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How Not to Run a Convention

I do conventions. I work a lot of them. Even though I’m not a conchair, I’ve been high enough up in the hierarchy, and worked with enough of them, to know how much work they are, and how they can go wrong.

But I’ve never seen one go as badly as this.

This is the story of FedCon USA. A Trek convention in Dallas Ft Worth where the organizer, one Tim Brazeal, apparently through pure incompetence, caused an entire event meltdown. The reasons appear to be manifold, but the causes seem to be miscommunication, poor organization, and in some cases, out right falsehoods.

On the flip side, it appears this failure is, apparently purely due to mismanagement, and cannot be ascribed to malice. He didn’t wreck the event on purpose, for profit or for some other reason – he simply screwed it up. Badly.

It should be noted, that this is FedCon USA, which only bears the name FedCon as borrowed from FedCon Germany. That organization, which is widely respected, issued a press release describing their dealings with Tim, and how he lied and alienated them as well. FedCon Germany withdrew support for the event, but Tim went on advertising that he had their financial and organizational backing:

I never in my life meet an individual like Tim. First he seems like to be a great buddy, but after a while you discover a person, who is constantly lying, apologizing and making things up. He was never straight forward, almost everything he said was a lie. I never in my life met someone who actually believes all this BS he says. He was always totally sure, what he says. But saying and doing are two totally different things. He is the person who says: “Okay no problem, i book the flights for you!” As soon as you hang up he totally forgot the conversations he just had. But if i would have told the fans earlier, I would for sure got some legal problems!”:
All i can say is, FedCon Germany (the real thing) is always a feast for the fans and if i can help out some of you at one of our next shows please let me know, just email us and sent us some proof that you purchased a ticket for FedCon USA and we give you something back at our next show.
I also think, the whole staff from FedCon USA (not Tim!!) have nothing to do with this mess and they sure worked their asses up to make some things better, but with their figurehead hiding in dream worlds, lame excuses and lies, this was just not possible.

My heart goes out to the volunteers, staff, and particularly the attendees who, in some cases, drove many hours or flew in for the event, only to have most of the guests not show (even though they were still on the conventions schedule), and have the event shut down halfway through Saturday.

So next time you’re having a hard time at an event? Think of how bad it could get, and thank your event staff.

And another one done.

Today is the last day of the National Cohousing Conference at Bentley College in Waltham, MA. I, naturally, was providing CONGO for registration and badging, and oddly enough, everything went smoothly. Systems and printers all worked as planned, no last minute badge panic, and the database worked great.
In the background, I’m starting work on Congo v2.0. I’vebranched SVN, and I’m committing against a new 2.0 branch. More on this later, but suffice to say I’m pretty excited.
As always, I learned a lot, figured out problems that need to be fixed, and made plans to add features. This was also the first time we had directly linked CONGO to a credit card payment system, though that wasn’t active at the event. Next time, however, we’ll have it all live at the same time, and won’t that be cool! 🙂
Everything’s packed up into the cases, and we’re ready to head home.
Another one done.

Housework is always better with music

Today, I’m up in Maine. The house is empty but for Zach and myself. After a morning of swimming, I’m settling down to do some work on the house, Zach is alternately reading and playing around with Scratch.
We had the wonderful Terry and Allen up since yesterday morning, with their awesome two kids, and Cat was here since Friday night. Now it’s just down to Zach and I, a sunny day, work to be done, and… music.
I rarely get to indulge in listening to music at a reasonable (cough) volume while I work. It tends to annoy people around me (hard to talk over Peter Gabriel blasting out a live version of In Your Eyes) but Zach doesn’t seem to mind, and for me, it just keeps the energy up, and makes the time go smoother.
We had a great weekend, and it’s not over yet, but with socializing and spaces, there’s always work to be done. Now I’m doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, putting away floaties and boats, and doing some repairs on the house (durned carpenter ants)… but that’s okay, because I have Radio Paradise hooked up on the big stereo, and the space to play it in.
Not a bad way to spend a sunny summer Sunday.

Hooray Dell!

Wait, what? Hooray Dell? Dave, have you gone MAD?
Nope! I finally managed to get Dell tech support to acknowledge that the fan in clipper was shot. Last time we went through a service call, the suggested fix was a BIOS upgrade. (Folks may remember the problem was that clipper would overheat doing just basic things, like just sitting in it’s dock, powered on).
As the warm weather came around again, the overheating was getting worse. The laptop couldn’t be used except under extreme circumstances that involved levering up the underside, and placing various fans around it. Hardly optimal.
On Tuesday I settled myself into a long online chat with a Dell technician, and convinced them that yes, indeed, my cooling fan and/or heatsink needed servicing, and could they send someone out please?
The fellow turned up yesterday, and after 2 hours of surgery on my kitchen table, clipper was up and running again.
Since then I’ve used the machine on my lap, in it’s dock, and run heavy duty compiles and testing on it, and I have yet to hear the cooling fan kick up above ‘normal’.
Hooray for field techs! (And I used to be one!)

