentation of what demos were, kind of playing them up
and throwing in fun buzz terms for Induhviduals.  But I think the amount of
UCSD people in the theatre (more non-sceners than sceners) showed that demos
are truly amazing productions, and outsiders really can understand "the
point" of them.  Although, I would love to know what the outsiders thought of
all those "random effect -> random text -> random effect -> naked chick"
demos...

After I had gone through just about my entire playlist (some demos just
outright refused to run - how rude!) and 4 or so hours of non-stop demo
action we decided to use the killer sound system for the music compos.
First up was the fast tracking compo with entries by behemoth and beek.
Well, I kinda already gave this one away, but behemoth's tune wasn't that
bad really for a fast tune with a sample set he hated.  However, Beek is
just the man.  Err, kid.  Anyway, make sure to get his tune from him on IRC
(it's titled "Summer Break" - his xdcc #11 I think) and first listen to it
objectively.  Then take into account 1) it was done in a few hours 2) he was
restricted to a 30 or so instrument sample pack and 3) he's 13.  Impressed?

Next came the main music compo, with entries from Darkheart, Pfister,
Nemesis, and Behemoth.  Again, none of the tunes were bad; certainly all
were better than the music for a couple of the demos that were simply painful
to listen to with that much power.  (Note to Europe: experimenting is great,
but could you make it sound good, too?)  The final results after informal
voting were Pfister 4th, Darkheart 3rd, Behemoth 2nd, and Nemesis 1st.  The
winning tune, Shadow Form, is on Nem's new disk n-waters, available on
cdrom.com (getitgetitgetitgetit).

Only unpleasant part of the music compo was one individual who was very
loudly and very rudely critizing each tune as it was played.  I think
critique and comments are extremely valuable, but their place is AFTER the
competition and IN PRIVATE.  I really hope all future party goers, whether
to small little parties like this one or to the massive parties like ASM
and NAID, will have the courtesy and decency to respect this.

Anyway, after the music compo Nemesis played parts of a couple songs from
his disk (if you haven't yet d/led n-waters.sip or aren't at the very least
d/ling it the background while you read this then you are going straight to
hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200), but we were fast running out of
theatre time.  So I cranked the volume up a few last notches and let
Babylon fly again.  It just about blew the sound system when the bass gets
really thick there in the middle, but I was so jealous of Ior when he told
me how he and Snowman played it after ASM96 was over that I just had to go
all out.  Nice tune Nec.

The next couple hours were mostly spent cleaning up the rooms and helping
some people pack up equipment to leave, but everyone was walking around
in a surreal state of bliss such that watching something on a 17" screen
or listening to something through a nice stereo would have been incredibly
lacking.  We did take advantage of the smiles and finish off Behemoth's
film, but the party thinned out heavily after that.

A few hours later we were just sitting around chatting, discussing the
current scene issues like movement to NT, hardware acceleration, and demo
design when the last great demoment of the party was triggered.  Somehow,
Mega-Ega was brought up.  Only about half the people in the room had seen it,
so before ya know it we had yanked it off of the Hornet Underground cdrom
(buyit!) and started it up.  Now, for those of you who have never heard of
Mega-Ega, it's S-Cubed's last ega demo, which he released in 94 before he
finally got a vga machine and went on to form Psychic Link with Satix and
others.  Its most notable feature is its end scrolley, which takes over
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES to read in its entirety!  Over 63,000 characters total,
and you really have to read every last one to consider yourself a true demo-
phreak.  And not only is it extremely long and gratuitous, it's FUNNY.
Really, the text is entertaining ALL the way through.

And the real fun doesn't even begin until the text stops.  Only then is
S-Cubed's brilliance fully revealed.  You know all those random bitmap
distortion effects that you see in most any demo?  After you spend almost an
hour watching text scroll plainly from right to left across your screen you
will experience incredible realtime bitmap distortion IN REAL LIFE!  Your
monitor, your desk, the picture on the wall, the ceiling light - everything
you see will be drifting left to right and swirling around eerily.  And
that's when you're not even on anything!  (A non-scener brought it to my
attention that a similar effect could be experienced just by spinning in
circles, but I felt that was like seeing Toast and pointing out that you
could see something similar by going to an amusement park.)

