Conventions

Saying Goodbye to NOLA

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Kevin and I are in New Orleans airport where there is free public wi-fi. We are, as usual, here ridiculously early, because you never know when there might be a huge backup at check-in or terrorization, so we have some time before we have to board. There follows a few reflections on my first visit to New Orleans.
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Worldcon Interviews

~ Cheryl

It appears that I was not the only person doing podcasts and vidcasts from Worldcon. (And yes, I know I still have a whole bunch of stuff to process and publish.) A web site called Pacific Fen Spotlight has just posted a number of interviews which you can find here. The one on Worldcon bids is entertaining as it includes a chat to the XERPS Ambassador, who has some interesting things to say about Roswell and anal probes. There is also an interview with a handsome and erudite chap called Kevin Standlee.

Mimeo Panel Photos Online

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

You can see Colin Hinz, Geri Sullivan, Frank Wu, Brianna SpaceKat and myself doing the mimeo demonstration at Denvention 3 in these photos. Check the final picture which is a close-up of Brianna’s artwork. For a first attempt at drawing on a stencil that was awesome (well, except for the spelling, but we all know that kids today can’t spell, right?).

Convention Anti-Harassment Policies

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Kevin and I spent a fair amount of time yesterday discussing this new web site which calls on conventions to adopt specific anti-harassment policies. As Jed Hartman notes, one of the first things that comes to mind is, “But why would cons need an anti-harassment policy?” I guess if you are used to going to conventions full of old people it might be less obvious, but some of the goings on at Comic Con this year appear to have been quite horrible. Besides, there are good reasons for having such a policy.
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Velociraptors!

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Here is some more video from the Denvention 3 masquerade. It features the velociraptor costumes that won Best in Show for Workmanship (despite being a journeyman entry). Huge congratulations to Charles Orndorff, Jennifer Strand, Michael Bruno and Tauni Orndorff for a fabulous entry.

John Picacio Art Tour

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

During the artists’ reception at Worldcon, John Picacio gave me a personal tour around his exhibit. I filmed it, and now it is on YouTube. The picture quality isn’t great, and clearly I have a lot to learn about shooting video, but hopefully it will be interesting.

We Have Video

~ Cheryl

The trouble with YouTube is that in order to make the video downloadable in a reasonable period it has to sacrifice a lot in quality. This is not good if you are trying to film beautiful costumes. But hopefully having the costumers talk about what they have done makes up for that. Here are Sandy & Pierre (alias Oberon and Titania).

WordCamp

~ Cheryl

So, that was a bust. By the time I got to the convention center it was 12:30. Signage was pretty much non-existent, but I found Registration because a) it looked exactly like a Registration table and b) the girls behind it were wearing WordCamp t-shirts. Somehow they hadn’t managed to print a badge for me, even though I’d been registered since Tuesday, but at least they had my name on the printed list. They also had a program. And as it turned out two of the four sessions I wanted to see had already happened, and the other two were not scheduled until after I had to leave to get to SF in SF.

Had I been able to see a schedule in advance it might have changed things, but as I would have had to settle for 4 hours sleep last night in order to be able to see anything I was interested in I suspect I might have blown off the conference anyway.

I guess I could have stuck around to see if there was free WiFi and blogged about it immediately, but it was a lovely day in San Francisco and I wanted to get back to Market Street while my MUNI ticket was still valid.

Stephen Boucher Interview

~ Cheryl

Here is the first of my podcasts from Worldcon. It is an interview with Stephen Boucher, the man who started the whole Australia in 2010 bid by foolishly saying “I’d rather chair a Worldcon than…” in the hearing of a bunch of SMOFs. Despite the hail of $20 bills that descended upon him, Stephen won’t be chairing Aussiecon 4. That honor goes to Perry Middlemiss and Rose Mitchell. But Stephen is heading up the Facilities Division, and he has a lot of interesting things to day about the new convention center in Melbourne.

There is a fair amount of background noise on the recording, and that’s despite us going off to a relatively quiet part of the convention center. Hopefully you can still make out what is being said fairly clearly.

