Silicon is over

SiliconM, one of the local SF conventions, was this weekend. It's come back from the brink of extinction several times now; this year it has grown to about 400 people (from maybe 250 last year). I found it enjoyable, but mostly for the people and conversations.

Programming was good, but limited and very sparsely attended. A couple of panels folded for lack of audience; there were only three or four for Kelly Freas's slide show, for example, and less than a dozen for my filk concert. Filking, indeed, was very poorly attended.

The hotel, on the other hand, was excellent: the Crowne Plaza in Foster City; I wouldn't hesitate to go to another con there. The coffeeshop is gorgeous, built around a series of koi ponds, and there's a waterfall across from the elevators. Quite a contrast to Baycon this year at the Doubletree in San Jose -- it's really gone to hell in a handbasket since its heyday as a Red Lion. (Colleen is now working as Baycon's hotel liason, and has them running very scared.)

We didn't stay in the hotel, though 45 minutes proved a bit long for a commute. It wouldn't have worked at all if the filking had been any better or the parties more numerous.

The dealer's room was OK, though small. That didn't keep me from picking up three books, most notably War of Honor by David Weber. It's the first of that series I've read (fans can all gasp in surprise now); I bought it mainly because of the bound-in CD-ROM that has the rest of the series on it. Baen Books is one of the few publishers that realize that making entire books available in electronic form is actually good for business, and I want to encourage them.

Well, I'm about to pass out now, so I think I'd better post this and go to bed.

Filk concert at Silicon

Here's the setlist from my concert at Silicon:

1. I Wanna Be a Webmaster
   
2. When I Was a Lad
   
3. The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of
   
4. For Amy
   
5. Millennium's Dawn

I was going to do Ship of Stone after For Amy, but things were running a little late.

Not my best performance, but OK; I was a little flustered after the time check and skipped the intro to Millennium's Dawn, and for some reason I'm still having trouble with the guitar part to For Amy.

Lyrics, as usual, at http://thestarport.com/people/steve/Doc/Songs/

Tech support

"When I try to boot my computer it just beeps continuously," chaoswolf complains to me.

Ten minutes later, "Tell me, my child, what happens when you pile junk on top of a keyboard?" Not hearing an immediate response, I continue, "It depresses a key. What happens if a random key is being held down while the computer is booting? It beeps."

More specifically, the key repeats and the beeping goes on. And on. And since it's spending all of its massive computational resources toggling the stupid speaker wire up and down, it's not getting a whole lot of booting done, either.