Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

Fantastic Fate will be on the radio!

Woohoo! A few years ago I did a bunch of parts in a radio drama/comedy/mystery something or other 😉 It’s going to be on the radio!
May 29th – June 19th, Saturdays at 3pm on 90.3FM KFAI, in Minneapolis, and 106.7 FM St Paul.
http://www.kfai.org/
Apparnetly they’re stored online in Real Audio format for 2 weeks after playing, so folks can hear them! Yay!
Or you can buy the CD’s here

Evil friends and sailboats

It’s not news that I’ve long wanted a sailboat. I inherited a love of sailing from my dad, but the last few years I haven’t had much of a chance to exercise it. We have a small Hunter 140 up in Maine, but it is really too small for me to handle (I actually outweigh the boat). We’re looking at replacing it with something easier to manage and that can take passengers comfortably.
The current top contender is a Hobiecat catamaran. The advantage here is that when the boat is sitting on the mooring in maine, it makes a -fine- swim platform 🙂 Go out, lie on the trampoline and just hang out 🙂 Can’t do that in a monohull. Least not a little 14′ fiberglass one.
Of course, my real love is in larger ocean-racing class boats. I have a particular weak spot for JBoats having sailed J-24’s and J-30’s while sailing at the Boston Sailing Center. In fact, the only time I ever took my father out sailing (incidentally also with my nephew – who is in that pic I pointed to above – was on a J24 in boston harbor. I even named my laptop ‘Jboat’ (we tend to use boatnames / types here at homeport, oddly enough) :).
Anyway, in chatting with a friend while at Lunacon I mentioned I’d love to get a J24, if I found one for, oh, around $5000. With a trailer. Ready to go. And wouldn’t you know it, the bastard went out and found me one.
That’s pretty close to what I was looking for. It needs cleaning, but doesn’t look damaged. The one thing it lacks is a motor, but since J-24’s use an outboard mounted on a sort of swinging platform on the transom, it’s easy to mount any long-shaft motor to it.
Of course, the reality of it is… well, a) I don’t have the money now. b) I’m not -making- the money I’d need to own that boat, and c) I don’t have any way to tow that boat. Maybe if we still had the Suburban, but 3500lbs on a trailer really requires a truck of some type.
Alas. Maybe I’ll just sell my motorcycle, buy that boat, park it in the driveway, and pine for a time I can really go sailing in it.

Oops

Sorry bout that folks, we made a change to the LJ feed setup, which caused livejournal to assume all the posts happened just now. THis’ll make the postings look better (there was an extraneous link in there).

For everyone waiting…

… to hear about how the Stressy Meeting I Was Nervous About went this (Tuesday) evening, it went fine. No major stress (in my direction), lots of good feedback from people, and things in place to complete the ‘things that broke’. Another meeting or two in the works to finalize, but we’re definately now headed in the correct direction. *PHEW!*

Sore. But good.

I tell ya. For an older game staton (PS-1’s are about 6 years old now), for an old version of the game (released August 2002), for a goofy concept (“So, lemme get this straight. IT’s a video game. you plkay it on your tv. but you… dance? in front of it? like, on special pads… to club danc music? THisi s a joke, right?”) – the game is MIGHTY addicting, and a helluva lot of fun.
Besides, where else do you play a video game and burn off a couple hundred calories at every playing?
I’ve played more DDR in the last couple days than I have for a while. This is doing wonders for getting my legs in shape for biking this summer.

Truth in selling on ebay.

When you want to get rid of something, and you really want to say what you think about the item. This poor fellow has a router table he doesn’t think much of.
“This Ryobi router table is the worst thing I’ve ever spent money on. Period. I’ve wasted money on a lot of things in my life: women, cars, other things I didn’t need, you name it, but I’ve never felt like I totally 100% wasted my money on something until I bought this router table. I’ve wasted money, but I normally got some sort of satisfaction out of it, no matter how small, I got something out of it This is the most worthless piece of crap item I have ever had the displeasure of working with in my life. I have much more colorful ways of describing this but I realize that there may be some kids that will read this so I will try to keep it PG”

“Wow, nice screensaver.”

The most common comment people make while registering at the event. (behind the reg counters is the server stack that runs the app and the database. On top is a rackmount LCD screen that is running… The Matrix screensaver).

Mid-Convention, thoughts.

I’m halfway through working AnimeBoston, and here’s a few interesting observations.
1) Every hotel I’ve been to that hosts a convetnion can’t handle a large scale registration burst. There’s always screamingly long lines, and a lot of annoyed attendees. Hotel, when you book a convention on a weekend, there’s going to be a HUGE burst of activity friday afternoon / evening. Prepare for it. Also. Do NOT overbook the hotel. Really.
2) CUPS is a fantastic printing system. When you have mission-critical badge printers in a printer class, pooled, and one of the badge printers shuts down, CUPS simply shunts the load to the second printer until the first one comes online again. Booyah.
3) Sleep is good.
4) 3500 attendees in the Boston Park Plaza is a helluva lot of people.
5) Some cons get things right. These guys have order forms for the staff den. For people who work 12 hour shifts on station, they can fill out a ‘dining delivery form’ which is basically an order to Staff Den, which a runner picks up, fulfills, and returns to the worker. The form shows everything the staff den has available. You just check off what you want. Neat.
6) FRS radios do NOT work. Go decent GMRS, or go commercial.
7) Using the Stanbro room for line wrangling for Reg is a good idea. Even better is not needing it, and simply moving stanchions to make more room for gaming.
8) It’s very good to hear people say “Thi s is running SO much better than last year!” (when they were not running my system)