So half an hour or so after Mega-Ega ended, when we had stopped tripping out,
the party broke up and everyone went back to wherever they came from.  For
Nem, Rimbo, and I, that meant back to by dorm room to start calling all the
lamers who missed the party to tell them how much fun it was.  Lamer #1:
Trinel.  After ranting to him for an hour or so we decided to call up
Grimace to tell him how well EsperFlow went.  I fear what that 3 hour call
to Boston's going to look like on my April phone bill...  But we just
couldn't stop talking about the party and the scene, putting off the end of
the weekend as long as possible.  Alas, eventually Rimbo took off and Nem
and I fell asleep.

And that really ends the Spring Break 1997 Demo Party, except for the final
memory and the most surprising thing that happened all weekend: I was on time
to my 8 am lecture Monday morning.


How SB97 Was Organized

Now, putting together this party was nothing like what goes into the major
parties, but I want to talk about how I did it anyway.  I know I've always
been curious how any of these parties are put together, and I certainly had
no idea what I was getting into with this one at UCSD.  It wasn't difficult
to get it together really, but there were a lot of things I would have liked
to have known about beforehand.  So here goes...

The first step in the realization of a party here was to register a student
organization on campus, which we shamelessly called the Computer Multimedia
Development Club.  (That was probably a mistake tho since I feel embarrased
saying it whenever I have to tell some UCSD person what club I'm
representing.)  I got a few random boobs to sign their lives away as
principal members since the ASUCSD (Associated Students etc) doesn't let just
one person start an organization.  The organization (CMDC) was registered
under the "social" category because social organizations have the least
requirements and stuff.  (We seriously considered the "religious" category,
but that would have placed some silly restrictions on speech or propoganda or
something so wasn't worth it.)

All student organizations get assigned an AS staff advisor, and ours is some
old chick named Yolanda.  I think either she's warming up to us or I'm
getting better at reading her but at first I got the impression of her as
someone not too approving of our club.  (Letting Rimbo write the club
constitution was probably a mistake...)  The problem was that Yolanda is just
not very talkative.  And of course I had no experience whatsoever with
student org operations here, and not getting much info out of her was a
little frustrating.

Eventually the club got all registered and set up officially, and she was
explaining something about funding.  She was saying like, "So for example if
you were having a convention..."  And I cut her off with "Actually we'd like
to set up a convention as soon as we can."  Unfortunately, I hadn't got
around to setting up the organization until the beginning of the winter
quarter (January), so we couldn't get funding for an event until spring
quarter, AFTER our spring break.  (I Thought about changing the party's name,
but the only graphic for the party page I had managed to squeeze out of
Cataclysm's graphics artists said "Spring Break '97.")

Yolanda seemed to indicate events revolved around a "blue form" (not sure
where the name came from...) and getting it all filled out.  So I set about
going to a bunch of different people to take care of different parts of the
party.  In general, the whole affair from that point to right up to the week
before the party turned into one of those big giant run-arounds.  I'd have
some spare time between classes, go down to the student org area of campus,
talk to someone, get sent to talk to someone else, eventually get sent to
someone who wasn't there, and then try again a week later.  Now, that's not
to say it was a hopeless situation.  There are two types of run-arounds.
The first is the one where everyone you talk to knows you're SOL but doesn't
want to deal with you so turns you over to someone else.  That's bad.  But
the ASUCSD situation is one where there's so much stuff happening on campus
with so many different types of people using different types of services
so that you get referred around a bit simply because it's impossible for
anyone to know how everything works.  That's not so bad, just tiring.

So first I have to go reserve a place to have the party.  I head downstairs
to reservations and get set up with the gallery rooms for an entire weekend,
and that includes stuff like tables and chairs, all of it for free.  Kewl.

Then I go down to talk to the PC (Price Center, the main student center of
campus and where the building complex where the party was) techie guy
about projectors and screens and stuff.  He says they've got a vga projector
that they can set up in the theatre nice and easy.  "Theatre?"  I take a
second to consider watching demos in a movie theatre.  Then I try to stop
thinking about it so I don't wet myself.

I walk into reservations, tell them my name and organization name and ask to
rent the theatre.  Done.  Man this student org stuff is neat.  So to recap,
we've been set up for general party rooms and the 500 person campus theatre,
with 30' screen, 1000 watt surround system, and vga projector, all for a
total sum of $42 for tech services.  Looking good.

