Done at Orycon (20111111 Fr - 14 Mo)

Orycon was good. Lots of music. A couple of good conversations. Not so much exercise; I gained a couple of pounds. But good.

Getting there was frustrating -- WiFi still wasn't working worth a damn on my netbook, and the way I had our bags stacked made for an exhausting trip from the airport to the hotel on Max. But we got there, around dinner time on Friday (missing a concert that we would have liked to get to).

Saturday morning I nuked the root partition on Barnard and installed Ubuntu 11.04, the last good one before they jumped the Gnome 3 shark. With working WiFi (reconnecting much faster than earlier versions, too), the rest of the weekend went very well indeed from a computerish point of view.

The con itself was great. I spent most of my time either in the concerts (there was a set of tables in back within reach of a power socket), or nearby talking to filkers. Not having a concert slot myself meant that I didn't have to spend any time rehearsing or fretting about not rehearsing, which helped make for a relaxed weekend.

Also adding to the relaxed experience was the fact that Colleen was more independent than she's been in years, able to get up to the room and back by herself. An independent cat is a happy cat, and makes for a happy bear.

It seems that I really need about 8 hours of sleep. Not too happy about that.

I also had conversations with musicians in the airport on both ends of the trip -- I traded CDs with Edward Dee, who had noticed Plink while waiting for the same flight we were on up to Portland. And had a good talk with Jimmy Free in PDX, admiring his skill with a 7-string violin and a looper.

Musical highlights of the con itself included concerts by The Doubleclicks, Katy Tinney, and Betsy Tinney (solo, with cello and looper). Want a looper. I missed most of Alexander Adams' concert in favor of a good conversation with runnerwolf, which was something I'd been wanting to do for a long time. Looking forward to more. A good dead dog in the almost-empty filk room swapping songs and talking with Andrew Ross and two women named Elizabeth and Jennifer whose last names I never caught.

Good con. Good weekend. And we came home to dinner and a clean house, thanks to our wonderful Younger Daughter, Emmy. We win.

( raw notes )

Done yesterday (20111115 Tu)

A pretty good day at work yesterday. Pretty good day in general, though I forgot to turn my alarm back on and ended up sleeping until 8:15. Do Not Like. I really need that extra hour or two in the morning before work. I can't deny that it feels good to get the extra sleep, but still... Grump. Need a 28-hour day.

I spent some time following the twitter stream from #occupywallst, #occupyoakland, and #occupyseattle, which were hit by coordinated police actions. We're now well into the "then they fight you" phase.

I don't believe I mentioned it in my previous post, but Monday evening I ordered a Thinkpad X120e from Welcome to Abe's of Maine (which is located in New Jersey -- go figure). They called while I was at work to verify the shipping address, and I let myself get talked into an extra 4GB of RAM and a 4-year warranty extension.

I spent much of the afternoon happily googling up the answers to three of the items on my to-do list from the morning's group meeting (all three were of the form "figure out how to do X and tell Y", so I didn't have to actually write any code for them. The rest of the items will involve real work.

Looks like almost all the notes below are links, mostly about the early morning police raids on the Occupy camps.

( raw notes )