Dayblogging Ubercon – Day 1

Today we start our bi-annual Ubercon event. We’re up to Ubercon V, so I guess we’re an institution now, eh? We’re just getting ready to go start setup, reg opens at 2:30, and I have some small code changes and database updates to complete, so we’re off to see the.. er… hotel event manager.
I’ll try and post some updates as things go along. So far, I set up all the equipment and tested it last night, things are working fine. This was, unfortunately, before 4 of the new Gateway terminals fell off the shelf I was working on. They seem okay, nothing rattling around, but I was not in the mood for powering up my terminals at midnight to watch them smoke, so I just quietly went to bed.
Off to breakfast and setup!
Update – 4:15pm
Aaaaaaaaaand, we’re off.
Reg is open, and folks are flowing through okay. We have 4 Gateway terminals running, and 3 kiosk terminals, plus one badge printer. Equipment lossage has been limited to One (1) Gateway DOA, one bad keyboard, and One (1) I-Opener dying. We have another Gateway that’s prone to sporadic reboots, so that gets a little annoying. I need to keep the active ‘operator’ terminals at 4 – 3 just backlogs too easily.
We have a slightly different arrangement with the helpdesk this time. We ran a cable up to the helpdesk / ops desk area, and there’s a clued operator at the terminal there. If folks have problems at Reg, we can send them along to the help desk (about 50′ away), and they can fix / research / find out hte problem. They can also send a badge print request to the main printer, which is close enough that the folks don’t mind coming back over to pick up the badge. There’s never a backlog at the printer itself, so it’s really just a walkup.
I have some pictures, I’ll try and post them during the next lull.