Blog

It's about time I wrote something about everything that happened at The Gathering 2006. I left the house around 8 on Wednsday, and drove by Gardemoen to drop of my sister at the airport. After driving non-stop for almost two hours I arrived at Hamar around 10. When I arrived the queue wasn't very long, they handled things very smoothly this year. After standing there for a few minutes, someone I didn't recognize came over to me, jumped over the fence and said hi. I was confused at first but understood pretty quickly that it must have been someone from Norsk FreakForum (nFF). nFF has had its own row at TG06 for a few years now, and this year I had decided I would join them, having met a lot of them since last year. He presented himself as Lord Kami (Lord_Kamikaze at the forum, Eirik in real life), and we talked while waiting in line. He turned out to be a great guy, but I would later experience that everyone from nFF was an amazing bunch of people. It's peculiar that you can meet such a big group of people, most of which you've never seen, and still it's like you've known each other for years. After getting in, Eirik helped me in with the last of my stuff, and TG could officially start. I was one of the first from nFF to arrive, so there really wasn't much to do. But I started setting up the Mario cutout I had finished a week ago. I had originally planned to hang it up somewhere, but there was no place to hang it. We ended up taping it at the spectator stands at the end of the row. I had brought materials to create a mushroom for Mario (he's jumping.. he has to be jumping for something ), so I started putting it together. There wasn't much space, people had started arriving, so I was more rough with the mushroom than with Mario. But it turned out well. When it was done we got the idea of taping it to the wall above the all the spectator seats, so we took Mario down from where we had fixed him, and put it all back up on the wall. JRP/Jon and Lord_Kami/Eirik was incredibly helpful, and in a few minutes Mario was visible from the entire stadium. It supposedly got commented everywhere, so it was definitely worth all the work. Amazingly the internet and networked functioned perfectly the first day. Previously there's always been a lot of problems the first and parts of the second day, but this year the crew had done an amazing job. All in all it was a perfect start of The Gathering.

The second day was a bit slow, but this was the day Andreas Hysing told me about the Opera competition. I was a bit sceptic at first, but then he told me the first prize was a $6000 computer. I had to take a look. It should be mentioned that my dad had loaned me his 19" Dell LCD Monitor (Well actually Linda, my step-sister, was using it.. thanks ^_^). Last year I had used a 19" CRT monitor, and it took a huge amount of space. Using a 19" LCD monitor was something out of another world, so when I saw the brand new 20.1" Widescreen LCD monitor at the Opera stand, I simply thought: "I'm gonna get that!". The competition was to make the best widget, a small utility written in javascript and HTML, for the new Opera 9 browser. I had just recently started programming javascript, and thought it was really fun, so I writing a widget seemed like a good idea. But I didn't really know what to make. I decided to play strategically. I really wanted to win, so it had to be perfect. Everything had to be perfect. I decided to make something that was useful, so what would be the most useful widget. A searching widget is always useful, but it's not enough to make just a search widget, everyone can do that. What I needed was something more, something better. When you search you're often looking about information about a subject, so what could help people do that. There are many places to learn about different subjects, so I decided to make something that would search several places at once for you, and provide you with the most relevant results from these sources. That would give people a great overview of a subject. Adding images to these results just seemed natural. At first I tought I should somehow cache the results so they would load faster when you click them, but that was quickly discarded as being too complicated. While I was thinking these things through I had a lot of input from friends and people from nFF. Especially Hysing, Moyner, Eirik and Mongeland/Mats. I decided on a name early. Drawing inspiration from my favourite text editor, TextMate, I named the widget KnowledgeMate. In the evening we all went to Hamar for Kebab. Some ordered them "Hot", which was a huge mistake (they should have taken the hint when they were asked "Are you sure?").

Friday I really started coding, I had finished the visual design Thursday, so all I had to do was code. This was also the day we started working on the rasterbation. Basically all I did Friday was coding and helping out with the rasterbation. It was a lot of work taping all those sheets together, but there were many of us, so we alternated. It was amazing seeing that huge monster of a picture come together. By night it was all done, and we started raising it. It was put up at row 1 so everyone could see it. I went back and forth between the rasterbation and the laptop. Coding a few lines, going back to the rasterbation, coding a few lines again.. It took a long time to raise it, as it had to be done properly. This was the culmination of 14 hours of work. Finally, some time after midnight I think, it was all up. It was huge, and it was a success. The worlds largest rasterbation.

Saturday came, and it was another day of constant coding. I was really set on winning that prize. What I basically had to do was add a few more search providers (I was getting good at exctracting data from the search engines by now), add image search, and make some way to set preferences for the widget. The guys at the Opera was very helpful, answering questions when I needed it. And they were also very friendly, I had a lot of good chats with them. At 15 (the deadline was 16:00) I still needed to fix some bugs and tweak the widget a bit. At this time the Windows Vista presentation started, and I was asked to join some Mac guys to make an appearance. So I sat in the conference room with the laptop coding the last bits of the widget. 10 minutes before deadline I sent it by e-mail over WiFi, and then started the long, torturous waiting for the results. I left the Vista presentation after a short while (having old things being presented as new and wonderful is really boring). After this I did a lot of different things. I watched Nineteen Eighty-Four (the movie based on 1984 filmed in 1984) with Moyner, nFF had a group photo, we had a "Syrebrilleløp". Syrebriller is made from skiing googles and a foil from LCD screens. It distorts your vision so you basically can't see anything. The run was along the booths in the west end of the stadium, one guy almost stumbled over the wall to the Opera stand. I could see the Opera guys was doing the last judging of the widgets, and it was hard not to ask who was winning. Some time before midnight I suddenly heard on the speakers "Can the contestants in the Widget competition please come to the Opera stand". I ran towards the booth, and the adrenaline started pumping through my body. I didn't know if I was going to win, but I knew I had a good chance. I had put a lot of work into it and really done my best. The guys at the stand opened some HTML pages on three screens, with the texts "3rd Prize", "2nd Prize" and "1st Prize". Then they opened a widget on the 3rd Prize screen (the prize was a headset). It was a tetris game. Then they opened a widget on the 2nd Prize screen (a more expensive headset), and it was a fancy clock. At this point I had a vague suspicion. It wasn't that the other two widgets wasn't good, but I knew now that mine was in the upper league, and it hadn't been 2nd or 3rd. They finally opened the 1st Prize Widget. There it was: KnowledgeMate. I was stunned, it really couldn't believe it. A $6000 computer system is a huge prize.. They asked for me, congratulated me on the prize and asked me to give a short demonstration. After a while I got to sit down and try the computer. Ironically the first games I downloaded was BZFlag (an open-source game with really crappy graphics) and the original Doom game. Many of my friends from nFF came over to congratulate me, many of whom had been very supportive. I spent a couple of hours playing around with my new computer. Ironically the first games I tried was BZFlag (an open-source game with crappy graphics) and the original Doom game, the temptation was too great. I had to sleep though, because I was driving home. I only got about 4 hours of sleep, but it's not that odd really.

The last day all I really did was chill out and say goodbye to people. The Gathering is closed at 16:00, so people start leaving when they can. Mongeland/Mats helped me carry my new possessions to the car, which was good because the sound system was really heavy (the subwoofer is HUGE). Good luck I brought a big car, because I had almost doubled the amount of baggage I had. After saying goodbye to everyone that was left I started driving home. There was a traffic jam from Hamar to Mjøsa, but after that it was fairly clear all the way home. I took a break about half-way home to eat and clear my head, I was really tired. Coming home to my own bed was great after having slept on a thin matress under the spectator seats for 4 days.