The Mandelbear's Musings

Except for the afternoon filk concerts I spent pretty much all day Saturday talking with people. Mainly the lovely Moira Stern (who should comment to tell me whether I should use her LJ ID, real name, or both interchangably), whose concert came after mine. With a concert harp and three kids, she certainly needed help gear-wrangling, and it made a good excuse to talk.

Had dinner with the Rubins, after which I hooked up with Moira again (we were at the same restaurant in the hotel). After that I party-hopped, which made for a couple more good conversations and a fair amount of tasty stuff containing ethanol. Trying to be gluten-free is annoying.

The concert went well; the Wolfling was trailing the beat a little -- we need to work on that -- but I was mostly on. It was all stuff I've been singing recently, so I was actually able to look at the audience a little. Tearful hug from Moira by way of a review. We really should have swapped sets; she needed time to tune the harp. And it's really hard to follow QV, or start one's set after one has been crying.

No, I'm not sorry about that.

My setlist, cobbled together mere minutes before the concert, consisted of:

Side note on gear: I took my notebook up on stage, which let me jam my watch fob into one of the rings where I could see it. Very useful. I found myself wishing that I'd taken one of the cup-holders, though.

I find the fact that I spent essentially the entire con as the Middle-Sized Bear to be deeply odd. I have noticed that I've been spending more time talking to people, and much less time in programming. And I've noticed a tendency recently to spend a lot of my time talking to one person during a con, usually somebody I want to know better. (It was cflute at Baycon, for example, and joecoustic at OVFF.) I love it, but it does mean that I get to meet fewer new people. (On the gripping hand, I've always had trouble meeting new people.)

On the whole, I'd rather spend my time deepening old friendships and making new ones than sitting around in a circle waiting for a good opening to slip a song into. Swapping songs with a small number of people is a lot of fun, though; I'm not sure how to find a good balance there.

There are only two functioning elevators. It's going to be a disaster. I'm rather glad Colleen's not here -- we're already looking at 20-minute waits; it'll be an hour or two in line by tomorrow.

At least my room number, 640, is easy to remember. And I can handle 5 floors worth of walking as long as my knees hold out.

This year's OVFF marked the first anniversary of the late-night conversation and song-swapping session with pocketnaomi (briefly mentioned here) that I think of as the first sign of the changes that eventually led to the River posts.

It was particularly appropriate, then, that she spent the con crashing in my room. It was something of an experiment, and a very successful one: I experienced much the same level of casual friendliness that's become familiar from years of sharing hotel rooms with my daughters. (Without arguments over who sleeps in which bed or what time curfew is -- a definite plus.)

The con was a good opportunity to re-connect with many of the friends I made last year, and to try to make a few new ones (though not as many as I would have liked). Few of my conversations got as deep as I would have liked them to, and there wasn't nearly enough time for all the conversations I wanted to have. *sigh*

I found it a little easier to start conversations with strangers, including three of my four airplane seatmates. Part of the trick, I think, is simply using my time better: I used to hang out on the edge of a conversation waiting for someone to notice me or for an opening to appear; it never worked and left me feeling left out. Now I try to stand or sit next to someone who isn't in a conversation. I'm still not very good at getting things started, but improving. Sharing a table at breakfast or dinner is always a good strategy.

On the negative side, just because I'm increasingly aware of things like body language, subtext, and tacit messages doesn't mean that I'm any damned good at either sending or interpreting them. In fact, it's probably worse: if I recognize but totally misread a message that I would have ignored a year ago, the results are at best highly embarassing. And in my little bear-like brain there's nothing worse than being embarassed. Similarly if I notice that I'd sent a totally unintended tacit message to someone I had no wish to offend. I spent quite a bit of time Sunday evening wondering whether I'd ever be any good at this whole "being human" thing.

I had one of each; no need to go into details on the first one. In the second case, yes, I really did want to finish a LJ post, which I was working on through an ssh connection, without having to worry about the battery dying and the connection dropping. It wasn't a rejection. There are lots of reasons why I'll leave a conversation: I might think it's over, I might have something that needs doing, or I might be feeling left out. I might even be bored, but that's rare, and never happened at OVFF. I'm afraid the person I'd been talking to thought I was rejecting her. Or something.

