...And tonight Mister Kite is topping the bill!

Photos from Friday at Conestoga (28-Jul-2006) are online. Click on the picture of reudaly and the other Redheads of the Apocalypse to see them.

I only have Friday ready. I arrived at the Radisson about 9:00 pm on Friday, and left by 1:00 am; in those four hours, I snapped about 160 photos, although a lot of them are duplicates (usually one with the flash, one or two without). I have been using the high-speed WiFi access (on days when the company's paid for it, or over at the Radisson on the weekend) to upload all the photos. And for the last couple of nights, I've been matching up my notebook to my Friday pictures. This means that -- ta da! -- the Friday photos are almost completely captioned, except for a small number where I didn't take notes.

Some highlights of Friday at Conestoga: Met up with a lot of friends I'd seen at other midwest cons (especially people I'd seen in Kansas City). Ariel Weaver's back from India, and returned me our cds that I loaned her, and gave me a new one from a Tibetan singer. Ariel's going to attend T.U. for her 4-year degree; it's across the street from her house, she lives closer to most of the campus than the students who live in the dorms. But that's one girl that's going to be leaving Oklahoma as soon as she's got her economics degree and a place to go...

I ran into many Yard Doggies (another name for a Yard Dog Writer-Ho) at the con that I'd met before, including thevarious redheads, plus non-author redheads such as Margene Bahm (who explained to someone else that redhead is an attitude, not a hair color). I ran into Brad and Sue Sinor at Sue's reading -- it was scheduled late Friday night, and Brad was the only audience member. I met India Boothman's children, Kerridwyn and Damien.

The Four Redheads of the Apocalpyse were hanging out badge stickers, so I got a sticker from them. The convention had ribbons, with things like "AUTHOR CONESTOGA" and "STAFF CONESTOGA" on them. They looked like they were from Hodges; Elspeth (running Reg) told me that she'd ordered ribbons from one of the places I'd told her about, and that the prices had gone up recently. I told them that the ladies at RV Awards had reported they were too busy to stop and raise their prices.

Frank Wu was at the convention. Conestoga ran a little international short film festival, and this was the first public showing of his little movie Guidolon the Space Chicken which he was also handing out on cd-roms. And he had t-shirts for the movie too, but not in my size (XXL-T). So I have a shot of Frank with the four apocalyptic redheads, at one of the parties. He'd flown out from California to the convention, because this was the first public showing of his animated movie and he was reallly excited about it.

There were two parties Friday night - Fencon and Kansas City in 2009. Fencon's in Dallas, so it wasn't surprising that they came up to Tulsa. It was nice to see Tim Miller again, I keep running into him at these midwest cons. He was standing outside his party at one point, talking to angelinehawkes and company. I expected the K.C. people to be at Demicon (and maybe some of them were), but Jim Murray, Paula, and Margene were all down in Tulsa to push the bid. Jim used Captain Morgan Special Reserve in the "Red Rum" cinnamon apple rum punch he does.

Don Maitz, who paints Captain Morgan, was AGoH, so there was Captain Morgan and pirates a plenty at the convention. The convention had set up a barrel stenciled "Rum" and had a photo-op corner where you could put on pirate garb (they had a box of costume parts and props if you needed them), and they sold the prints and had a contest for best pirate. (Captain Morgan Spiced Rum has an advertising campaign featuring ordinary people with a leg bent in the air, as if they had one foot on an invisible keg of rum.)

Favorite t-shirt seen (on "Pops"): But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is AAAAHHHHH THE SUN! *FOOM*
-Vampire Theatre. Favorite bumper sticker in the parking lot: "I get along with God just fine. It's his fan clubs that I can't stand."

Regency Dance was lightly attended -- I snapped a few blurry shots using available light of the four dancers. Lots of food in the Con Suite. I dropped off a whole bunch of "Mike and Ike" samples that Tony Benoun and Christian McGuire had turned over to me. (I also put out glosssy flyers, one-sided paper flyers, and bookmarks for laconiv on the freebie table.) I ran into other local photographers Gerald Burton, Keith Stokes, and tapestry01, and gave most of them "Unoffical Photographer" ribbons.

I took lots of pictures of Gaming, which was in a prime location on the first floor. Filking was in one of the meeting rooms on the second floor, and when I stopped by Margaret Middleton was singing a song about contractors whose refrain was "I love to watch you caulk." And I ran into the science fictional gentle giant James P. Hogan, who was visiting from Ireland. (More about him later, there's News.)