By the way, the reason I say I’m “again” looking at future Worldcons is because I recorded an interview with Farah Mendlesohn just before this one. I must bear in mind that I may not upload recordings in the order in which I make them.

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WordCamp & SF in SF

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Tomorrow I will be spending the day in San Francisco. The day starts with my first ever attendance at WordCamp – a convention for WordPress users. It doesn’t seem especially organized. It is the day before the event and they still don’t have a full schedule upon the web site. If it was an science fiction convention the blogosphere would be aflame with indignation, but so it goes. The main problem is that I don’t know if I need to get there early. The one data point that they do have is that registration will begin at 8:00am, but it isn’t clear when the sessions actually start, or who will be on first. Besides, 8:00am might be OK for gung-ho blogging entrepreneurs, but us lit crit types (Farah excepted) are barely awake at that time of day, and I have to shower, breakfast and take bus, BART and MUNI in order to get there. I’ll be there when I can.

Anyway, the web site does mention that the WiFi is being sponsored so I’m hoping it is free. I’m taking the Asus (and my audio and video recorders) and I’ll see what I can find. I’m hoping to catch Kathy Sierra, and the session on secure programming. I know most of you folks will be much more interested in the LOLCats guy, so hopefully I’ll get to see him too.

But I may have to duck out early because in the evening I have to be at the SF in SF reading with Michael Shea and Michael Blumlein. No rest for the wicked, as my mother tends to say.

Video Progress

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Given that Simon Bisson was so confident that my video files would be recoverable, I decided to try one or two more file recovery utilities. The one that worked was File Recover from PC Tools. It cost me $30, but it was well worth it as I have so far managed to recover almost all of the missing files, including the Picacio interview and the piece about Stephen Clark’s bear costume. I’m still missing one sequence with the velociraptors and the interview with Sandy and Pierre Pettinger, but if that’s all I have lost I’ll be much relieved.

Celebrity Worship

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

Via Mike Glyer I found this report on Denvention3. It is always good to hear that people enjoyed Worldcon, but one particular comment stopped me in my tracks:

I go to a panel discussion to hear the panel members’ opinions – not the audience’s. The audience contributes questions, not their own opinions, which is a concept that many attendees did not seem to grasp. (Exceptions, of course, for notable authors or professionals who happen to be in the audience.)

Having moderated very many panels in my time, I’d be the first to admit that there are audience members who need to be restrained from expressing their opinion interminably. However, that’s a small price to pay for a community that values discussion. Being a famous author does not automatically give you a monopoly on knowledge or wisdom. And if Worldcon ever becomes a convention where the point of attending is to worship at the feet of celebrities I for one will stop attending.

Gone

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

So this evening I thought I would make a start on editing the video from Worldcon, and the first thing I needed to do was up upload the video from the Hugo ceremony from the Flip camera to the computer. So I did a bit of housekeeping, and then transferred the files. I started up the video editing software and looked for something to edit.

All of the previous Worldcon videos that I had saved were gone. The Hugo ceremony stuff was there OK, but the videos from the masquerade, and the video of John Picacio’s art exhibition, were all gone.

I looked in the recycle bin. Nothing. I got out the file undelete software. Nothing. The videos had been completely wiped.

I know what I did. The video transfer software has a folder that it uses on the computer. The missing video files had been stored there. When I tidied things up I moved the files to subdirectories within that folder. And when I loaded the transfer software it found directories that it didn’t recognize and deleted them.

Well, didn’t just delete them, it wiped them beyond all hope of recovery. (I suspect they were overwritten by the newly uploaded files.)

What kind of pea-brained moron writes software that does this I cannot say. However, once bitten, twice shy. I shall not make that mistake again. From now on every time I upload videos from the camera I will immediately back them up to some other location on the hard drive. If you happen to have a Flip camera, I advise you to do the same thing too.

Ah well, at least that’s less video that I have to process. But damn, that was really good footage that I lost.