After Pennsic, I returned home for a week of frantic Burning Man preparation. Rob & Anna & I went and camped with Carl & Chiara. One thing I discovered was that there was going to be an 802.11b wireless network on the playa, so anyone with a laptop could connect to this intranet (internal network, separate from the internet). Some of the applications were: searching for camps, searching for events, and realtime weather data. I thought some other neat applications would be: web-based email, and searchable classified ads, so I put in a lot of time and effort (with lots of kind help from Jon Leonard) on getting linux installed on my Compaq laptop, and appropriate software to make some neat applications happen.

Unfortunately, when I got to the playa, everything changed. First, the wireless base stations weren't working as well as they'd hoped, and I had a crappy card, so I couldn't get on the network from our camp. I wandered over to the nearest station, and managed to get access there, and talked with some of the guys from the project. It seemed as though none of the applications really worked, and that not many people were using the network. It had gotten some press in Wired and other places, but being in its first year, lots of people hadn't heard about it. Also, it seemed like kinda a lame scene at the base station - a lot of people sitting around with laptops typing stuff. I mean, this is burning man - aren't there better things to do?

I think it would be really neat to have some really useful applications on a BM intranet. Things like finding other people, trading stuff, etc., that take little time but are very beneficial. For example, the Burning Bell message center does a good job of relaying messages between people, but their bulletin board is just heinous. Its a huge board covered with little pieces of paper, and its almost impossible to find anything there. But since there weren't very many users, there was no point in trying to get an application to work, so I abandoned my project and spent the rest of my time enjoying the madness.

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