There and Back Again

Travel notes:

The Portland airport is a good place for walkies. I'll have to remember that the two sides of the terminal are connected; the security-check lines were considerably shorter on the D/E side. It's not as if I mind walking.

The backpack is a lot easier to get around with than the rolly, but it's less accessible for getting stuff in and out, and it gets hard on my back after a while. I may look for a folding cart.

With the Tux Droid taking up nearly half the suitcase, things were a little tighter than I like. Wound up wearing my fleece jacket, which worked great on the way to the airport but was less convenient after I got there.

A luggage strap with a plastic quick-connect buckle makes a great temporary belt for going through security. I basically just sailed through, except for nearly forgetting to pull my computer out of the backpack.

One of these days I may just have to design the perfect travel backpack and folding cart, and get somebody to manufacture them.

Album notes

We're uploading artwork today, hooray!

I still haven't quite gotten the hang of selling out my soul my stuff; I only sold one physical preorder pack, plus a couple of nibbles that may lead to web sales. A dozen or so people found the cards I put out on the flier table. I should also have been handing them out more freely at the breakfast and lunch tables; I had a tendency to do it only when the subject came up in the course of the conversation.

Talked briefly with Therese Michaud, who was playing piano in the airport, and her daughter who was manning the table selling a 5-song demo CD. Only realized later that I should have just swapped for a preorder pack. Did I mention that I'm a slow learner?

Upload complete

Even as I type, an 80MB zip file with the artwork for Coffee, Computers, and Song is sitting on a server in New Jersey. The length matches, anyway; unfortunately they don't supply an MD5 hash. It took an hour and a half to upload over artbeco's admittedly rather slow DSL line, so we had a good conversation and didn't really notice the time. We did it from her place so we could take care of any last-minute changes; there were a few of them, but not too many.

We'll find out tomorrow morning whether it came through OK; I'm not going to say it's done until I get the proofs back.

It's alive!

Plugged in my TuxDroid this afternoon to charge up. Downloaded the setup kit a few minutes ago, installed the text-to-speech voices for English, fired up the test UI, and it worked. It blinks, it talks, it flaps its wings. It has beautiful big glowing blue eyes.

The only minor gotcha was that you have wait to plug in the USB dongle until after you install the drivers. Duh.

Specs here.