WC2006 - Final Information!
 

Dates Held
August 1st-August 7th, 2006
Seattle, Washington

Hotel
Ramada Inn Downtown
2250 5th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98121
(206) 441-9785

Housing Costs
Hotel rooms will probably be, at most, $130/night -- I may be able to get this reduced slightly, though. Most rooms will have four people. Those desiring fewer roommates will need to make separate accomidations. If someone cannot absolutely afford this cost but can make transportation, contact me and I may be able to set something up for you. This comes out to about $33 per person per night. This is to be paid to Trafton, who will in turn charge the rooms to credit card because he is just that nice.

Transportation is free, as Puget Sound Transit provides free downtown-area shuttles.

Food Costs
Seattle offers a myriad of food choices, from ethnic hole-in-the-walls to McDonald's. Food ranges from cheap to very pricy, as in any big city. Breakfast will not be provided by the hotel, but there are obviously plenty of Starbucks around -- this is the Pacific Northwest, after all.

Pike Place Market is the best place to find food -- but it closes fairly early, so be sure to consider that. Like Toronto, Seattle's nightlife food tends to be on the expensive side, although it does exist.

Amusement Costs
Activities are currently in their finalisation stage. We may have groups splitting off to do things according to their desires. Some things may just consist of walking around, hanging out at the hotel, or going on the bus to other neighbourhoods. Bring bus fare, and as much spending cash as you'd expect to use for this kind of thing.

Currently Scheduled to Appear
Black Ninja
Bobby aka Dizzy
Cobra
Elliot/"Me"
EvilMike
FireClaw
Gabu
iCeD
Kaz
Link
Monolith
Spanky (?)
Spotty
Tachyon
Trafton
VelKasha
Violet

Schedule (tentative)
August 1st - Arrivals
August 2nd - Arrivals (morning), wandering around downtown
August 3rd - University District
August 4th - International District
August 5th - Internet coffee gaming
August 6th - Fremont
August 7th - Departures; invasion by harrowing, kafkaesque bat creatures (event may be canceled pending availablity of bat creatures)

It's not that I don't have events scheduled, by the way, but rather that I don't have specific days for them yet.

What should I bring?
If you have any gaming devices, especially Nintendo DS, to bring, do so. There's always relaxing time in the evenings, and this would be a good time for some DS match-ups.

Discussion
Please post only important attendance-related questions here. Everything else goes here.

Did they guarantee you a block of rooms or anything like that? Because when I was just checking on Ramada's site and also Expedia, both of them said there were no rooms available for that week, Expedia elaborating that the particular problem night was Saturday the 5th.

I know things may change (or it could even be a glitch), but geez, that's kind of worrisome to see ...

I would still prefer to share my room with three other people, if it is possible.

I'm going to try and get some time off so I should be able to make it for the full thing :).

Sounds like I'll be all free, so I should be able to stay for (at least the majority of) the thing.


As of now, I also plan to bring my Xbox 360, so we can hook it up and do some of that during the 'relaxing times' if anyone's interested.

My exam schedule is friendly with this event. I should make it for the whole thing as well.

A 3 person room, as we are listed for now, is fine with me financially. 2 would be too few, but it looks like no one's going to be dropping out so everything's good.

I've bought my plane tickets, so I'll just confirm my plans here. I'm arriving the evening of Thursday August 3, and leaving on Monday August 7, and I'm staying with Bobby at his apartment.

I just thought I should let people know, I'll be coming in on the 3rd. For reasons I don't care to discuss to the wider public, I'll be unavailable the 1st and 2nd. After that, though, I'll stay through 'til the bitter end. And I'll be bringing my Xbox 360, like I said.

Which reminds me, if anyone has 2 spare Xbox 360 controllers, bringing them would be great. I only have 2, and cannot afford to buy more. Nothing wrong with 2, but 2-player PDZ when we could be playing 4-player PDZ is just a shame.

I'll bring mine. I only have 1 controller (which I use as a gamepad for my pc) but no xbox 360.

And just to clarify, I am coming on the evening of the 2nd. Can't come any earlier than that. Other than that I am staying for the whole thing.

Awesome, Mike. If anyone else has one controller (wireless or wired) to spare, please let me know.

I won't be able to come unless you can somehow find $2000 AUS for airfares. Sorry guys. I might be able to get some sort of vioce message over :D

I just bought a wired Xbox 360 controller, so assuming Mike brings his, we'll have 4. We can party with PDZ, Halo 2, or whatever. Yay.

Trafton is internetless and is unable to post for himself, but he did call me and gave me a phone number in case anybody needs to contact him (particularly if you still haven't gotten hotel stuff worked out). So if you need it, just contact me and I'll give you the phone number.

I live a little over an hour away from the hotel. Will anyone be posting specific plans so I might be able to drop by for one of the "events"? I can't commit to anything, but I'd like to try and make it.

BTW, if you're still trying to come up with free events, there are the old standby "Bigger or Better" and "Digital Scavenger Hunt".

Bigger or Better
Each team starts with a small object (say, a paperclip) and walks/rides around town trading it for something bigger or better. They in turn trade that item to someone else, and so on. The team with the biggest/best item at the end wins. (I don't know how well this would work in a city setting.)

Digital Scavenger Hunt
Someone(s) comes up with a long list of "things" (for lack of a better word) and each team tries to take a digital picture of as many items as possible.

-Nag

Those are good ideas, Onag. And it would be great to see you there. Our plans don't seem to be too clear, but we could post them here as we work them out. Or if you have a more direct means of communication we might be able to contact you directly as we come up with plans while we're there.

