Wesley's Tool-Box

The OpenWireless community did a field day as one of their regular member meets and I went there after reading about it on SwingIsOn cafe. I was thinking, "isn't that community where Ryong is one of the admins?" and hesitated whether to go or not... then eventually decided to go. So they had taken up a corner in Maronnier Park...

Ryong was working to group the members into teams. After pruning the list we ended up with 6 teams.



Meanwhile, the regular members were busy exchanging info.
To the left, the mascot of SwingIsOn, Gibalgun, was showing off a handcrafted wooden stylus...



Wesley... and Mujeokjeonseol (admin of MITs community at TodaysPPC)...
Ryong in the background was still swamped with work.

Eventually, the field day went off to a start. This field day, in a nutshell, was to run around all over downtown Seoul to accomplish the given mission, relying on wireless technology. A mix of high-tech and low-tech, if you will. This community holds this field day every year. Pretty amazing.

Anyhow, this year's event consisted of one pre-mission (to sort out the team's starting time) and seven main missions in a total of eight missions which started from Daehakro and spread out to Jongro, Ryongsan(Yongsan), Yeouido, and Sinchon, covering a huge area.

Wesley was on Team 2.

The pre-mission was doing a time-attack on KartRider (popular online racing game in Korea). One of the team members had to do it, and it looked like I was the capable one (my level was Red Glove 5 at the time) so I took up the task. I drove strictly by the book, and came in 2nd place overall. I finished the Forest Tree normal course in around 2 minutes 8 seconds. Team 3 came in 1st at 2 minutes and 7 seconds.

Each team left one by one, five minutes apart by the rankings on the pre-mission. The first team started out on 3:07PM. The teams had to come to the final destination after completing the missions no sooner than 6PM sharp.

Each team was given an online map for the missions, which included specific mission goals. Each mission generally went as follows.

1. Choose a mission to accomplish.
2. To find out the specifics of the mission the team must find and enter an authentication code.
3. The authentication code is in some sort of a marker that can be found in a certain place, and the mission page shows how to get there in general. The photo below shows the banner ad that had the authentication code needed for the Yeouido mission (it was the phone number without the dashes).



4. After finding the marker and extracting the authentication code, the team enters the code to retrieve the page that contains the mission specifics. The photo below shows the contents of the Ryongsan mission, which basically asks the team to find out the shortest route between several tourist attractions.



5. After completing the given mission, the result is entered and sent to the main server wirelessly.
6. Go back to step 1 and repeat!

To accomplish the missions the wireless internet connection was a must, and sometimes this required a 'swing-phone' (a PDA-phone that works in conjunction with KT's 'Nespot Swing' service) because the mission requires something like videochat and uploading pictures or videos.

Team 2, being in the 2nd place for the pre-mission, started out at 3:12PM. The equipments, rented or owned, consisted of one laptop and two swing-phones (MITs-M4300, rw6100). Wesley's swing-phone had the Fimm240 service plan activated (unlimited data access for fixed payment). KBS (ed: actually, it was SBS) sent out three video jockies to record the field day so they could have something for the Independence Day special documentary, and one of them tagged along with our team. Maybe we could see ourselves on TV two months later.

Daehakro mission (1. Order food online)
Jongro mission (2. Take photo and video with a foreigner)
(3. Solve a maze quiz at Bandi & Luni's bookstore in Jongro)
Ryongsan mission (4. Calculate shortest route) (5. Videochat on swing-phone)
Yeouido mission (6. Hear the streaming music medley and guess the correct names of the songs)
Sinchon mission (7. Solve quiz using internet search)

Our team dealt with the missions in that order. Except for the Jongro-Ryongsan path, we took taxi for every move. In case of Jongro-Ryongsan, the 3rd mission and the 5th mission were to be done around the respective subway line 1 stations, so we used the subway to move in that case. We were lucky to have the train coming in just as we went through the ticketing and got down to the platform. We found out later that saving time by using taxi helped considerably.

The most frustrating of the missions was at Ryongsan, because unlike the high-tech image that Ryongsan projected, it had quite a poor wireless communication environment which ended up wasting our time a lot. So we moved out to Yeouido to do the actual missions after finding out the authentication code. There were lots of areas without proper WiFi, so we relied on the CDMA wireless connection of M4300 more than a few times. In fact it was a good way to keep the connection alive while moving from one mission area to next, which meant our time was resourcefully used.

By the way... upon arriving at Yeouido station, we found a strong WiFi hotspot near the public bathroom, which was quite a relief. We plugged in the laptop to the wall outlet to charge, too (our laptop already had the battery depleted after Jongro mission and we only briefly charged it at Ryongsan while attepting to get WiFi signals), a temporary fix to the mounting problems at hand. But the clock was already ticking at 5:35PM.

After rigging up the swing-phone to continuously play the streaming music, we moved to the last mission spot, Sinchon, and did our last mission inside Hyundai Department Store Sinchon. The internet search was one on the laptop, and the answer submission was done on M4300. We got two wrong out of ten answers, but after submitting the answers the clock was at 6:08PM. Weren't we already late? And we already met up with two other teams in Sinchon. Were we so far behind now? With these thoughts in mind we dashed out of the department store in a blazing speed and sped across the street spanning between Sinchon subway station and Yonsei University. Instinctively, we found the final destination, a bar named 'Suldok', and came in - the time had only gone by a minute - at 6:09PM. I still couldn't believe we could've run that distance in one minute. But if we were a minute later than this, we would've gotten 5 points shaved off the total score, by the rule of minus 5 points per 10 minutes.

But... after getting our composures back we didn't see any other teams in sight.
We were the first team to cross the finish line.



So we did a small celebration of our own. The second team to arrive was Team 1, at 6:38PM. Other teams arrived, too, at around 20-minute intervals.



And the last team to arrive was greeted with much fanfare. This was around 7:40PM. All things considered, that we arrived so early had placed our team in a very advantageous position - the closest rival for the 1st place overall would be Team 1 which came in twenty minutes later than us.

The results: 3rd place = Team 3 / 2nd place = Team 1 / 1st place = Team 2...

Our team won the day. The committee reduced the time penalty, which ended up making the difference in points quite small (only two points?), but because we got the maze quiz correct and Team 1 didn't, and because we showed that our solution to the food ordering problem was correct, not the initial answer the committee formulated, and because we saved time here and there during the missions, it all added up to keep us in the lead.

Although the pre-mission had Team 3 in the first place start, and therefore had a nice time advantage, coming in late pushed them down to 3rd place.

The prizes: 1st place = PSP / 2nd place = wireless headphones / 3rd place = 1GB SD flash memory

The prizes were handed out to each members of the respective teams.



Because the event took place on a Sunday, the ceremonial party ended a bit early (around 9PM). Here's a photo with Ryong before leaving.



Going home now... (that thing on the left is the 2nd place prize - the wireless headphones)



This day's accumulation: a t-shirt and a PSP. I never thought about getting a PSP, but came into my hands like this. This prize was probably the biggest prize I won at a community meet.

And so the OpenWireless field day ended, looking out for the next year.
I thank the other members of the team for their efforts.

From "Wesley's Filling Up of Empty Space" at Naver Blog - August 2005