Sat Jul 5 20:16:06 PDT 2008 | One last round of invites on the way!

[Transformus Web]

Greetings Mysterians

Yes, you heard that right, we had 130 tickets and 302 users signed up
to
Transformus.com waiting to get one. Vespa is pushing the "invite"
button on
all those that were chosen right now, so look in your email inbox in
the
next few hours if you still don't have an invite!

Since there were many issues with the previous issuing of invites, we
thought it would be best to go about the last issuing of tickets a bit
more
random, and a lot more transparent.

We started with a simple randomizing script, which Sam from the web
team
created for us, and which will be available for anyone to examine, the
original zip file it was sent to me in is sitting on the server and is
available to anyone that would like to download and check it out.

Next up we went into the invite system and extracted all emails from
the
database that had the status code "0" on them, which is a number we
gave
anyone that had not been invited. Just for reference sake, 1 and 2
means
they were invited and didn't purchase, 5 and 6 means they were invited
and
now have gate codes...3 and 4 were not used.

Now, we faced the dilemma that one of us might be biased, or people
might
perceive us that way, so we needed to find a impartial person, not
involved,
to make this email list we had completely random. I brought up the
idea to
use a close friend of mine, Halcyon, from HugNation.com. He is one of
the
most honest people I know. I told him that I would send him an email
list
and a location of the randomizing script on transformus.com, and once
he got
the email list to make a copy of it and keep it on his hard drive,
then take
the emails and put them into the randomizing form and click RANDOMIZE.
Once
he did that he was to make a copy of that list and save it to his
local hard
drive, and send me a copy as well.

I should add here, that to play it on the safe side also, I sent
Halcyon a
zipped up copy of the randomizing script we used for this, so he had a
copy
of the original zip file.

Once we received the list of emails that had been randomized, we
started
with email #1 and worked our way down til we hit the 130th email in
the
list.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask, every bit of this was
done so
that everyone knows exactly what is going on at all times, but most of
all
so that the entire process remains fair and unbiased.

Thank you Vespa for coming to me, this was a fun little project for
the
night.

Parties involved
Vespa - Ticketing master, financial wizard (vespa at transformus.com)
Jace - Web team lead, insomniac x10 (jace at transformus.com)
Halcyon - Professional hugologist and pink specialist (halcyon at
hugnation.com
)

If you all get a chance, check out Halcyon's little project at
http://www.hugnation.com - and if you are heading out to the playa
this
year, be on the look out for him, and if you do see him, make sure you
stop
him and thank him for helping the Transformus community.