Public Service Announcements:

• You can't count on me to interpret your body language, tone of voice, or implied messages correctly, even if I sort-of notice that they're there. Use words, if at all possible.
• There's rarely, if ever, an unspoken subtext to anything I do. What you see me doing is what I'm doing, and I'll tell you why if you ask.

Many hugs and goodbyes this morning. Didn't sing even once in the Dead Dog, but there was a little hallway filk on the way back to the room at midnight, where I sang The River for quadrivium (who I particularly wanted to hear it because it's just crying out for a piano arrangement), weirdsister, sweetmusic_27, and others I've forgotten. Also had my hair and beard trimmed by the marvelous museinred.

All-in-all a very good convention: not much singing, but lots of great conversation and catching-up, and meeting a few new people (though I'm still not nearly as good at that as I'd like to be)

Met a fellow OVFF attendee in the Columbus airport, and had a great talk on the plane with Paul (last name forgotten, of course), an old folk music fan who'd spotted Plink in the airport.

Time to go, I think.

I think I'm going to do this in reverse chronological order:

Just got back from the Sunday evening expedition to BD's Mongolian Barbecue. Only had one serving, though I opted for the 2-bowl "unlimited" variety. Asked for tea and got iced with some kind of fruit mixed in. Sigh. OTOH, it has a huge variety of fixin's, and the conversation was fantastic.

Rode to BD's with joecoustic, continuing a conversation we'd started earlier in the con suite. We were joined by Kanef and Ben Newman, continuing a conversation on the computational linguistics of songwriting. Notable quote (about a bit of Smalltalk trivia I tossed into the mix) "You mean they implemented Boolean as a union of two unit classes? Cool." They did, and it is.

I'd found myself in the con suite because I'd been sent to deliver a message to Peter Alway; ended up in a good discussion on dulcimer. It's been like that all weekend -- the main reason I haven't been blogging much is that I've been spending most of my time (outside of concerts) talking to people.

Won a handsome gourd/guiro/rainstick in the Interfilk auction; it'll be interesting seeing how it fits into my luggage. I didn't mind bidding it up to $30 because I'd been lazy and hadn't brought anything to donate.

Caught the song contest and a couple of the morning two-fers.

Breakfast was interesting -- Came in by myself (through not immediately asking the two young ladies ahead of me in line if I could join them), but another table had already mentioned to the greeter that they were looking for more. They were all locals; the woman next to me was a children's librarian named Lin -- short for Linea. The series of coincidences was impressive: Mom is Lynn, short for Evelyn, and a (retired) librarian; the young lady whose wedding we attended last weekend was named Linea. Fun.

Table-hopped after breakfast, with conversations with musicahumana and Barry and Sally Childs-Helton, and the GOHs, stevieannie and micktim.

Saturday to follow, to prevent this from getting too long.

Once again it's way too close to a con, and I've done way too little to get ready. I can, at least, post my itinerary.

AA 1588 SJC Oct 23 10:10am -> DFW 03:30pm  27B
AA 3597 DFW Oct 23 05:30pm -> CMH 09:00pm  14B

AA 2249 CMH Oct 27 12:50pm -> DFW 02:25pm  26D
AA 1355 DFW Oct 27 05:30pm -> SJC 07:10pm  27B

You can find my cell phone number on the contact page at Grand Central Starport.

My toastmaster's concert at ConChord, which happened a week ago last Saturday, is finally split up, properly indexed, and uploaded. You can find it here. For field recordings, the sound quality is remarkably good; they were captured on my H2, just in front of the audience. The performances a little less so, but parts of it are, if not awesome, at least served up with win and a modest amount of awesome sauce. I did tear up at the ending of QV, so that says something.

Busy being toast. Concert last went pretty well; good reaction to Wheelin' and QV. Lost a longer update because of stupid Apple keyboard conflicting with 30 years of Emacs habits. Pants not bankrupt, but required a large infusion of cash this morning. Set list later.

Well, here we are at ConChord. Got in about 4:30 after an easy trip down 101. Stopped at Solvang for lunch at The Chef's Touch -- made of yum. Small place, very small menu written up on chalkboard. Two large-screen monitors showing the stove from above, so you can see what the chef is doing.

