The first week of Camp MacGuffin has been really exciting. First I moved all my stuff into Bunkhouse 1 but realized I read the Bunk assignments incorrectly and had to move to Bunkhouse 2.
@Tripper106 is my co-counselor and he’s been rocking the PA system every day on DS106Radio which makes me super happy and productive. You should have seen all the macaroni necklaces I made during his epic setlist. Pics to come, I promise!
Other Bunkhouses have already settled on names, thinking about logos and we’re still in the brainstorming phase. I’m not even sure if we got all the brains to the table yet. But I do know we have a really great group of campers. John Johnston already created a twitter list and an RSS aggregate for us. Yippee!~
A lot of our Bunkhouse2 campers have hit the ground running. Creating assignments & doing them, completing the Daily Creates with fervour but I’m kind of worried about a couple of the campers. The woods and the swamp can sometimes take you through a time vortex and suddenly you come back to the bunkhouse and 3 weeks have passed by without doing a Daily Create, an assignment or even setting up your blog! The swamp, especially, has this swamp monster who is dreadfully boring but to be polite campers will sit down and have a cup of tea and the next thing you know four daily creates have passed!
We also have to remember to take time to comment on the other blogs in our Bunkhouse. I say this but right now I’ve got to run, I was hoping to find time to tie-dye some t-shirts and make some animated GIFs this afternoon but that swamp monster is coming my way!
QUICK UPDATE: happy welcome to @mgershovich who has decided to take the ds106 plunge (he knows it’s #4LIFE)
Getting in the spirit of camp has not been hard. I’ve loved watching my fellow campers get into the Daily Creates and other various assignments.
One problem I have run into is that of identity. I have so many blogs, social media sites, and spaces that are mine that it is hard to find a way to make them more cohesive. Most of my accounts are “shauser” or go by the nickname of “Shannon” (I hope you can figure out that one) but, on umwblogs (where my main site for ds106 is hosted) I adopted the moniker “Neo-Rev”.
Here is the quick backstory on that. Back around 2008 our beloved Reverend, Jim Groom, temporarily left us on a missions retreat. In his absence I took up a bit of the identity of “Reverend” but put my own new spin on it, hence the “Neo”. Under those circumstances Neo-Rev was born.
So, I’ve got numerous names going on in comments and on posts. At the moment I’ve adopted a style that I saw Alan Levine do where he puts his name then @cogdog in parentheses.
I think this is where we see Gravatar coming in handy. It can be a central point for various e-mails and blogs by unifying them all under one account and having a picture for that account. If you haven’t signed up for one I’d recommend it. It is a good way for people who don’t like feeling they have multiple personalities find a way to unify them all.
I’m still debating about the name I’m going to stick to for camp but, for now you’ll have to put up with my indecisiveness. Also, recommendations or ideas are encouraged
I know I was driving when I took this picture, which is not the safest way to do The Daily Create. I thought of The Daily Create and I decided to take the photograph it while I was thinking about it.
Today’s Camp Macguffin campfire hangout was very entertaining and informative. I joined the camp fire hangout this morning from work. The problem is that my workplace is not really conducive to sending audio and video, so while I could see and hear everything going on I could only participate via the text chat. So when I discovered that I could watch and listen to the hangout from Google Plus, I gave up my seat so someone else could join in and I watched from the bushes where I discovered olHatchetJack was stalking watching the proceedings.
Here’s what it looked like in my browser. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by wwnorm
This seems like a good way to get more participants especially if we use Twitter instead of the built in chat in the hangout. Late arrivals would still be able to experience the live event, kind of from the back row, and if anyone leaves early, someone else could grab the vacated spot. It just means someone in the hangout needs to watch the Twitter back channel to relay any comments or questions. I think Alan and Bryan Alexander were on Twitter for some of the time as I saw them Tweeting during the campfire.
I don’t know all the details but when the hangout started, I found our host, Alan on G+ with a notice which told me he was in a hangout. Clicking on the notice, I could suddenly see and hear the hangout even though I hadn’t joined it. I think it has to be a public, broadcast hangout to work this way. Anyway I thought it was pretty cool. The only thing I couldn’t see was the hangout chat. I think there’s a way to watch from YouTube, too.
The point of all this is that campers can participates even if they get the “hangout full” message when trying to join. I’ll probably have to use this approach for most of the remaining hangouts unless I’m away from work. I think the hangouts will be a great way to get some group interaction, so I encourage everyone to check it out. Hey, we could even have hangouts for our bunk groups too.
That’s all. Now I’ve got to go take some pictures of the sky for TDC, see ya.
This is the view from The Alsea Room in The Cliff House in Waldport where we love to stay. The dark things on the point are Harbor Seals.
Over Memorial Day weekend, Peter and I stayed at the wonderful Cliff House B n B in Waldport, overlooking the mouth of the Alsea River where it goes into the ocean. Peter wrote a sonnet while looking out the window, so I thought it would be a cool digital story to film out the window while he read his poem–and I still think it is!
Peter scopes the seals and eagles out the window of The Alsea Room.
Harbor Seals sleeping the day away at the mouth of the Alsea River. Courtesy of Greg The Busker
Today, after missing the bus and a week late, I finally made it to Camp Magic MacGuffin. Hurray for me! Once here I was welcomed by my Camp Counselor Hatchet Jack. My immediate thought was âIn five days we’ll all either be working in an underground gold mine for him⌠or be dead by his handâ. When your bio on the Camp Counselor page in the orientation pamphlet is written as a manifesto, you know you are working with someone with a sound mind. Anyhow, he seems stable enough to be a counselor and he wields an impressive handmade hatchet that he most likely made himself. Well I am off to unpack and meet everyone in Bunk 5.
On Memorial Day Weekend 2012, Peter and I headed for a weekend at Waldport. We drove up to Philomath, then drove down the Alsea River. We made a pit stop at Clemens Park and stayed a while as the larkspur was in bloom, and the river brought back memories to Peter.
I put this together like a journal entry, trying to capture the rhythm of a mind, a set of eyes, and an interaction with another person’s memory. Audio turned out rougher than I would have liked, but maybe next time I’ll get it right!
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
