Yesterday several of us got together for a great hiking trip at Burgess Falls State Park near Cookeville, TN. The hike is a very easy one - more like a short walk until you get to the main waterfall - and is considered to be one of the most rewarding hikes per step walked because there is so much for such a short trail. There were 11 of us hiking together and 3 more joined up later (Ob1Shinobi and his family were running late). Jeff Wee-Eng represented the 865 area code for us and Ob1 was there for the 931s. The rest of us were local to the Nashville metro area.

SkyDog even tried a new smoking cessation program with ware. Here you can see SkyDog applying the penalty for ware lighting up (which is now illegal in all TN State Parks, by the way).



After we hiked we went to Mamma Rosa's Italian restaurant in Cookeville and enjoyed an excellent meal. The stromboli there beats anything else in the entire Southeast region, and trust me, I've tried to find another as good. However, even after eating a giant stromboli, Jeff Wee-Eng ordered a sausage foot-long sub... to eat right then. Once the waitress got over the shock and brought him the sub, he ate it all up. When she came back to see if we needed anything else, he ordered a piece of chocolate layer cake. I think this boy can give Tim Ball a run for his money in eating contests.

Here is a short video of the waterfall and our resident ecotaku, Jeff Wee-Eng walking along the rocks at the bottom.

Let's take a look at a couple of words/acronyms, shall we? I'm talking about the difference between SWAG, and Schwag. SWAG stands for "Scientific Wild Assed Guess," but some people also use it as "Stuff We All Get." Both are relevant to the geek community, especially those of us who attend trade shows. I see this as silly confusion.

Wayne's World, despite it's sophomoric purpose, brought a great new word into the foreground, namely "schwing." Schwing is the word that stood for getting an instant hard-on. The motions that Wayne and Garth always made when saying it are permanently etched into the brains of anyone that has ever seen the skit or the movie. It's total pop culture, which makes it cool++;. Schwag is based upon the word schwing. Sure, you can keep "SWAG" for the crap that is given away at trade shows - the $0.12 screen printed ink pens, the logo stress balls, even the 4,298th coffee cup that I've been given. However, that 1GB memory stick with your company logo on it? Yeah, I'll be a whore for your company, just gimme that thumb drive. That, my friend, is schwag. If it's really cool stuff and the person handing it to you feels that twinge of pain at giving it away, then it's definitely schwag.

I started something new within the hacker and geek communities back in PN6. At the time I traveled extensively and spoke at a lot of trade shows. People who were paying $2500 to get in got really cool things, like laptop backpacks or nice binders or similar. Those who spoke at the trade show got in for free. Yippee. So I decided to merge the two together - if you showed up, you got schwag; if you spoke, you got in free and got schwag. That first year I was financing all of it, so the schwag was a logo imprinted pint glass and a bottle of Hacker-Pschorr beer. The next year I expanded - the attendees got one type of schwag, while the presenters and main organizers got an extra piece of schwag. Yes, I'm playing the devil here, because the purpose of this disparity is to create envy. If you want to get the extra cool schwag, you need to participate. PhreakNIC is put on by volunteers who sink a lot of time into it. Those who speak put in a lot of time as well, and are not paid to be here (well, by us... some are sent by work).

Many people know that I've been trying to hand off Nashville 2600 leadership to someone else for a while. It's time to give someone else a chance to show what they can do. However, there is a legacy that I also want to protect. The different items that we've had over the years are not about branding, or trying to become "The Gap" of the hacker world. It's also not about trying to make money - the admission fees pretty much cover the operating costs, and the shirts pay for themselves and the volunteer giveaways. The only thing related to PhreakNIC that someone should be able to buy their way into is a t-shirt, plain and simple. Yes, we can make other items easily. We could probably even make more money, but this isn't a business, it's a community project. This is the vision that the next leader of Nashville 2600 must never lose sight of, because it helps us to keep our integrity and our focus on what really matters - the convention.

That being said, this year there is no swag. There's only schwag.