Just for everyone's information, my second roommate, Gabu (a non-JJ2 friend), informed me that he shall not be attending due to various health problems which ran up a considerable bill. My hotel room will therefore have just two occupants. If anyone wants to stay with us, contact me as soon as possible and maybe we can arrange something.

I'm sorry to hear Gabu can't make it, Velk.


What does anybody think about taking the underground tour of Seattle? I keep hearing that's one of the more fun general trouristy things to do.

Another thing that was mentioned but not really planned has been laser tag. Anybody want to look more into that? Link mentioned he found a place that's a bit out of the way, but someone could do more searching.

Well I'd rather do a tour like that, personally. If it's a fun tour, then I bet it would be pretty enjoyable.

As for laser tag, I'm ok with it, but I'm not a big fan of dressing up in plastic armour that smells like BO, when being shot at by 14 year olds taking a break from counter strike. Plus the place is a bit out of the way, so chances are the trip vs the length of time actually spent there would probably make it feel "not worth it". Seattle is fairly compact, which is nice because that way there's plenty of things to do which do not involve lots of travel time.

I've heard good things about the underground tour from people.

I've also heard the underground tour is awesome. We should check it out.

When you get a chance, Trafton, could you post the list of phone numbers and when people are arriving/leaving? (Or send it to people attending to avoid posting it publicly).

Alright foos, I am leaving for WC2006. You should see me in about 2.5 hours.

We're here in room 428. Got in between 4 and 5 AM from an 8 hour late train. Looking forward to rocking out!!!!

What's going on today/tonight (Saturday)? I'm planning on dropping by sometime this evening.

I'll call the hotel to make sure you'er not all dead (or out to dinner) or something before making the drive.

We're going to be heading to the Fremont Fair until this evening, but we should be back around dinnertime. If you want to meet up to head to dinner, that would be great. I'll send you a private message with contact details (or at least try to).

(This is Trafton, by the way.)

Pictures
 

I demand pictures! Did any of the group troll pictures/group Onag pictures turn out? The troll picture on my camera's a little blurry.

(and I especially want the one picture with me and Mono that Spoy had on his computer)

BN's pics (temporary mirror):

http://www.fuzic.nl/wc06/BNPIX/

I very much enjoyed the few hours I spent with the group. Unfortunately, only one of my pictures turned out...

The WC2006 Supper

-Nag

Here's some I put up: http://pics.livejournal.com/pyrzqxgl/gallery/0000sf3z.

Later edit: Now they're up on http://www.flickr.com/groups/jj2_wc2006/pool/ with the others.

Later I'll probably add a few more (though the majority of the rest are blurry) and give more of them titles/descriptions, but these are ones I had uploaded from the hotel via its flaky connections.

p.s. This is probably obvious, but after you click a thumbnail to get a larger picture, you can also click the larger picture to get a (usually) much larger picture.

Flickr only lets you upload 20MB per month. What's the best way to reduce the file size of a lot of photos all at once?

I've uploaded my photos to Facebook, however. Here and here. Let me know if there are any photos you want removed (probably not, as I fortunately missed the truth or dare game).

Flickr worked well for the EC2005 pictures, so I started a group for WC2006 here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/jj2_wc2006/pool/
Just upload your pictures to Flickr, join the group, and then add your pictures to the group.

I'm sure Google will turn up some options for resizing a lot of pictures at once. I go through mine one at a time since I like to make more adjustments, and I'm pretty sure I have more pictures to go through than any of you.

Facebook is not accessible for non-north americans I think, and at the least not to unregistered users :( That might, however, be intended for these pics.

Those two links that I posted should work for everyone. Were you able to access them? If you're not registered on Facebook you can't see my profile and stuff, but those links specifically are intended for public distribution.

In any case, though, this is just temporary and I'll have them up on Flickr fairly soon.

It looks like the Flickr Uploadr tool can do automatic resizing, and it's probably the prefered method of uploading many pictures at once.

I just uploaded a ton of pictures to flickr. I'll work on getting them added to the group.

And although my bandwidth can't really handle it, I also have videos here.

www.fooproducts.com/wc2006.shtml

I have all my pictures and videos up there, and may try to add some to flickr later. I'm aware the subtitles arn't perfect. Thanks.

My photos have now been added to Flickr. I've tagged them all, but no descriptions or titles as of yet.

Perhaps the videos could be uploaded to YouTube to save Monolith's bandwidth.

I thought I'd do some experimenting with YouTube and my three little WC2006 movies. YouTube recommends resizing videos to 320x240 for supposed best results, but then after you upload and it converts them to Flash it shows them at a larger size than that, so they both lose some detail in the original resizing and get a bit fuzzed out in the Flash resizing. I think I'll experiment with Google Video later and see which seems better, but here are two of them:

Elliot goes bowling

FireClaw and Elliot play air hockey

My third movie is a longer DDR one of you, but I had the camera on its side, and although I can rotate and rerender the movie just fine in my video editor, neither YouTube nor Google Video seem to be able to deal with footage taller than it is wide except by really squashing it. So I'll have to do some more experimenting with that one.

And going back to still photos as well as back in time, two years ago I had uploaded my WC2004 pictures to Ofoto, but now that Flickr seems to be the happening place I uploaded them there as well, if anyone would care for a blast from the past ...

Wow, that's awesome :D

I was thinking of putting my WC2004 pictures on Flickr too, but only my last 200 pictures show since I'm not a pro member. And I uploaded nearly 200 pictures for WC2006... (which means most of my EC2005 pictures are hidden now).