The Mandelbear's Musings

Just a very quick note from Loscon. We arrived safely; my concert was this evening at 5:30. Set list: Riverheart, Inherit the Earth, the two Bears, Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of, and QV. I recorded it; that will be up eventually, but not until after I get back to a reasonably fast computer with gigabit access to my fileserver.

Tired, missing my Cat, but well-fed and happy to be home. Managed to aggravate the tendinitis in my right knee going up and down stairs during loadout; took the last loads down by elevator. By that time there were only two left operating. We got the final load out with mere minutes to spare before the checkout time of 12:00.

In spite of our early start, we got home about an hour later than usual -- traffic was awful. Over 7 1/2 hours of driving. Ugh. Didn't help my knee much, either.

Mongolian for dinner. Yum. Inexpensive, and the kids love it. Even Emmy, who has sense enough to ask them to clean the grill so as not to trigger her mushroom allergy.

Met a few new people at Loscon, and had some wonderful conversations. I'm a moderately happy Bear. Also a very tired one. And I get to see my Cat tomorrow! That will make me a very happy Bear.

As predicted, Loscon is being weird. Good, mostly, but weird. Got pounce-hugged by snobahr in the lobby, and much later had a good conversation in the elevator lobby. Spent a lovely couple of hours talking to impresaria1 by the pool as she watched her three kids. Then we went out for dinner, to the nearby Mongolian barbecue, with Bill and Carole (WINOLJ), and the Y. D.

What impresaria1 failed to mention -- or think of -- was that she's seriously allergic to soy. As in soy sauce. Can you say dumb? Thought so. Spent most of the evening taking care of her. She seemed OK when I left her around midnight, but an emergency call was only minutes away a couple of times.

Spent about 45 minutes down at the filk circle after that; sang Toolmakers and QV off-book using KR's 12-string. Not entirely sure I like QV capoed up on a 12 -- it could stand to be lower. (It's in C; I play it capo 5 with G fingerings, because that works better on a 6 with my fingerpicking style. So it can go either way.) Sang Wheelin' up in the lobby, and spent a lot of time noodling.

The whole day was punctuated with calls to Colleen. She managed to get out and go shopping in the afternoon. So that's very good progress.

We're back. The facehugger has really made a difference -- this was the first return trip in several years where I wasn't yawning continuously and fighting sleep for the last 150 miles. I yawned a couple of times, and felt a little sleepy a couple of times (a seven-hour car trip will do that), but I didn't feel as though I was about to fall asleep. Yay!

Many goodbyes and a couple of good conversations this morning. Having a CD out gives me something new to talk about, which is always a good thing.

Total CD sales at the con: 1. Oh, well. Eric sold a few, I think. Having a CD also gives one an excuse to hang out with the dealers.

It occurs to me that my last Loscon post was Thursday, so I have a bit of catching up to do. Fortunately it's been mostly concerts and conversations so far, so there isn't as much to report as might be.

AJA and Dr. Jim Robinson both gave concerts yesterday -- that was good. Dinner with selenesue in the "good restaurant". Some open filking that started breaking up around midnight; I went up to the parties and finally got in about 1:30. Slept well.

Side note on the facehugger -- I seem to be getting used to it. I'm still having some trouble getting the mask tight enough so that it doesn't leak, and a little trouble getting to sleep. But by the time morning comes around I sometimes have to check to see whether I'm still wearing it, the way I do with my glasses sometimes. I can live with this. Ordered a CPAP pillow, which is back-ordered and should be back in stock later next week.

My concert (with the chaoswolf on drum and backup vocals) was today at 2:00, and seemed to go very well indeed. Smallish audience, but I think my performance was better than usual. Three weeks of practicing every couple of days with the Wolfling seemed to help. Got a decent recording with the H2. I think the drum came out too loud; we'll probably have to skip it when it's just two of us, and drop down to something quieter like shaker.

I'll post the set list later; for now, I'll just note the shortnames: cicero bugs rosie tool rrprayer barratry stuff bigger. Obviously I need a script that conses up an Emacs abbrev file, or something.

I'm no good at reporting conversations. I'll just note a good talk around dinner with mysticfig, mostly about CD production, and a couple of nice chats during soundchecks with Moira Stern.

Right now I'm avoiding the "Banned from Argo" sing; I'll probably go down in half an hour or so. The flower_cat is napping; she -- and a lot of other people -- seem to be suffering from an excess of air conditioning. Doesn't seem cold to me, but...

We're all packed for Loscon -- the flower_cat and chaoswolf are out getting bagels and lox for breakfast. It works out to about 3 items per person -- quite a large pile, but not really all that much. For the first time, the collection includes a rollycrate with my facehugger and my favorite pillow. I wasted an hour yesterday trying to find a good CPAP pillow, but there doesn't seem to be a local source. The one I have is a memory-foam neck pillow -- it has a sharp drop-off on the side so that I can hang the facehugger over the edge while the foam keeps my head relatively stable. It works quite well, but it's too big for travel unless we're driving. I may resort to tracking down one of the others we have around the house, and cutting a chunk off the side. What I'd really like is an inflatable.

Concert early Saturday afternoon. The chaoswolf and I have been practicing for the last two weeks; we both needed it. We'll have to practice more regularly from now on.

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.

Waltzing With Bears
Jabberwocky
I Am the Walrus
When I was a Lad
The World Inside the Crystal
High Barratry
Silk and Steel
Desolation Row
Desolation --- Oh, No!

Very little publicity (mentioned only on the second page of the daily zine, and not even with the rest of the program items) and not much signage, so the audience varied between 4 and 6 or 8 people. Went well. I only had a 30 minute set prepared, but as it turned out there was an hour to the next set; I filled in with patter, conversation, and the long version (Dylan's, then my two verses) of Desolation Row. Would have run a little longer if I'd remembered to pull "Cicero in the Twenty-First Century", which I'd intended to do. As it was, there was about a 15 minute gap, which I used to run my guitar up to the room.

I'm not sure whether the problem was in the programming, the pubs, or somewhere in between; this con seems a little less well-run than previous Loscons. It's still coming off a bit better than last year; that may be due to the hotel having gotten used to us.

So, here we are at the LAX Marriot, waiting for Loscon to start tomorrow. A reasonably fast, uneventful trip, for which I am duly thankful. Especially, thanks to the kids, who were very calm and cheerful the whole way down. I'm also thankful for the hotel's fast net conection ($10/day, which is outrageous, but probably also pretty typical).

Beyond that, I'm thankful for (in no particular order) my family, my extended family in fandom and on the Net, our reasonably good health, a job that keeps me happily busy as well as gainfully employed, and the fact that there's always something new to learn.