The Mandelbear's Musings

Now that I'm back at home with all my software, here's the official setlist for my concert Friday night:

Set list: Worldcon-2006

1. Cicero in the Twenty First Century
2. House Carpenter
3. Demon Lover
4. Silk and Steel
5. Ship of Stone
6. The World Inside the Crystal
7. Guilty Pleasures

I thought it went pretty well; fortunately, the audience never seems to notice the times when I lose track of the chords (usually around the second or third verse). Really need chords on all the verses of the songs I have trouble with.

Breakfast in the Executive Lounge (we paid for one night with Hilton Honors points -- that got us onto the concierge floor). Dave and Joyce were there -- they drove down overnight. Insane, but probably no more so than the rest of us.

Did a fair amount of singing yesterday, with a kids' concert and the computer-song theme circle back to back in the afternoon. Then probably more singing than I should have done in the filk lounge. Woke up with a very dry throat, but not scratchy thanks to benedryl and a variety of other drugs, plus lots of ginger tea yesterday. (Yay for ginger tea: put a couple of slices of ginger into a cup of hot water. Add honey to taste. Yummy, and good for the throat.)

Two theme circles and my concert today -- I'm planning to stay properly hydrated, and should get through it if I'm careful.

The flower_cat was attacked by a large plush dragon in the dealers' room. By the time I spotted her it was much too late to rescue her, but after what I've spent on CDs and what she hasn't spent on jewelry, I was in no position to complain.

The bags, boxes, crates, and ice chest are packed. The dishes from last night and this morning are being washed. The Y.D. is still at her high school freshman orientation; she'll get out at 11 or so. We'll have lunch, load the car, and should be on the road by noonish.

My first program item, the theme circle on found filk, is tomorrow at 5:30pm, giving me plenty of time to track down my badge (which might be either at reg or the green room).

Spent last Tuesday at the trade-show section of Linuxworld. Nothing really new, but there were a few developments that pleased me greatly (not even counting the fact that Microsoft wasn't there):

1. HP was showing a couple of "thin client" machines running Debian. They're based on Mini-ITX boards and AMD Geode CPUs. The larger one (to be released sometime next month) has an option for a PCI expansion card. Can you say "recording"? Unlike thin clients from Wyse, etc., they have enough onboard flash to hold a reasonable number of local applications. This is the future of "thin" clients, folks: machines that get information from the Web, but do most of the processing locally. Why wait for Firefox or OpenOffice to load through a knothole when you can load them from flash? Disk and CPU are cheap; bandwidth is expensive. And it's Debian, not some commercial distro.
2. Three manufacturers shipping Linux on laptops. One was Lenovo (heir to IBM's Thinkpad line); they only ship to large customers at the moment. But it runs on all their machines!
3. Creative Commons was there. I dropped off my card.

Saturday, I spent the afternoon at the 15^th Anniversary Linux Picnic. Went by myself, since the flower_cat and chaoswolf had to go to the Baycon picnic, and super_star_girl wanted to sleep in (she starts High School on August 28^th). The food arrived late, and the ice cream even later, but it was the usual crowd of happy, friendly geeks, so nobody minded.

Monday, Friday and Saturday night had practice sessions with Joyce. Mostly just working on the concert set, though last night I tossed "Guilty Pleasures" into the mix to see how it would sound with drum. Sounds good. Joyce is a folkdancer; songs in 5/4 and 7/8 don't faze her a bit.

We're heading down to Worldcon Tuesday as soon as the Y.D. gets done with her freshman orientation. Hopefully the flap over whether filk program participants are real "Program Participants" will have been cleared up by the time I go to the Green Room looking for my badge.