Area42

From What The Wiki?!

Area42 is a loose collection of planning demi gods who get together each year on a slightly damp field in the one of the flatter countries of this planet and try to come up with a project to get off this backward piece of galactic real-estate (or at least build a gizmo which does something...preferably with lots-o-blinking lights and AI..). We have failed so far...but this time..so long suckers...

location

South west corner of A1. The big ugly green hexagonal tent with supporting sleeping quarters...

Planning methodology

In general the process works as follows:

1. Try to organize a planning meeting, which triggers a subproject:
   1. somebody suggests that a meeting would be a-real-good-idea(tm)..
   2. said somebody suggests a time and place which is almost, but not quite, entirely unacceptable to everyone (including the forementioned somebody)
   3. The previous step re-iterates until a time and date have been agreed which is invariable after the event the planning meeting was intended for. (the most recent planning meeting held on the 11th floor on 11/07/05 at 07:11:05 was actually the pre-post-hal planning/evalutation meeting)
   4. pray to the god of entropy that everybody--or at least 2 people--show up at the same place at roughly the same time..(we are completly at a loss how people would meet up before the time of mobile phones).
2. At the pre-post planning meeting everybody presents their well-prepared and sensible projects proposals which are discussed at length. We then decide on a project which invariably possibly cannot be ready on time due to people having to work for the man, lack of necessary skills (i.e. being able to deal with hardware and especially the hot thingie (hot enough to melt metal!!) (one important safety tip: handle the platic bit not the metal pointy end)..
3. The other purpose of the planning meeting is decide who is going to bring what but we never bother because we rely on the zen way of organizing:

we never bring what we plan to bring but always what we ought to bring..

Although it appearantly means that somebody ought to sleep on the floor without a comfy matras..