worldcon wednesday
Aug. 30th, 2012 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
totientDay 2... or day -1, I suppose. By this reckoning there will no more be a day 0 than there was a year 0.
Woke up quite early for an 8:00 call in the art show, which gave me some time to tidy up the room a little before heading out. I like to have things put away in hotel rooms, especially when I'm staying for more than a couple of nights. And also there will be roommates in the room soon and I want to leave room for their stuff, and eventually there will be a party in the room as well. It's just easier to get everything ready for that if there's an empty suitcase into which all my dirty laundry can go, and so on.
Made it down to the art show to meet the carpenters and electricians. The carpenters showed up first which was actually not quite ideal as much of the work I had for them required the electrical work to be done first. But I was able to keep them moving until the electricians got in.
As soon as the electricians did arrive I realized that I was working to an optimization that I had so internalized that I didn't even realize I was making it. In non-union hotels we buy power by the drop, and arrange things to use as few of them as possible, because we're not allowed to just plug in wherever we want. Hotel electricians don't have to worry about that. They can use all the drops that physically exist in the room if that is more sensible than, say, daisy chaining art show spines off each other. Duh! This is a better idea electrically anyway. And it didn't change the charge any. It did mean that they were uninterested in the spine to spine flyovers we had put up, and since not every spine had a flyover to the outside wall of the room they simply taped all the cords to the floor and I had the carpenters take down the wall flyovers too. The show looks a lot cleaner without them. And the particular spacing of the spines meant that instead of a great assortment of extension cords needed for the flyovers we wound up using *zero* of the heavy duty extension cords we'd brought from Boston for that. A few did get used elsewhere but this made the spines nice and clean looking and also meant that each of the combination vertical support/power strip poles had exactly one free plug for use by the occasional lighted art.
We had a few other hiccups along the way, but still were done with the carpenters and electricians by 11 and ready for art to go up by noon. By that time the art show army was getting restless so it was easy to find people to help clean up after setup, even given the huge number of people needed for mail in art.
Joni Dashoff recommended the Corner Bakery Cafe, a nearby lunch place, and Mary Dumas, her friend Pam, and I went there for lunch. It struck me as kind of a more upscale Panera but it was quite tasty.
After lunch I finished prepping the carts for storage, figured out what had happened to our load straps on the way in (one broke, but all parts were accounted for and the break won't keep us from using it opens the return), and generally try to keep abreast of the tide of chaos. After a few hours of setup it began to look like we wouldn't really have enough pegboard hooks, so I found a couple of nearby hardware stores that carried them and bought them both out. We can always go return them later.
Dinner with Joni Dashoff and Andrea Senchy continued my theme of dining with the smofs. But my meals have not really been smoffy -- these are all people who are already working on Arisia and who don't really need anything from me either. As I got back from dinner I noticed someone with Altadena listed on their badge and struck up a conversation. This turned out to be Jonathan Vos Post who is quite an interesting fellow. The next three hours were about 80% stories of his, 10% actual discourse, and 10% me failing my roll against conversational competitiveness.
There were a few parties going on including a Boston in 2020 hoax bid party. This is Chris Garcia's baby and I find it kind of annoying so I was pleased to see ribbons for a similar hoax bid for Garcia's home town of LA. This seems to have been spearheaded by the New Zealand in 2020 folks so I bought a presupport from them. Not that I'd have failed to do that otherwise.
Woke up quite early for an 8:00 call in the art show, which gave me some time to tidy up the room a little before heading out. I like to have things put away in hotel rooms, especially when I'm staying for more than a couple of nights. And also there will be roommates in the room soon and I want to leave room for their stuff, and eventually there will be a party in the room as well. It's just easier to get everything ready for that if there's an empty suitcase into which all my dirty laundry can go, and so on.
Made it down to the art show to meet the carpenters and electricians. The carpenters showed up first which was actually not quite ideal as much of the work I had for them required the electrical work to be done first. But I was able to keep them moving until the electricians got in.
As soon as the electricians did arrive I realized that I was working to an optimization that I had so internalized that I didn't even realize I was making it. In non-union hotels we buy power by the drop, and arrange things to use as few of them as possible, because we're not allowed to just plug in wherever we want. Hotel electricians don't have to worry about that. They can use all the drops that physically exist in the room if that is more sensible than, say, daisy chaining art show spines off each other. Duh! This is a better idea electrically anyway. And it didn't change the charge any. It did mean that they were uninterested in the spine to spine flyovers we had put up, and since not every spine had a flyover to the outside wall of the room they simply taped all the cords to the floor and I had the carpenters take down the wall flyovers too. The show looks a lot cleaner without them. And the particular spacing of the spines meant that instead of a great assortment of extension cords needed for the flyovers we wound up using *zero* of the heavy duty extension cords we'd brought from Boston for that. A few did get used elsewhere but this made the spines nice and clean looking and also meant that each of the combination vertical support/power strip poles had exactly one free plug for use by the occasional lighted art.
We had a few other hiccups along the way, but still were done with the carpenters and electricians by 11 and ready for art to go up by noon. By that time the art show army was getting restless so it was easy to find people to help clean up after setup, even given the huge number of people needed for mail in art.
Joni Dashoff recommended the Corner Bakery Cafe, a nearby lunch place, and Mary Dumas, her friend Pam, and I went there for lunch. It struck me as kind of a more upscale Panera but it was quite tasty.
After lunch I finished prepping the carts for storage, figured out what had happened to our load straps on the way in (one broke, but all parts were accounted for and the break won't keep us from using it opens the return), and generally try to keep abreast of the tide of chaos. After a few hours of setup it began to look like we wouldn't really have enough pegboard hooks, so I found a couple of nearby hardware stores that carried them and bought them both out. We can always go return them later.
Dinner with Joni Dashoff and Andrea Senchy continued my theme of dining with the smofs. But my meals have not really been smoffy -- these are all people who are already working on Arisia and who don't really need anything from me either. As I got back from dinner I noticed someone with Altadena listed on their badge and struck up a conversation. This turned out to be Jonathan Vos Post who is quite an interesting fellow. The next three hours were about 80% stories of his, 10% actual discourse, and 10% me failing my roll against conversational competitiveness.
There were a few parties going on including a Boston in 2020 hoax bid party. This is Chris Garcia's baby and I find it kind of annoying so I was pleased to see ribbons for a similar hoax bid for Garcia's home town of LA. This seems to have been spearheaded by the New Zealand in 2020 folks so I bought a presupport from them. Not that I'd have failed to do that otherwise.