Life Update – Volleyball!

ZOMG sore ouchie wow.
Yes dear readers, it must be the beginning of summer. And that means… VOLLEYBALL!
Last night I had my second evening playing (first was last Thursday). All the old muscles are creaking back to life, and ones I had forgotten existed are making themselves known. On the court, I’m playing far better for “first time out” than I was same time last year. Last night’s games included some mighty good hits, an acknowledgement from the fellow who runs the games that my hitting and blocking were such that I should be ‘switched out’ from setting (sad, because I actually like setting, but being 6’6″ tall, I really should be in the hitter position).
Probably the highlight of the evening was I was in the right hitter position, ball’s on the other side, received and passed, set to the woman just in front of me (who has -outstanding- technical form, she’s saddled by being rather short), she goes up for the hit, I time it juuust right, and go up to block. STUFFED! She glares at me, turns to the team, “ALRIGHT, Who put that damned wall there?”
Gonna be a good summer.

Things Learned on Teh IntarWeb

I look forward to Friday mornings because I get to read James Randi’s SWIFT column. It always has the latest woowoo news and other idiocies being inflicted on the world.
Today’s had an interesting tidbit, pointing to an article on Wikipedia about the Flat Earth mythology that debunks the common misperception that until modern times, it was a wide spread assumption that the world was flat.
In fact, there’s strong historical evidence that going all the way back to the ancient greeks, there was no such viewpoint (or at least it was very very limited). The misperception arose from the religion vs science debates toward the end of the 19th century, when Darwin’s writings were very much in the public eye.
Well that’s one personal misconception corrected. Enlightenment continues.

Decisions, Decisions.

So a rare alignment of the planets has happened, and I have a little bit of cash available. Enough to not only pay off some credit card debt (wootah), but also indulge in a little toybuying. Of course, the eternal question comes up, what should I do with it?

Here’s the current list of candidates, in a very rough order of preference. It is possible to get more than one, but I’d like to keep things down to somewhat reasonable.

  • EeePC or similar small-mobile laptop (Approx $350)
    I’ve been hauling Clipper around as my primary ‘mobile’ machine for about 2 years now. It’s large, heavy, runs RIDICULOUSLY hot, and is saddled with WindowsXP. I don’t need to have a Core2 running just to get my email and chat on IRC, or SSH places. An EeePC will do 95% of what I need to do when out and about, at a fraction of the power and weight.
  • A Nokia N95 ($590?)
    Boy o boy is this a sexy phone. I’m tired of my Treo and it’s abysmal 2′ range on Bluetooth. The N95 is a beautiful platform. I’d need to change providers to AT&T though, and that means getting off my wife’s phone plan. Complex and dangerous!
  • Get Rock Band ($170)
    This is pure unadulterated Fun. Zach loves playing it, I have a Playstation 2 to run it on. I wanna beat some drums! (Probably add another $30 or so for a second guitar)
  • Upgrade my desktop machine(Approx $200)
    I’m realizing my desktop machine, yawl is not the powerhouse I had thought it would be. Sure it says Pentium 4 2.26gig, but the P4 CPU is an absolute dog. I can get a motherboard, ram, and CPU from newegg that will outperform this machine for $150-$200. I even have a chassis to put it in.
  • Decent GPS ($300)
    My travails with my Mobile Crossing GPS are well documented, and that machine has now been tossed into the trunk, awaiting some other project. There are several really good GPS platforms around now, and getting one for the my car (Cat has one built into her Prius) is on the list of “really want”s. The TomTom 910 was on the top of my list last time I did this search, as the platform is very good, and it includes blueooth hands-free usage for my phone. A total bonus. Looking around, it looks like the 910 has really come down in price ($300?).
  • A new monitor ($200?)
    You’d think I had enough monitors. But I sacrificed one of my monitors to the Mame cabinet, which leaves me with a really poor 1024×768 monitor as screen #3. I’d like to get another Dell 19″er.
  • Upgrade the Mame cabinet ($100)
    Rebuilding the controller on the Mame cabinet would be a win – I’d like a trackball and some better joysticks. Not really a big expense – it’s more work than cost. But still on the wishlist.
  • Zoom lens for the Canon (Approx $600)
  • Flash for the Canon (Approx $250)

