The Mandelbear's Musings

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.

Now that I'm home with my software running on a real computer, I can post my setlist for Loscon:

Set list: Loscon-2006

1. Ta(l)king Preorders
2. Silk and Steel
3. The Last Train
4. Cicero in the Twenty First Century
5. Guilty Pleasures
6. The Mushroom Song
7. The World Inside the Crystal

You'll note that it's pretty short -- total about 20 minutes. It was a 30 minute slot, but I spent some time at the beginning fussing with my new recording gear. That probably ate 5 minutes, and the other 5 went into patter and a little too much audience interaction. The chairs were all arranged in a circle, so people in the audience apparently felt free to talk among themselves between songs the way they would in a chaos circle. There were only about a dozen people in the audience.

Note to self: make sure concert seating is appropriate; rearrange chairs if necessary.

I don't think most of the recording I made will be of much use except for reference, though the sound quality appears, on a brief listen, to be excellent. There were a number of places where I simply got distracted and the chords went off into the twilight zone, and of course "Ta(l)king Preorders" was only two days old and still pretty rough. I sang it several more times in circles.

Well, we made it down to Loscon. The flower_cat and I ended up not eating turkey -- the claim is that it's high enough in tryptophan to make you sleepy. She had the prime rib dinner, and I had roast leg of lamb. Both were excellent. The kids split a plate of fettuccini Alfredo, which left super_star_girl enough room for pumpkin pie for desert.

Dinner in the hotel was a bit problematic -- we both opted for appetizers. Colleen had the butternut squash soup off their Thanksgiving dinner menu and it was excellent, and my spicy chicken lettuce wraps were OK but not what I was expecting. Colleen's "satay", though, was plain chicken on skewers with a teriyaki-like dipping sauce, which she loaths, and my "Szechuan ravioli" where leathery and, though hot, basically lacking in flavor. Look, folks -- if you're going to put a well-known dish on the menu, that's what you're supposed to serve.

After dinner I came back up to the room and practiced a little, then paid for a net connection -- at $10/day it's a little pricey, but that's the going rate and it's fast enough. I'm actually writing this on my home system over SSH. Went downstairs briefly with the guitar, hoping to serenade the Cat, but the muzak was annoyingly loud, so I came back upstairs and practiced some more. I'm getting happier with "The Last Train" now that I've figured out good fingerings for all the chords in drop-D tuning. I'm wondering how it would sound with a soprano singing open fifths over it.

At the moment, the only contact information for Loscon on the web can be found here in the archived website of Loscon 32. Since all the email addresses are generic, there's a pretty good chance they're forwarded to the right people, though of course there's no way of knowing in all cases. "Programming" is known to work.

Meanwhile, people in search of information about Loscon can try posting on the loscon community; maybe if we all do it the helpful folks there will prod the webmaster into finishing the site updates that were apparently started a couple of weeks ago.

Note to webmasters: Never leave a site in an unuseable or semi-useable condition. No matter what horrendous, gnarly upgrade you're trying to do, make sure that:

• All the old links continue to work. If last year's convention was www.loscon.org/32/, then make sure that www.loscon.org/33/ works this year, even if all you do is copy the old site and slap an "under construction" on the front page.
• Start with the event date, and hotel, and all of the current contact information. Make sure that's on the web and useful, even before the other info on the front page. That's what people are looking for on your website; if they can't find it, they're going to post rants in their blogs.
• Never let the understandable desire to have a pretty site with all the latest bells and whistles get in the way of having a useful site. People didn't come to your website to look at the blinkenlights; they came for information. If they can't find it, you're going to lose members/customers/eyeballs/whatever, and possibly be the subject of rants that will haunt you for years on Google.

That ends the second of today's Public Service Announcements; it's time for this old Bear to trundle off to work.