Well, I sit around thinking about what else is going to be needed, and also
talk to a lot of people on the net who seem interested in coming.  So I
thought that maybe an airport shuttle would be nice too, and call up the
transportation people to get an estimate for an airport shuttle.  (We ended
up NOT using it at all because only one person bothered to fly in, despite
many people who told me they would earlier on.  Oh, well.  Looks like
they'll all suffer eternal damnation...)  And after that I really couldn't
think of anything else missing (stupid me...) so I thought I was all set to
do that "blue form".

I set up an appointment with Yolanda and we get to filling it out.  After
taking care of all the basic info, she asks me if I've gotten funding yet.
"Say what?"  "You've got to get funding before you can do the blue form."
*sigh*  Luckily I still had a whole day or two to complete the funding
request forms before the deadline.  So she shows me what I have to fill out
and I ask her if that's all now.  She says yes so I go to drop it off at the
AS desk, where the secretary looks at it, and says, "Ok, you'll get a call in
next week to schedule your hearing."  "Hearing?"  *sigh*

Well, the hearing actually turned out great.  We (me and one of the boobs
who's another "principal member" of the CMDC) just had to talk to some
other UCSD students (called "senators" even tho they're kewl) about the club
and event.  Now, I wasn't exceptionally brilliant in my presentation (I mean,
no more brilliant than I usually am) but they reacted to it as if I'd just
explained how a certain derivation of the time-dependant Schrodenger
equation (ie, Dummy mode: ON) could be used to create world peace.  And then
they look at our funding request and say "oh, you're only asking for a
hundred bucks."  Success.

So finally we got to the blue form.  At this point suddenly everyone became
super helpful.  We ran into a little catch-22: since the funding
isn't allocated until spring quarter, we couldn't get official funding
documents until after spring break.  However, the reservations desk needed to
see the completed blue form two weeks before the event, that is, before
spring break.  Cute, eh?  But Yolanda worked it out, and I also got
together with the facilities guy, the tech guy, and the funding lady, who all
helped greatly with ironing out the details in their various areas.

Unfortunately, this is where we noticed we had two problems.  First, I had
been talking to Behemoth on irc and he was planning to bring lots of phat
equipment but was obviously concerned about security.  Talking to the
facility guy removed my last desperate hope that we could stay in the rooms
overnight, and I became aware of the fact that if we didn't get a security
guard to watch the place overnight, we'd have to clean up ALL of the
equipment Saturday before 11pm.  That would suck.  So the facility guy
introduced me to one of the campus police officers and we went about hiring
someone for the night.  Problem was that the funding period was over
(speaking of which I just realized it's April 29 and budget requests for next
quarter are due by May 2 *sigh*) and so the security guard's pay had to come
out of our own pockets.  Doh.

Moral of the story for all you potential party organizers: talk to EVERYONE
involved in your party arrangements and make sure EVERYTHING is covered
BEFORE you have to prepare your BUDGET.

The second thing little problem was pointed out to us by the financial lady.
On our budget for the airport shuttle we had requested funding for two half-
day rentals (Saturday morning and Sunday evening).  But when the lady looked
at it she noticed that we'd need funding for two FULL day rentals since the
transportantion office is closed on weekends and so we can't return the
shuttle after only half of Saturday.  Again, funding for the extra day would
have to come out of our own pockets.  Doh.

Moral of the story for all you potential party organizers:
EVERYONE EVERYTHING BEFORE BUDGET!!

Well, after shelling out the rest of the money we were all set to go with
the main stuff, just needed to take care of some odds and ends.  Stocked up
on phud and caffeine to serve, spent an entire week watching demos to have as
few crashes as possible, etc.  The last little mistake was not getting the
campus-wide mass email out until the day before the party.  Didn't notice
the problem with that until the week after the party when my email box got
almost spammed with messages saying "Wish I had (gotten the email/checked my
email/heard about this event) earlier because I really would have liked to
have gone."  :(

All and all though I definately was very pleased with the party, and think I
learned a lot organizing it.  So much in fact, that I'm hoping to organize
two demofests in the next two days before that budget request is due.  Wish
me luck and I'll see everyone at Spring Break '98!!

god / Cataclysm