Dinner here at the hotel wasn't nearly as good, but made up for it by being more expensive. The company was good, though; Joyce, Dave and Jordan; Michael and Allison. Nobody else had shown up by the time we went upstairs at 11:30. Grump.

Spent all evening sitting in the lobby playing guitar: Plink before dinner, and Flame after.

We're borrowing a scooter from Michael for the weekend. It took up an enormous amount of space; we ended up using the back seat for additional stowage. We would not have been able to take two additional people plus luggage, though we could have managed one. So far, the only person who's actually used the scooter has been me.

Musical mayhem starts tomorrow.

Got in a good walk this afternoon after lunch, meaning (in this case) between about 3pm and 4pm. Good, solid exercise walk, three times around the Rose Garden. Or was it four? I lost count.

The route takes me past a high school; it was amusing to be strolling past kids a quarter my age. Of course, they were mostly in groups and more interested in their conversations than in covering ground. But still...

About 30-40 minutes of practicing; mostly stuff from the concert set. I still get distracted; it's usually safe to assume that there will be at least one trainwreck during the concert, but it's pretty solid otherwise. Discovered that I've been playing an F in the first line of third quatrain of QV, not the C that I originally notated. That, in turn, means that the second and third quatrains harmonize, and explains why I occasionally mix them up. Anyway, that means I can use the second (lower) melody with the men's ending, and it'll work.

Wheelin', meanwhile, may have acquired a C-C7-E7-F riff between what I still think of as the verse and the refrain sections. The C7-E7 slide is one I learned from my brother years and years ago, in "Railroad Bill" and "Freight Train". Always wanted an excuse to use it.

It feels like an odd sort of Sunday, not a Tuesday. Grumble. That means that tomorrow will probably feel like an odd sort of Monday, at least until I get home.

My Toastmaster gig at ConChord is now a mere three weeks away. And now that I have reasonably solid timings on QV and Wheelin', I can actually plan out my set list -- as long as I don't write anything new in the mean time. The probability of getting QV on a single is getting lower, but it's still non-zero.

Wednesday was fun. Colleen's friend Bev had to leave early, just after Joyce and Jordan arrived, but we managed to squeeze in her verse of QV, which she hadn't heard. Got the hoped-for reaction: shocked recognition, surprise, and laughter, in that order. Made of win.

Paper Wings [mp3] and Wheelin' [mp3] are coming together pretty well; the latter is especially not bad for having been written just this Monday. We also tried out Quiet Victories with all the extra verses (to date) and some audience participation on the ending. I'm still pretty much winging it there -- that and the intro need work -- but it is going to be flat flaming fantastic.

If I'm going to record Wednesdays on a regular basis for more than just scratch tracks, I'm probably going to need separate mics for the performers to get a reasonable mix with the drum.

Exactly one month from now I'll be eating breakfast in the Warner Center Marriott, getting ready for my Toastmaster gig at ConChord 21. EEEEP!!

Went over to Joyce's last night for some practice; we worked on the three songs in the tentative setlist that we hadn't worked on before: "Paper Wings", "Millennium's Dawn", and "Quiet Victories". Also worked on "The River".

There's still a chance that Joyce won't make it down to ConChord. She just got laid off last week (anyone -- especially a startup in the Bay Area -- looking for a senior tech writer or documentation manager?) and is currently dealing with some medical/mobility problems. So the setlist for my concert Saturday night is still slightly up in the air. I need to practice more of my repertoire than just the setlist, though, so that's ok. I figure on running through about half the set plus a couple of other songs every day.

It's not at all clear whether I'll be able to get a single of QV put together in time for the con.

It's been a good day. Met the flower_cat in SEA; she'd arranged for someone to meet her and wheel her around, so all I had to do was collect the baggage and rent the car. Avis gave us a PT Cruiser -- cool-looking, and drives well, but the controls are confusingly different from my Honda, and cargo space is quite limited. Ended up with two bags and the walker in the back seat to accomodate the wheelchair and large suitacase in the back. Even then it was tight, and the rear visibility was nil with the wheelchair in the way.

But now, we've been well fed and made welcome in the Big Green Monster, and the Cat is sleeping beside me even as I type. Folks seem to go to bed early around here; I'd been kind of looking forward to some late-night conversation. Tomorrow, perhaps.

