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.

I did this year get a bit of a chance to see much of the costumes before the contest.  I admit I ADD’d out of the improv fan comedy light bulb joke session and didn’t see the actual cosplay, but I did get a chance to see a few of the players standing out in the hall and this year’s selection was very good.  (pictures pending)

I did run that GURPS game in one of the board rooms.  It did turn out very well and they did give me a lot of good RP, I don’t think we had as much action as I wanted.  I still have the characters and I may run a continuation of the game next year as per request.  By then, I will have my rules down better and I won’t be looking stuff up as much.  GURPS is a very easy system and I can fudge a lot if I have to.  lol  The system lacks a good ship battle system so what I did was played the ships like they were battletech mecs with lots of guns and armor and just described movement.   It was fairly easy.  Next time I may bring the hex grid and get serious on ships battles.  That was the best part of the game.  I do need mini ships for this don’t I.  hmm.

Parties.  Lots of parties.  I lent my room out for the Wholigans Dr. Who party both nights.   I think we had most the alcohal on the floor this time around.  Our party could have had a few more signs, but we did have a OMG amount of beer and other things.  We even got one of my gamer friends completely smashed who doens’t usually do that sort of thing as he repeatedly told us over and over again. lol  We had to help him back to his room, gawd he was gone.  lol  I think the highlight of our party was the “Empress Dalek” costume.  I’ve got a bunch of pictures of that and as usual, pictures pending. Next year, we need to top that guy who brought the cello, maybe a whole chamber orchestra lol.

I got the rest of the week filled with laundry, and cleaning, maybe a bit of maintainance, and family diplomacy to work out.  I hope to get at least a little sleep before the con, but that doesn’t look likely.  I certainly am not getting sleep while I’m there.  My room will be taken over by the Space City Timelords for parties on Friday and Saturday night.  Gawdz, what have I gotten myself into?

It’s an awesome feed about the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. It’s done in real time, that is, it’s the testing and the prep before the launch as it happened 40 years ago. It’s been fun to follow.

Thinking of Apollo… namely ApolloCon, don’t forget it’s next weekend and we will be there running the movie room.  I’ll also be involved with the Space City Time Lords and throwing a party in my room.  Don’t know what night it will be yet, but it will be announced at the con, if not here first.

I also am going to try and run a GURPS game on Saturday afternoon.  Probably around 12 noon or so.  It should be on the schedule at the con or up on the webpage soon.

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.