I did see a few panels, I was hoping to see more but just didn’t have the time.  I didn’t get there on Friday until after 8pm.  I work, sucks.  It was a bit difficult to get there early in the morning for the earlier panels.  Being that this con is held at a small university, University of Houston at Clear Lake, there wasn’t a hotel room to go to to relax or stuff your stuff in while you were there.  The advantage of holding it at the University is the Gaming Guild who runs it has a low overhead.  This is handy, but again, no hotel for the weary.  Owlcon has this problem too.  It helps the organization who runs the con, but the players are at a little bit of a disadvantage.

I had a good time, made a few new friends and collected a few new phone numbers and addresses for my collection.  My phone is starting to die however, so I may be getting a new phone soon.  I hope I don’t lose any of those.

In other news, I’ve added a color printer to my little computer set up.  I’ve been wanting one for a long time to print out things like charts so I picked up a freecycled HP 720C just the other day.  Its an old parallel printer all it needed was a couple of cartridges and a usb to parallel cable and I was up and running in no time.  It’s networked in through the linux machine and all my computers can print to it except the handheld.  The only problem I’ve run into is that there are no drivers for a Mac or the handheld for this printer.  It’s old, I know, and I’m still working on that problem.  The generic driver works for now, but color doesn’t print very well through the mac but it will print text just fine.  The hand held can’t print at all through it, another problem to solve but it has no problems with printing to the lazer jet.  No problems for the laptop and the linux  machine however.  I did manage to get everything to print to the other HP printer, something I’ve not had time to fool with on the mac and I am pleased about that.

And… here they are: (Behind the cut)

All my Elissa volunteering has kept me away from Amtgard for a long time and I needed to see them. Currently, there is another overnight going on this next weekend. However, I haven’t heard back from them. I think I’ll just call them tomorrow and see what’s up with that. It will be a Friday over night. It’s hard for me to get to those, but I’ll make my best effort. I know, I know, I missed Plankowners. Yea, it’s the biggest fundraiser of the year. Sorry. I’ll really try to make it next year. I promise. See, it’s recorded now.

ApolloCon will be happening at the end of the month on June 26-28, 2009. Snicker and I are doing the Media room. I’ve sent them my stuff, but I’ve not seen it up yet. Here’s the flyer for the Iron Director Contest. It promises to be a lot of fun, I hope we get some good participation this year.

Two, there is a meeting this weekend of the ApolloCon con committee.  We are pretty much done with all our set up stuff, all that remains for Media is to get to the con and set up.  I’ve sent them all my flyer data and stuff.  Twice now.  I have yet to see it posted on the site.  I have heard nothing back to if they couldn’t read it or if it wasn’t good enough, still or what.  I may just post it here and send out a link to the flyer.  I’d post it right now but it’s at home on the laptop.  You know, the one that is too big to fit on my lap on the bus?  I really should keep that data on the iPod at least.   I’ll post the just of it on a page on this site and update it later.

There is a third option, I can go help out at Plankowners at the Elissa this Saturday, but gawd, I still am in recovery from the Elissa right now.  More on that later.

Other updates:

I’ve changed the icons to gravatars.  You can go online to www.gravatar.com to create your gravatar.  All you do is create a username and email you use for all your blogs and sites and upload an avatar that you will use for all of them.  It automaticly downloads the avatar when you create a membership with that email address.  It’s actually kind of cool.

I think I have installed enough crossposting software to completely annoy just about every blog I’ve ever gotten a membership on.

I’ve gotten a chat program working though the site.  It is based on google talk.  I have found another one that had more features that uses another program, but I don’t think I have any friends on that service.  I did find an irc based one, but I was never able to get that one configured.  It was also too tied to an adult irc company and even though it was their G rated version, I don’t know if I want to go there regardless.

Else, I am about to do some overhauling on the Cafepress site. I am working on a revamp of my chapbooks (I didn’t realize just how much has changed since I’ve written those.) and I’ve picked up a lot of new Hubble shots to make new stuff. I’ve also revamped the Calendar and may make a few more if I get time.
At the very least, I can stay home and work on the boat. There is always something to do at home.

I have to admit they had nice t-shirts.  The panel I went to had an audience of at first just two of us.  However, a few other people later showed up and we maybe had 5 in the room.  The whole con was like that on Friday night.

I missed the day portion of Saturday.  We were taking our final exam at the Elissa on Saturday so I had to be there.  I did rather well on the test which was doing great since I had skipped out on the study group the night before.   When I got there, I managed to make the only LARP that happened to make it that weekend.  It was a weird combination of Steampunk, Changling and Furry and me and one of my Amtgard friends managed to pretty much take over in the RP.  I guess that’s what happens when you take a bunch of 20 something LARPers and throw in a couple of 40 something old Amtgard geeks into the mix.  Give us some rather ambiguous rules and loads of magic to play with and we will run amok.  I look back at it and I think that we would have been successful in killing the fairy ice queen if we only thought of taking the statue we had turned her into and thrown it into an iron box so her fay friends wouldn’t have been able to rescue here … then we would have been able to throw her into the sea without too much interference.  Oh well, hind sight is 20/20.

I had planned to be at Stormwall on Sunday, but as luck would have it, power issues returned to the boat.  However, this time, we isolated what was causing it all this time.  It was dirty power.  The power grid at the marina has been pretty spotty since Ike and we discovered when we were fixing my burnt out wires at the inverter that the power input from the marina was only 99 volts instead of 110 and the current was almost non existent.  This is probably why I’ve been having so many problems lately.  Fortunately, the Harbormaster was around to fix the power connection so all is good now.