No idea what's happening tomorrow. Real-time scheduling, and likely to be pretty relaxed. I'm hoping that everyone will get the one-on-one time they need with me and/or Colleen respectively, and that there will be music and burlesque at one time or another. Other than that it's all pretty open.

I've been having breakfast in the hotel this trip rather than the Continental breakfast at the con: protein and potassium are my friends.

I'm really glad I've developed the habit of keeping my room key in my right-hand pants pocket. I hardly ever leave a room without my pants. I have been known to leave without my shoulder bag. Recently.

The Red Lion at the convention center is undergoing extensive renovation. Sure, the carpets have been torn up most of the weekend. OTOH, the WiFi works perfectly in the rooms; this is the first year that's been true.

I've been trying to figure out how many years I've been coming to OSCon. This must be the fourth; first year I believe I was in the Inn at the Convention Center, and I've been at the RL at least twice before. I see LJ tags for OSCon 2006 and 2007. OK, also posts in 2005, and apparently none in 2004.

I've taken to wearing a luggage strap as a belt. Infinitely adjustable instantly, and no metal at all. Needs a way of temporarily attaching something that looks like a buckle when I want to be dressy.

The San Jose airport is also being extensively renovated; Terminal C has been rejiggered to put all of the shops inside the security zone. Finally. They also have free WiFi. Finally.

I still hate the Mac. The apple key, which exists only because they're using a one-button mouse, is exactly where I expect the ALT key to be. Emacs uses Alt-Q to rewrap a paragraph, and Alt-W to copy a selection. Fortunately you can configure the terminal to ask before closing a window or a tab, so as long as I run emacs in a terminal window and not the native version, I'm comparatively safe. (It also took me a long time to figure out how to configure the terminal to treat option as alt.)

The Mac laptop's keyboard is still wretched.

The food has been very good, though I don't like the fact that breakfast has been being served downstairs in the exhibit hall instead of upstairs outside the room where the keynotes are given.

I've been taking realtime notes (in a text file, using emacs). It would have been possible to turn that into real-time blogging using a couple of well-designed scripts and makefiles, but that will have to wait for the next time.

The continental breakfast was down in the exhibit hall this morning; I bagged it and went back to the hotel for something with protein and potassium (i.e. hash browns).

I don't really like eating alone, though. Grabbed coffee and conversation back at the conference; the hotel may have bacon and eggs, but the con has melon and Charbuck's. Need both.

Well, here I am. The afternoon has been filled with wonderful conversations. My seatmate on the plane, a student at SJ State interning in the marketing department of an open source company, and here to work their booth. A woman on the train, going to OSCon for the first time now that her company has gone open source.

The woman handing out badges and bags, who turns out to be a long-time Tolkein fan -- she told me about the badge ribbons they've started using and I mentioned that I was familiar with them from SF conventions. (I added one of my CC&S ribbons left over from Baycon.) A guy in the hall with a home-made PVC-pipe didgeridoo.

MaryBeth Panagos, business relations person for OpenMediaNow.org, the people behind the GNASH flash clone, which it turns out is optimized for use in embedded systems, making it ideal for things like user interfaces on gadgets. Turns out she has a copy of my CD; we mostly talked about recording and my upcoming projects. We apparently met last year when I had preorder bonus disks in hand.

Yeah, I'm a little different these days. But only a little. I still have trouble with phones, and have yet to get in touch with didn't even leave a message when I called _amethyst_fire_ to give her contact info for this weekend. I'll try a couple more times tonight. But she called me back anyway! Today has been made of win, with awesome sauce.

And I'm still really bad with names.

The Tres Gique concert from last Friday at Baycon can be found, in a rather unsatisfactory and preliminary form, here. It has ogg and mp3 files, but essentially nothing else. More this evening after I've had a few more hours to jump up and down on it.

Not much to say about load-out day, except that we would have been able to check out a lot sooner if we hadn't had to wait so long for a table in the coffeeshop, or an elevator down that wasn't completely full. Would have taken forever if a maid hadn't shown us where the service elevator was. They would have done better if they'd allowed people to get late checkout, which would have spread out the peak a little, but they didn't. They would also have done better if they'd been faster at turning around tables in the restaurant.

Took cflute to the airport in the early afternoon. A nice chat in the car, but too short.

