Yearly Archives: 2008

826 Valencia

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I might be late out the gate on this, but I wanted to call attention to 826 Valencia, which is a non-profit writing and tutoring center started by the folks at McSweeney’s. There are seven branches around the country now, which each one running a unique storefront to help fund their efforts. The original location in San Francisco runs a Pirate Supply Store. The one in New York City is for superheroes, while the one in Los Angeles is for time travelers. Seattle is all about space travel (appropriate since the Sci-fi Museum is also in Seattle), Chicago is meant for spies, while Ann Arbor, Michigan offers a home for itinerant monsters, and Boston is home to cryptozoologists from all over.

So friggin’ cool. I wish stuff like this had been running when I was a kid.

Delays and Excuses

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“The best laid plans…” and all that. Apologies for the slow posting. For what it’s worth, the day before flying back to Portland, I came down with a hell of a cough that has been driving me bonkers ever since. At some point, I imagine it’ll go away, but in the meantime, it hasn’t exactly put me in a posting mood (after a string of coughing, most of the time all I really want to say is “fucking hell…”).

Despite the cough, I’ve been keeping busy the past week or two catching up on things that I’d let slide while gone for the month (finally did my taxes today, woo! …and yes, I did in fact file an extension when I realized my paperwork was in Portland and I was in DC, so no guff about procrastinating this time). I’ve also been spending a fair bit of time with my friend Jessica (not going to jinx it by trying to define it into a neatly compartmentalized relationship, but I will say I’ve been really enjoying her company, and leave any conclusions to be made to the reader).

I didn’t get the LaCie job, which is a shame, but I remain optimistic about finding a reasonable position somewhere in the Portland area (not that it’s a requirement, but it would be nice… I’m also applying elsewhere, just less so). I’ve also decided it’s time to try revising my resume again, to see if I can elicit more responses from my job hunting attempts.

Will get back to posting more regularly soon.

DC Sightseeing

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I’ve spent the past few days staying with Scott, Shane, and Brian down in Arlington, doing the sightseeing thing through DC. It’s been good fun, and each day I completely filled the compact flash cards I have (two 2gb cards)… this may sound like a lot, but given that I was shooting raw, that’s really only about 500-550 images total. Now that I HAVE those images, of course, I need to actually sift through them, do any post processing I feel is necessary, and upload them… which in some ideal world will be after I move to Zenphoto. So, time willing, maybe by the end of the week.

UberCon X Followup

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UberCon has once again come and gone. While our numbers weren’t what we’d hoped or expected, a lot of that can be tied to the current recession, and not having the hotel contracts in time to promote the event early on. We can’t do much about the recession, but this time at least we have firm dates for UberCon XI — October 24-26th. I can’t be positive I’ll make it out for it (I’ve made it to the past two by the grace of friends in a more financially beneficial place than I am), but it would certainly be nice to see everyone again.

Overall, I’d say the con was a great time — it’s good people, and everyone seems to have fun. I met a bunch more Avatarians, though frankly I lost count ages ago. I’m fairly positive I’m over 100 at this point. (The list of MUDders who attended can be found here.) I actually ended up hosting two panels (well, one and a half, one of the panels was on plans to shift some of the geography of Avatar around, and pulled in a whopping two people and took about 10 minutes… the other one was very well attended, as it was a roundtable discussing plans for the ranger class revision). As is usual, I didn’t really play any games, but instead spent a lot of the weekend simply running around and checking up on people, making sure they had what they needed, and doing general chit-chat. I like being “at large,” and honestly don’t think I’d have nearly as much fun if I was locked into an official role.

Some highlights: getting to see a lot of friends I’d not seen for anywhere from six months to several years, or even had never met in real life before at all; observing the midnight game of “It’s Midnight… are YOU a Werewolf?”; wading through a two foot long chocolate eclair from Harold’s with Timothy Zahn and a dozen other friends; and, of course, the late night parties and diner runs that all seem contribute to the COMPLETE lack of sleep that happens at the con.

Adding Forums

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It’s not ready for primetime yet, but I’m making progress towards my goals for the site. I’ve installed and hacked Vanilla (the hack is a minor one — there is a tutorial on the Vanilla website on integrating Vanilla with WordPress, so it has a shared user database. This means you register ONCE, and you get the ability to post in the forums AND leave comments in the blog. I consider this a Good Thing™, given how much of a pain it can be to get folks to register in the first place.

Speaking of registering, yes, I’m sorry, you’ll need to re-register. I’d managed to accrue a ton of spambot members, so I ended up doing a purge of member accounts when I shifted everything else around, rather than try and sift through who is a bot, and who is simply someone who made an account but never comments.

The forum can be found here. As you can see, I’m not done tweaking the theme for it. I thought about waiting to install the forum until the theme was complete, but meh, I wanted to continue to make forward motion. The move to ZenPhoto is the next big technical mucking I need to do, and that I AM putting off, until I finish chatting with Mickey regarding her gallery, which I still host, though she’s mostly moved on to her Flickr account. One of ZenPhoto’s few drawbacks currently is its support for multiple users, so while I don’t want to kick her out or anything, if she decides she’d rather just host everything on Flickr, it’s one less hoop I need to worry about (for the record, if she does move, I’ll be setting up an automatic redirect, so links to her gallery will point you to her Flickr account instead).

UberCon X

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April is nearly gone, and I’ve not really posted much. Partly, yes, because I was working on a site redesign, and more than a little bit because I was simply a slacker. But also, because I’ve been out in the Baltimore/DC area for almost all of April, helping prepare for UberCon X, which is coming up in a scant few days, in Edison, New Jersey. I was flown in for the purpose of chasing down sponsorships and corporate contacts, a task which I seem to do alright at, even though I really hate doing it. I should have been focusing on landing a job, and getting settled into Portland, of course, but I was explicitly asked, flown out, and put up to do this (and it’s not like I don’t have a vested interest in making sure the con stays afloat and successful, friends aside), so in the grand scheme, there are worse things I could be doing with my time.

Being a wee bit more tied to the con than I have for the past several, I know that Erica and CJ won’t be making it this time around, which bums me a little bit, but is the way things go sometimes. UberCon has a new guest director, Alyssa (who has been involved with the con since day one as the RPG director, so I have at least some faith will stick around and do a good job), who has managed to line up Timothy Zahn for a rare east coast appearance. This should be fun because it’s always nice to get a good headliner, and also because his affiliation with the expanded Star Wars universe suggests that there will be a decent turnout of stormtrooper-armored fans at the event.