Decisions, decisions…

Ikariam Screws the Pooch

AAAARGGGHHH!
So, I’ve been having some fun playing Ikariam for the last month or two. It’s a low-key, enjoyable game. I’m part of a large alliance, my cities are growing nicely, I’m not involved in any wars. Spiffy.
Lately I’ve been making a move to expand my settlements from 3 to 4 cities. This requires an ENORMOUS investment in resources and logistics (it’s one of the throttles on the game that limits expansionism). Last night I decided to move my resources to the last city that needs to be expanded before I build my new settlement. This involves loading a lot of ships, sending them off, and making sure there’s space to receive them.
This morning, I look, and all the resources I set to ship between the cities has vanished.
I’ve seen this happen once or twice before. It usually means the location I’m heading to isn’t large enough to accept the shipment or something. But having the results of weeks of manufacturing just vanish has me totally ticked off.
If this is a bug in Ikariam, they need to fix it. If this is normal gameplay, it would be nice to NOTIFY a player when something they’re doing is going to cause a major financial loss.
Right now I’m considering ditching the game and moving on. The tediousness of recreating all that material and re-shipping it is something I’m not too inspired to do, particularly if there’s some chance of it all disappearing silently again.

Oh yeah.




on the lake

Originally uploaded by eidolon

Now I remember why we come up here.

Today we spent the day doing the ‘second’ phase of prepwork necessary to get the Maine house ready for the summer. Last weekend was plumbing, electrical, and ‘gross’ maintenance. Today was things like leafblowing and mowing the field, other basic house repairs, and the big project of re-installing the docks.

We have a two section floating dock that is stored on shore for the winter. Moving it back onto the lake and into position involves some pulleys, a tow vehicle, 150′ of heavy line, and a lot of muscle. All in all, it went smoothly, but boy is it a lot of work.

Tonight it’s cool, quiet, and done. We had a great grilled dinner with friends from DownLake, and now the house is quiet, aside from the MIL watching the Celtics game (one of the few times the TV is turned on).

We did retrieve our Caravelle powerboat from it’s winter storage, and it’s sitting on the trailer in the field. Tomorrow we’ll launch it and, if it’s warm enough, we’ll get some skiing and tubing in.

It’s good to be back.

The Cellphone Blues.


Ya’ll are probably tired of me yammering about phones, feel free to ‘n’ or ‘^W’ or whatever you do to skip this posting.
As mentioned previously, I’m getting pretty tired of my Treo. It works okay, though it’s really aging. Physically too large for the features it offers, absolutely dreadful Bluetooth support… it’s really time to move on.
The problem is, the offerings are slim. In my previous posting, Matt commented regarding the Nokia N95. All in all, it looks like a fantastic phone. There’s only a few small problems.
First and foremost, no one has it! It was released in europe, and there is a US version, but none of the carriers are carrying it. You can order it from Nokia, but then you have to go through the joy of getting it one of the US networks, and even then it’ll only be T-Mobile or AT&T. There’s some noise about a ‘north american version’ for lower frequency WCDMA stuff, but I’m really lost about the offerings here.
Second, it’s very expensive. The lowest price I’ve seen is in the $595 range, and the highest I’ve seen is over $800. Now, granted, this things is basically a laptop in phone form. Wifi, GPS, acceleromter, 3d accelerated graphics, media player, SD slot, bluetooth, kick butt CPU, etc. The reviewers are showing people happily networking via bluetooth through it onto the data network (something Verizon actively blocks, for totally unknown reasons).
IF I knew I could order an N95, walk into an AT&T store and activate it, and IF I could get a reasonable data plan on it, so I could use it as my primary wireless ‘gateway’ for my laptop(s), and IF there weren’t any major obstacles I’m not seeing (like, oh, there are no plans that can do SMS + Data + voice for something < $200 a month), I'd be seriously ready to do this. But there's too many unknowns, too many variables.
And. I can't find anyone in the Boston area who HAS one, so I can't even get one in my hands to play with it.
Growl!

Clinton Digs Herself in Deeper

In the beginning, I was a fair supporter of Hillary. I thought she had the chops to do the job, and would be professional, honest, and hard working.

But as this race winds down, and for all intents and purposes, it’s over, she’s getting more vicious, more whacked, and just plain Not Making Any Sense.