Colleen's main mode of social interaction at conventions has always been to plop herself down either in the lobby, filk lounge, or (at filk cons) con suite, and collect a group of people around her. These days I, on the other hand, prefer to have a series of one-on-one or small-group conversations, and gravitate in the evening toward the smallest available circle. Often I'll latch onto one person, as I did with Callie this con and pocketnaomi at Conflikt, especially if we seem to have a lot to talk about.

I seem to be rather bad about finding new people to talk to; usually I'll talk to the ones I know. Sometimes friends of the ones I know. I'm still shy, and have trouble starting conversations with people I don't know. Feel free to come up and talk to me, though. Remind me of your name, if it isn't on your badge, and maybe where we met; I'll have forgotten.

Yesterday was surprisingly hassle-free. Breakfast with the flower_cat and Y.D., joined by cflute a little later. She and the newlyweds had knocked on our door hoping for coffee, but not only had we gone down for breakfast, but we'd forgotten to bring a coffeemaker.

The hotel's buffet breakfast was only $10. You get what you pay for -- it was still overpriced. The bacon was particularly awful. Going out today.

After breakfast and a little running around, I went home to fetch coffeemaker, filters, kleenex, and a few other last-minute items. Didn't even glance at the computer, which is a little unusual for me.

I was on two panels: "Every OS %$#@!", and "Filking for kids" The first was particularly wide-ranging, in spite of my efforts as moderator to keep it somewhat on topic. The latter included the Bohnhoffs, Paul Kwinn, and Taunya Gren. cflute had been planning to join us, but dropped by only to beg off from lack of spoons. I handed her a room key and sent her off to bed.

Between the two panels I was actually on was the "Growing Up Geek" one that the chaoswolf and Jordan were on. Ended up being mostly about how geek kids cope with middle school and high school. Interesting, but could have been better.

There was a 90-minute wait for tables in the hotel's little coffeeshop; we cobbled some chairs together and ate in the bar. It is occasionally useful to have a wheelchair in the family.

After dinner, chaoswolf, selkit, and I went up to the room for coffee, and were eventually joined by cflute. Got a call from the Cat just before the concerts started, but was just settling in to another talk with Callie. Both of us would much rather talk or make music with a small number of friends than sit quietly in a room listening to someone else sing.

Got down to open filk a little after it started. Small circle, but good people. I set up directly across the circle from the niche where Colleen was ensconced with Igor, and started off with "Eyes Like the Morning". Like "The River", that was a Valentine's Day present for Colleen; the two will bookend the next CD. Other songs included "World Inside the Crystal" (following "Where the Magic is Real") and... I forget.

We went up and crashed about 12:40.

Rather than give this stupid Mac laptop a chance to eat my post again, I'm just going to post the songs with quick notes, and and post the "oficial" notes later when I have it uploaded and have some time on a machine I can actually type on.

Friday     	5/23/2008 	22:00  	Concert: Tres Gique 
Saturday 	5/24/2008 	13:00 	Every OS @%*^& 	
Saturday 	5/24/2008 	16:00 	Filk for Kids 	
Sunday  	5/25/2008 	14:30 	Recording Music 

Just got back from a Tres Gique rehearsal at Joyce's. I think I may be allergic to something in that house; my throat got very dry and constricted, so we didn't get through even the songs I had on the list. There's still room for a few more, and suggestions (waves at cflute and pocketnaomi) are welcome.

Went to the Embedded Systems Conference yesterday in the San Jose convention center. A little disappointing -- smaller than last year, and nothing really new except some of the swag. Oh, and a booth with the slogan: "Seeing is Believing, but Touching is More Fun". Yeah; I can get behind that...

There was a moderate amount of Linux in evidence: in addition to the usual distros (Montavista, LynuxWorks) most of the single-board computers and evaluation boards support it as a matter of course.

The nice thing about doing a trade show on a Wednesday is that I can come home, dump the swag on a chair, and expect most of it to disappear by the end of the evening. The only things I found worth keeping were one of the bags (black, with the sides extended into a single long shoulder strap rather than the usual pair of loops) and a pen in the shape of a squid, that opens in a particularly interesting way (from Reach Technology). The patent drawings do not show the mechanism, which is fun to watch.

10:27 Thanks to rowanf, we now know that this is called a "Transformer Pen". The minimum order appears to be 200...