it never rains...

A quick summary of the last month:

Dec. 6, miss_chance's birthday.
Dec. 8, last day at Permabit.
Dec. 10, ICA opening.
Dec. 17, fly to Puerto Rico.
Dec. 21, roozle's birthday.
Dec. 21, miss_chance's and my anniversary.
Dec. 24, home from Puerto Rico.
Dec. 25, Christmas, and two parties.
Dec. 28, drive to New Haven for nephew Charlie's birthday.
Dec. 31, more do-not-miss parties than I can actually get to.
Jan. 1, also more do-not-miss parties than I can actually get to.
Jan. 2, first day at new job at ITA Software.
Jan. 3, Tolkein's birthday.
Jan. 4, fancy dinner with some close friends.
Jan. 5, drive to New York.
Jan. 6, over the top bat mitzvah of my youngest cousin.
Jan. 7, another do-not-miss party.
Jan. 9, final deadline with the Arisia hotel
Jan. 10, Arisia runtime begins
Jan. 12, first actual official day of Arisia

Happily, my biggest real responsibility at ITA so far has been to organize ITA's presence at Arisia. We will be sponsoring the film program, as a tie-in to the movie nights that happen here twice a week. We'll have some HR folks wandering around the con. And we will be throwing a party on Saturday night after the Masquerade. We have about a dozen people coming down, from all across the company, a pretty good food budget, and a bunch of giveaways (nice ones, like shirts and hats and USB thumbdrives) that we'll be giving out to people who come talk to us. We're going to experiment a little with using video projection in a party context in a way that might lead to a very interesting immersive party concept for 2008. It looks like it's going to be a good time.

fifteen years

A little more than fifteen years ago I got a call from Kim van Auken asking if I could run a Staff Den for her a few days later. I could, I said, what's my budget and when do I pick up the room, and then I went off and did it.

I didn't really understand at the time why she sounded so relieved on the phone.

Now I do.