The Mandelbear's Musings

I don't think this was a good week. Right now I'm severely depressed and hopeless (mostly over politics, but also about how little I've been getting done for the last few {weeks, months, years}*, so that may be coloring my judgememt).

I have done some music, including setting up the RainbowCouch virtual filksing (although I only ran the first, frustrating part on Jitsi; it went went a lot better once it moved to Zoom). It's too bad, because I really wanted to like Jitsi. But it's not ready for prime time. It would probably work well for a small group, after everybody was already set up. Probably. Muting, in particular, works badly. (It's pretty confusing on Zoom too, only not quite as much.)

I did sing more than I have in a while, including "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of" in the FK-No Dead Penguin circle.

The 10th anniversary of my DW account (first post here) passed without notice on Monday. I'd looked it up and intended to make a post, but... DW postedUpdates on the security changes (how to keep your client working!) on Monday. The fix was pretty trivial -- if you're using a client (as opposed to posting on a web page) and it isn't working, see that post on how to fix it.

That sent me off down a bit of a rabbit hole learning about the new REST API under development, and both of the old ones (XML-RPC and "flat"). I still mean to replace my current kludge with a real command-line client. I may wait until the REST API is ready, although the only difference at this point between it and flat appears to be punctuation. Annoyingly, none of the APIs allow you to post raw HTML: In XML you have to escape HTML markup, in the other two you use C-type escapes, including "\n" for all the newlines.

I got the jbackup utility going the week before last; it proved to be an excellent tutorial for the XML API, and some of the code could be ripped out and used as the basis for a client. It would be in Perl, though, if I did that. Not necessarily a bad thing -- I like Perl, though maybe not as much as I did a few years ago.

* those are set braces

( Notes & links, as usual )

Well, the big event this weekend was RainbowCon 3. It was a good weekend, modulo some tech failures around recording and streaming, and logistical problems getting Colleen out of and back into the car -- but she was there for Sunday's Ecumenifilk/Celebration of Life circle, which was mostly in her honor. The con was small enough at that point that we were able to move the circle into the main house, so she didn't have to try to get into the main performance space in the Box Room. The Maypole dance also came off well, and Colleen and the other non-dancers were able to sit on the porch and watch.

I was alarmed at how weak she is, and how much help she needed with car transfers (we called 911 for both of them at our end). Worried. But even with that, she "had an absolute blast" (her words, when Naomi called -- we were in the ferry line -- and asked), which made the whole exercise worthwhile.

The laser printer was giving me fits all week. Some kind of buffering problem, I think; any job over a couple of pages would end up being cut short. The network interface seemed somewhat better, but had problems waking the damned printer up.

On the whole, a pretty good week, and a very good con, despite all the hassles. Because Colleen.

( Notes & links, as usual )

(I'm a day late posting this -- I pretty much fell over last night. Onward!)

The reason I didn't post this on Sunday as I usually do is that last weekend was RainbowCon 2.1. The dead dog (just the family, Gwen, and Cat) ran until about 11pm Sunday night. The whole week was wonderful.

For those who only tune in occasionally, RainbowCon is our household's mini-convention. RC-0 was Glenn and Naomi's wedding; it was so much fun that we decided to do it every year. There are two tracks, filk and gaming, with filk being the main one. It's always held within a week or two of May 1^st, and features a maypole dance on Sunday.

The guests arrived early in the week: Gwen Knighton Raftery on Monday and Cat Faber on Tuesday, which gave us plenty of time to hang out and plan the con. Being small, we can get away with doing our planning at the last minute, including having the members brainstorm workshop ideas and voting on them Friday night by dropping poker chips into paper bags. It's also small enough that we can make last-minute scheduling changes and let everyone know about them.

We had about 25 people, which (surprisingly) was about the same number we had at RC-1 in Seattle. That included some people we didn't know directly; hopefully word will get around. Everyone loved the venue -- it's beautiful and quiet. We boarded the cats, at Bayview Pet Resort (which I can recommend), and rented an RV for extra sleeping space. It was used mainly by Cat and j.

Colleen and here caregiver, Vivian, did an amazing job with the "con suite", which included round-the-clock snacks and dinner on Friday and Saturday. Sunday we went out for a dinner run, to Christopher's in Coupville. The specialize in seafood, and especially Penn Cove mussels. Coupeville is located about a block from the Penn Cove waterfront.

This post is already late enough that I'm not going to go into detail on the concerts and workshops. See the notes for a little more.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Public Service Announcement: RainbowCon 2.1 is next weekend! It's our second annual house-con (last year would have been just before we closed on selling Rainbow's End). Details at the link. Come visit our island paradise. It'll be awesome.

I seem to be finally, gradually, getting off my arse with projects -- I've installed Elm and cleared out some space in my working tree -- though not actually started coding. Probably later today.

No progress on finding a job. I've noticed that I have a strong tendency to ignore problems and paperwork, apparetly thinking they'll go away if I don't look at them. I think I have to try -- again -- to get myself on a tight work schedule, with set times for job search, coding, and music. I suspect that the Pomodoro Technique -- 25-minute sprints -- may be about right. It's probably time to start using a "25min" tag.

Tuesday I cashed out my Amazon 401K. Net after taxes and transferring the Amazon shares to my brokerage account was enough to cover the rest of the remodeling, and maybe a month or two beyond that if nothing goes seriously wrong. I'm also getting a pretty substantial tax refund, mostly from the electric vehicle credit. I'll get another once I find the rest of the receipts for the work we did on Rainbow's End the year or so after we moved in. That will make the sale a pretty substantial net loss. :P

It's still a slow-motion trainwreck.

Cashing out the 401k required five phone calls -- I was a total wreck most of the afternoon.

