Lemmings on the metro

How many metros have you been on? (from trektone and telynor)

( 11 that they had icons for; several that they didn't )

Back in the workday groove, more or less

For the first time in several years, my practice of keeping a good shirt at work paid off -- it rained while I was out for my lunchtime walk. I had just decided to turn back because the weather suddenly seemed cold and threatening when it started. By the time I got back indoors, about 15 minutes later, my shirt was soaked. Fortunately I'd worn my hat.

Backing up to the morning, I managed to turn off my alarm last night (it's a new alarm clock, and I'm not quite familiar with its controls yet). As a result I woke up at about 7:20. Fortunately I was able to get the kids out of bed and ready to go in 20 minutes, about half the usual time. Contrats to the chaoswolf and super_star_girl. But this is why I need you to learn to wake up to your own alarm clocks.

To top it off, I only had one mug of coffee instead of my usual three, so I got to work with far too much blood in my caffeine stream. Fortunately my two Monday meetings and catching up on a week's worth of mail and web reading didn't require more than a couple of functioning neurons.

Loscon: Saturday, Sunday, and the road home

I was in two panels on Saturday, both in the filk room. The first was on songwriting, with Lee Gold (and Lynn Maudlin, who we later found out hadn't gotten her correct schedule). The second was on "The Media of Filk", with Lee and Eric Gerds (filk.com). Both went off OK, though it was touch and go whether we'd have an audience for the first one.

The remainder of the afternoon was taken up by a pair of concerts: Lynn Maudlin, who has a lovely voice, and Emmet Chapman, inventor of the stick. No, I am not lusting after a stick -- the technique is so different from that of a guitar that I'd have to pick one or the other, and I'm good at guitar.

The flower_cat and I had dinner at the "good" restaurant again; filet for her and ahi for me. Expensive, and vaguely disappointing.

 

Sunday I went to no programming at all -- it was all packing up and getting ready to go. Probably the easiest pack-out in several years -- the kids helped. We staged in the lobby (with the flower_cat watching over the growing pile) and left a little before noon.

We almost made it home before the rain started. But it was at least an hour of soggy stop-and-go from Salinas to San Jose. Well, we'd made good time up until then. It was about 7:30 when we rolled into the parking lot at Black Angus, having decided that we were all hungry enough to postpone unloading until after dinner. About half the price of the Marriott, four times the selection, and significantly better food.

Loscon: recording on the go

I'm going to wrap up what passes for a Loscon con report with a few notes on my current mobile recording rig. This consisted of the Edirol UA25 that I mentioned buying in this post, and a Behringer C2 matched pair of condenser mics. The latter were surprisingly cheap -- on sale for $50. They came in a plastic carrying case with a bar for holding them in the right position for stereo recording. To these I added a mic-stand threaded clamp, which I attached to the handle of my rolling tote, and a Macbook Pro running the beta version of Audacity 1.3. (I tried the stable 1.2, but it hung with the UA25 in place.)

I also tested the UA25 on my DeMuDi laptop, but although ALSA recognized it just fine, I wasn't able to get Audacity to see it. Something in the alsa-oss package configuration wasn't right, and I didn't have time to mess with it. It appears to work with my desktop machine running Debian Etch, so I'll try that in the future.

The rig performed well, though I could have had the gain up quite a bit higher. Fortunately, with a 24-bit interface, there's enough headroom that it doesn't matter much. I still picked up the gamers in the room on the other side of the airwall.

For next time, I want to have something that I can just roll into the room, adjust the gain, and forget about. The rolly isn't really stable enough, and I had to sit the laptop on a chair next to it.