CHAD DICKERSON

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THE BELGUM SANITARIUM

The story behind the ruins of a turn-of-the-century sanitarium I discovered recently in the Berkeley Hills -- the Grande Vista Sanitarium, also known as the Belgum Sanitarium after the doctor who ran it in the early 1900s.

PRESENTATIONS, STORIES

The American Way of Snacks (Salon.com story)

Slashdot controversy about scripting

Building a Media Company with Open Source Technologies (Presentation at 2000 O'Reilly Open Source Conference, aka OSCON)

Sex and Linux at Salon (Presentation at 1999 O'Reilly Open Source Conference, aka OSCON)

HICKSVILLE 200

Back when I worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1995-96), our efforts were at least partially focused on building yall.com, a tongue-in-cheek site about Southern lifestyles. One day, I was having lunch with my colleagues Duffy Dolan and Matt Konigsmark and we started dreaming up a NASCAR-like "Shockwave" game for the site, and we collectively agreed on a few key guiding principles for the "Hicksville 200," as it came to be known:

1. Controlling the race cars should be completely impossible

2. If you click on anything, it should blow up

3. Everything should blow up at the end

4. All the car sound effects should be created by us making noises into a microphone (yeah, that's me making some of those revving noises)

Some folks on the 'net thought this game was serious and gave the "game" harsh reviews for the lack of decent controls and general pointlessness of the game environment. Well, the pointlessness itself was the point -- the Hicksville 200 is a silly statement on the absurdity of NASCAR from both the participant and spectator standpoints. (Thank goodness Duffy had the sense to put a "last lap" button in the Hicksville 200 so users wouldn't have to sit through all 200 laps.) My favorite review read: "An extremely realistic simulation of a NASCAR race, crashes and all (Well, actually, it's mostly crashes.)"

Out of all the things I've had a hand in putting on the web, this might be my all-time favorite.