Guys,
I want to make one thing clear from the beginning. I don’t look at this as MY Map. It’s OUR Map (all VIPs). This is Get Rhythm and Prolijo and all the guys who started sending in suggestions for changes and updates. All I did was put mouse to mouse-pad what all of you have been sending in. This thing snowballed into a totally different project than I had originally intended, and it worked out great. El Silencioso and Admin 1 saw the opportunity to put it all together and process the community effort that Prolijo has (rightly) been pressing for. He was able to take Prolijo’s desire for a community project and execute it by coordinating all the input.
Several months ago I had Get Rhythm’s Map and Prolijo’s Map. I wanted to combine them and change them for my own personal use and preferences for my trip to SJ and put things down that I wanted. So I altered those maps for my own use. Guys saw them and started asking for copies. Then guys started PM’ing for copies and making suggestions. I decided to start from scratch so I would have a clean slate and make my own map for fun. And when I mentioned to El Silencioso that I was doing this, he suggested that we open it up for more suggestions because guys had been sending in things that needed to be done.
We wanted everyone to be able to contribute and take ownership of the project, but we wanted that to be limited to CRT VIP Members because it’s CRT that brings us all together and (no offense) if guys can’t contribute enough for the membership cost, then they aren’t really deserving of the accumulated knowledge on that level. I had my version of Get Rhythm’s map at SL and we were making copies for guys who wanted them. And there were two guys who were just clueless. I felt sorry for them. They had been in SJ for two weeks and didn’t know where to go for anything. And here I was one day in SJ and knew where to send them. I gave those two guys a copy of the map, and at the time I thought I was doing the right thing by helping them out and suggesting that they should have joined CRT and they’d know all this stuff. I regretted it almost immediately. They had decided not to join, and therefore put themselves in that position. I should have made some suggestions, but not given them the map. So from that point on I decided, I will always be helpful to anyone who needs information, but if you can’t be bothered to cough up $39, then the amount of help you get should be commensurate. Admin 1 does so much for us, and goes above and beyond any normal expectation of service, so that should be rewarded with loyalty. Sorry, didn’t mean to get preachy. Thus endeth the sermon.
We wanted it to reflect Get Rhythm and Prolijo’s contributions to the knowledge base. We did that by adopting the community effort approach that Prolijo has been describing (although not on that level yet—hopefully someone will continue working the web-site database angle), and the style and feel of Get Rhythm’s Map (which was my personal favorite feel). You can definitely see Get Rhythm’s fingerprints all over this map. It looks like his for a reason. It’s where we came from. It was our genesis and we thought it should reflect that and pay respect to that. I know he’s a big Rio proponent now, but his map was my introduction to SJ so I feel an attachment to it (yes, I’m a dork that way, I know).
This is just the beginning, there’s a lot more that can be done, and if we all work together like we have so far on this one, we can put together even more information, and make it available to an even wider audience, providing of course that they’re willing to join CRT
A couple technical notes:
The map is huge, but your pdf program should default to “shrink to print†on 8.5x11 (if it doesn’t , just check that box). I suggest you print page 2 on the back, that’s how it was designed to be done. Just turn your paper over before printing page 2.
We wanted the actual map to be large, so you could zoom in and look at things on your screen if you wanted, but still print on a single sheet for portability. There shouldn’t be scalability issues and distortion like versions in the past because of the compression capability of the pdf format.
Continue to coordinate suggestions, updates, changes etc through El Silencioso, I’m just the peasant scribe, with a bottle of ink, a feather, and a piece of parchment, stuck in a dark damp room with only the light from a small window to work by. My Masters only let me out for fresh air occasionally.
And I would like to personally apologize to Phoenix Rising for the truly miniscule length of this post. I'm sorry, I'll write more later.
it is now a souvenir shop.