I give as the latest example, as reported via ABCnews blogger Jake Tapper:

In Florida today, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., vociferously pushed her argument that the disqualified contests in Michigan and Florida should count, even though the DNC said the contests didn’t count, no candidate campaigned in either state, and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., along with many other Democratic candidates, was not even on the Michigan ballot.

“I believe the Democratic Party must count these votes. They should count them exactly as they were cast,” she said in Palm Beach County, per ABC News’ Eloise Harper, apparently meaning that she should receive more than 300,000 votes from Michigan and Obama should receive zero.

In Sunrise, Fla., Clinton assailed countries “where votes don’t count. People go through the motions of an election only to have it discarded and disregarded. We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe — tragically an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people. So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote.”

As GC said… “Wait, WHAT?” Not only does this comparison make no sense whatsoever, but as Jake says later in his post, Clinton didn’t make an issue of this until she started losing so badly, AND her own advisor, who is on the DNC rules and regulations committee, voted not to count Michigan and Florida’s votes. Continuing from there, the states themselves broke the rules, as they themselves say, to try and bolster their position in the election process. The DNS’s rules are there for a reason. Break the rules, you don’t get seated. Done and done.

Mrs. Clinton, shut the hell up. You’re doing a disservice to yourself, the democratic party, and the entire election process. How you can possibly think what you’re doing is positive for any American besides yourself (and even then I disagree) I cannot fathom.

Obstacles

It’s frustrating when you chalk out a specific block of time to Get Stuff Done, and then things just keep cropping up to get in the way.
Today I returned from a trip to Pittsburgh, and had 6-7 hours of work time slated to get stuff done. The random factors have aligned to challenge me the whole way:

  • Do more with Struts
    I’m still trying to learn Struts. It’s a huge challenge, and takes a lot of brainpower. I’m making slow but steady progress, but halfway through the work, I realized my laptop had gone into ‘slow-mo’ mode (it happens when it overheats). And my nice dual core 2.2gig machine was running at 900mghz. Eclipse and JBoss and Windows don’t like that speed. So only half productivity there.

  • Get badges ready for The Cohousing Conference
    I need to get these into the printers to be pre-printed for the event. To do that I need an order form and a proof. The graphics are in, but they won’t generate the proof without my credit card. The one they had on file for me expired. I can’t give it to them over the phone. I can’t email it, I have to FAX it. I don’t OWN a fax machine. I have to print their fugly Word doc (yes, Word, not PDF), write in my information, drive to Mailboxes Etc, and fax it from there. Grr.

  • Another Con needs a Contract
    Another convention that’s coming up in August needs a finalized contract before it can move ahead. This one I got done, the contract is out for review. Phew.

  • There’s a lot of email.
    Mosaic generates more mail than any other group I’ve ever worked with. I’m not even on the busier lists, and i have a dozen or two messages waiting for me to respond to or act upon.

  • Summer Camp for Zach
    The deadline for registration for Zach’s summer camp is this Friday. I have to finish the registration forms (they’re done, they need one 2 week window completed), then drive (yes, drive) them to Worcester and submit them, not to mention PAY for them. Not a check I’m looking forward to writing, but it is what it is.

  • Teeth
    Tomorrow I go in for my 1 week followup after oral surgery last Thursday. I had a tooth removed, as well as an abcess cleaned out. If you think that evokes a strong visual, you’re not far off the mark about what it felt like. I shan’t elaborate. But I have a dozen or so stitches in my gumline that need to be dealt with tomorrow, and have I mentioned how much I dislike antibiotics?

Good thing this weekend’s a vacation.

A KDE Gripe – Spellcheck needs to go.

It’s no secret I’m a huge booster of KDE, and specifically Konqueror, the built-in web browser. It’s fast, powerful, standards compliant, and just plain works.

But please, KDE folks, ferchrissake, fix the damned spell checker.

When editing things in TEXTAREA fields in Konqueror, occasionally you’ll get the red text of a misspelled word (or one that is simply not in the dictionary). That’s fine, no problems. In the Gnome world (and the variants such as those used in Thunderbird, my other most-used app, you can right click on the misspelled word, and it’ll happily give you a list of alternate spellings.

But no, not in KDE. The right click menu has no context for the misspelled word. It simply gives you the option of ‘check spelling’, which pulls up a dialog that spell checks the entire textarea, from beginning to end. Every time.

That means I get prompted for ‘href’ and ‘png’ and ‘img’ and ‘valign’ and all the other fun things that I type into my blog postings, long before I get to the current word.

Dear KDE. Please fix this behaviour. Make a context-sensitive spell checker. Luv, me