In other news, our cat-lock -- a sliding gate across the entryway that keeps our cats from dashing out the front door the moment it's opened -- has become useless. Bronx (of course) learned that he could jump over it. Even turning the gate (a re-purposed whiteboard) 90 degrees to make it four feet high instead of three didn't work. N called Bronx "an agent of Chaos and Cuteness."

( Notes & links, as usual )

RainbowCon 1 happened last weekend, and it was wonderful. The guests were Decadent Dave Clement from Canada, and Tim and Annie Walker from the Uk. Programming also included gaming -- I'll get to that -- organized by Naomi's friend Steven Schwartz. Con suite by Mama Colleen. Con chair and head of programming was Naomi Rivkis, and I was Con Bear (my badge read "Ursa Major").

I don't think people knew whether to expect a large house filk, or a small convention. We wanted a small convention, and I think we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Attendence was in the low to mid 30s; we were aiming for 30-40. Enough with the stats.

Naomi and I worked out most of the schedule the weekend before. We left it up to the guests which order they wanted to go in, and although we had suggestions for other programming we left the final decisions up to them too. They decided to put Dave's concert on Friday, a Stan Rogers sing-along Saturday with Dave and Tim, and Tim and Annie's concert Saturday night. We had three workshop slots scheduled. I'll get to that.

Dave (with his wife Liz, who had done the driving), Tim, and Annie arrived Monday. Tuesday they all went with Naomi to Dusty Strings, to rent Annie a harp. (The only instruments they came with were Tim's button accordion and some whistles.)

Naomi was jumped by a large djembe, which followed her home. Its name is Rebel.

Tim and Annie needed guitars; one each, plus one they could leave tuned to DADGAD. Fortunately this household has more guitars than cats. They seemed a little awestruck by Snuggles (the Martin O-15); the Applause that I brought out for DADGAD had apparently last been used by Talis.

OK, so that brings us to Friday. In addition to pulling guitars out of my hat I also got the maypole up, with Chaos's help. I'll get to that.

Friday got off to a somewhat late start, so the opening ceremonies sort of tailed off early into the introductory circle. We started, naturally, with "Bigger on the Inside" as an introduction to the house.

During the introductory circle, dinner break, and some of Dave's concert, people were voting for their favorite workshops. They did this by dropping poker chips (they're not just for bardics anymore) into paper bags, with a blue chip representing their pick for the 90-minute slot.

After the concert we finished tallying up the poker chips, and did a little last-minute negotiation with the attendees, which resulted in the 90-minute slot getting sea shanties and kitting out your home studio in parallel, and the vocal and harmony workshops getting combined into one.

The poker chips then re-emerged in the poker chip bardic. Our variant on it has people using their chips in blue-red-white order, but with no need to complete a round before moving on to the next color. Instead, an earlier color jumps to the head of the queue if mixed colors are on the floor. It worked very well -- people had time to think about what they wanted to do or hear in their own time, rather than holding up the next round while they struggled to come up with something.

Saturday we actually had two full tracks of programming during the afternoon. Three at one point, since the Cat game (Did I mention gaming? There was gaming.) overlapped the sea shanty and home studio workshops. The build-a-dragon game overlapped the "sensitive percussion" workshop earlier in the day. The afternoon ended with the Stan Rogers sing-along concert. (We skipped the scheduled critiqued one-shots due to lack of interest, and went for a longer dinner break.)

The evening had Tim and Annie's concert, which was wonderful, followed what was intended as a ball-of-yarn chaos, but after we noticed that there was never more than one person queued up we just passed the ball around.

Sunday started with the Ecumenifilk circle, moderated by Annie, followed by the drum circle, led by Dave. And featuring several of the household's assorted drums and my box of random small percussion instruments that had been left around from Saturday's workshop.

After that was the Maypole dance. Unlike last year (RainbowCon 0 was Naomi and Glenn's wedding) there were enough experienced dancers to keep things running smoothly.

After that was the vocal/harmony workshop, where I had surprisingly (to me) little trouble keeping to my assigned part. Then there was the jam, and closing ceremonies.

Then most of those who were left went out for dinner. The restaurant, 13 Coins, is right across the street from the airport, so even the people who had to catch planes could come along.

Rainbow Con II will be held next year, with guests Alexa Klettner from Germany, and Trickster and King (Ada Palmer and Lauren Schiller, the touring subset of Sassafras. We expect it to be as amazingly wonderful as RC1.

We'd originally thought that we'd move the con to a hotel after it got too big for the house. But we really liked the small size -- it gives people a chance to hang out, talk, and make music with the guests and each other. We may end up capping the membership if it threatens to get out of hand, but it will stay at Rainbow's End as long as we're there to run it.

Long week. Long day yesterday. Contented bear, but my back hurts and I'm not as conscious as I might be.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way: things continued to go full speed sideways at work, and the car was in fact totalled in the accident. I cleaned it out Tuesday and spent some time grieving -- I really liked that car, and it had served us well for a decade.

Apart from that, it's been awesome. I finished the maypole on Sunday - literally, with sandpaper and Watco Danish oil. Had fun showing it off to the builders and friends. Wedding guests started arriving Wednesday.

The Great Room was cleared out (mostly onto the balcony) and decorated with billows of rainbow-colored fabric hanging from the beams. It made a really amazing space. It still makes an amazing space; we'll be leaving the fabric up for the forseeable future even after the furniture is brought back in.

The ceremony itself, officiated by Heather Dale, was one of the most moving weddings I have ever attended. Not just the musical part ("As I Am", which was a wonderful choice and worked perfectly with the choreography), but the vows they made not only to one other but to the children.

The music afterwards was also pretty amazing.

The technical aspects -- the maypole and my admittedly minimal but functional PA setup -- came off perfectly.