For months now, Eric has been bugging me to attend ADHOC, aka MacHack. I’ve been thinking of going for a few years now; probably would have last year if I hadn’t been unemployed and/or moving at the time. So when he suggested that I’d better register soon, since the registration fees were increasing in a few days, I figured I should head over to the Web page and figure it all out.

They could hardly have designed a Web site better-suited to making me not want to attend. I started my browsing session planning to give them $450, and ended up deciding to at least postpone my decision for a few days. Honestly, the experience has me leaning towards not going at all.

First, the site is badly organized. The site calls itself the “AdHoc Blog”, and it has an accordingly unprofessional feel. Half the information is obscure or out of date (since it’s an “older entry”), and a lot of the links don’t work; they take you to the wrong pages, or don’t take you anywhere at all. There are links to online registration forms that don’t list prices, or list only student rates ($50 is a lot cheaper, but I’m sure I’m not eligible!) Hardly the best way to collect my money…

Eric was still trying to convince me to attend, so I figured I’d at least figure out what airfare and a hotel room would cost. Which is when I discovered that the Web site does not tell you when the conference is. Oh, sure, it says “July 21-24, 2004.” But for an event that purports to have a “24 hour nature,” that’s less than helpful. Am I supposed to arrive the night of the 20th and leave on the 25th? Or do I show up on the 21st and leave on the 24th? I’ve been to events that work both ways, and so I was expecting to find an hour-by-hour schedule that would tell me when I was expected to show up and leave. Instead, I found less than the bare minimum of information. Certainly not enough for a hotel or flight reservation.

It’s obvious to me that ADHOC has no interest in helping newcomers like myself (and I’ve known about MacHack for years!) attend, so I therefore have no interest in attending. I’ve been eyeing the Treo 600; maybe I’ll spend my $450 on that instead.

P.S. Eric has also written about this. His weblog gets more traffic than mine, and since he’s attended and spoken in the past, maybe he has more influence with the ADHOC folks. If they clean up their site and make it clear that they are actually running a professional conference–I should point out, by the way, that I’ve been to plenty of $50-$100 events that appear better organized than this $450 conference–then maybe I’ll think about going. I still regret never having attended a MacHack…

For the past few weeks, I’ve been playing the old classic Mac game Dark Castle on a Mac Plus emulator. It’s a game I remember fondly from when I was a kid, and playing it again has been a lot of fun. I’m on vacation in St. Louis this week–which would explain why I wasn’t posting much, except that I never post much–and I was hoping to beat the game before I got back. I think I just did. I’m not sure, though. I toppled the Black Knight’s throne. I wasn’t expecting an intricate victory sequence, but I seem to simply have been tossed into the dungeon, with my special powers reset and the difficulty level of the game turned up a notch (there are three). Do I have to beat the game on Advanced to see a real ending, or even then do I win only the opportunity to play it again?

It’s frustrating, since there isn’t much information about the game from 1986 online. I did find one walkthrough of the PC version of the game–the Mac version is slightly different but close enough to be helpful–but the author never finished the game.

Maybe I’ll see if I can’t beat it again and see if I missed something. One interesting aspect of Dark Castle is that it’s very much a practice-makes-perfect sort of game. Each level has a pattern, and once you’ve learned the pattern, the level becomes fairly easy to beat each time. Most levels, from the first to the last, started out being very daunting, but once I successfully got through them once, they became routine. So hopefully it won’t be too hard to beat the Black Knight again, and see if the same thing happens.

Or maybe I’ll just move on to Beyond Dark Castle.