One person had a badge that simply said ELF, which is her usual fan name. I explained that it wouldn't cross-reference well; I prefer to be able to write down names that are consistent and unique, that is every time I see them I'll use the same name, and it's a name nobody else on my list uses. Elf thought about it, and told me I could list her as Elf Feywynn. Great! Works for me. There a guy known as Ogre, and another known as Pops; I'm taking a chance that there won't be a collision if I use those one-word namees on the website. Or at least, not for a little while yet...

For a while I hung out in the hall that leads from the elevators to the ballroom area, outside one of the bar entrances. There were four comfy chairs (two on each side of the hall) and good lighting, so it was one place to wait for folks to stop by and be photographed. While I was there late at night, Jeni Eppler strolled by in a blue chinese silk jacket and some kind of combat cargo pants; I commented that she looked very Kaylee-esque, and she went out to her car and got her parasol to pose for a photo. (Whereupon I gave her a "Browncoat" ribbon.)

In the evening on Friday I met young Trey Shofner, who explained that he was wearing his night clothes; he was too old for pajamas, but he had some regular items he slept in. A basketball shirt without sleeves, and some sweatpants or something that only came to his knees. I'm the same way -- I don't have a proper set of pajamas or a nightshirt I can wear anymore, but I do have some clothes that are my usual sleepwear.

Leila Weaver, Elpeth's other daughter, has dyed her hair, and was hanging around late Friday night with her posse, most of whom were handcuffed together. She turns 18 in a few months. Daniel Gilbert, who is not young (judging by his receding gray hair), said he's worked for Leila when she's been in charge of things at conventions. (I don't remember the specifics.)

There was a vampire-and-werewolf LARP going on Friday night. I took a few pictures of some of the players, including Count Ramon, and some vampires who were apparently hanging out in werewolf territory. And during the day on Friday, I ran into Matt Randolph who's been helpful in recovering thumbnails from some of my previous Tulsa trips -- that'll help a lot when I get back into matching up my Mystery Photos again. A lot of people asked about the state of the recovery; I told the story about the forty percent a number of times over the course of the weekend.

The elevators in the hotel were mirrored, so I took the opportunity to take a self-portrait. I learned later that I was in one of the Star Trek elevators, because the mirrors make it look like you're in a curving corridor; there was a third elevator I don't remember riding in that was reportedly the 2001 elevator, because the curve went up instead of to the side.

Susan Satterfield and Russ Kleinowski were at the convention. Apparently Contraception (the 18-and-over con in Missouri) has hit a big snag: the hotel's completely demolished its atrium. It needed to, there was a serious mold problem that couldn't just be painted over. But this means that some of Contraception's traditional activities (such as a balcony-decorating contest) won't work at the place while it's under re-construction, and they don't know where they'll be able to move to if they need to. Susan explained how when negotiating with hotels, they can tell right away if the hotel's got a sense of humor by how they react to the convention's name.... and she also said that someone published a Top Ten List of Names You Shouldn't Give Your Convention, and "Contraception" made it to #1. She was pleased about that.

Conestoga had a "Bad metaphor or simile" contest -- does anyone know how it turned out?

---

Tuesday G. and I spent most of our time studying our manuals and sample source code for the new hardware. We talked a little bit about the M1 niche, and spent a lot of time studying how the little device handles its operating system. We've decided that "baby brains" can talk to "widgets" (and might be bundled with a widget) but that "big brains" will only talk to baby brains (not to widgets). This should help the big brain development, because that will be on a completely different OS (wince).

We also went over colleency's diagrams (second draft) for future testing, and realized we'd completely overlooked a fanout issue the day before. So I wrote up instructions for her to redraw the diagrams, and made sure that there would be test scenarios to cover the essentials of the San Francisco and Sacramento problems that we've encountered.

G. and I had lunch at Beijing Gourmet, a Chinese buffet (which had a Mongolian BBQ station) down at 61st and Memorial. When we came out of the parking lot, I realized that we were across from Triad Bank. Just a coincidence, I'm sure... It was tasty enough, although I missed consulting the chart telling you combinations of oils to put in with your bbq.

And for dinner, we went to another diner. We'd been to Tally's, an old diner on 11th (=old Route 66) at Yale (I think), where he had the club salad with the miscellaneous vegetables including the pickle slices; we'd been to "Five and Diner", down near new route 66 (that is, Oklahoma Hwy 66 = Interstate 44) and the Harley dealership; we'd talked about, but not visited, Metro Diner, the establishment on 11th in front of T.U. (University of Tulsa) that's due to get knocked down in a month or so to let the university build a park on that land; and today we went down to Corner Cafe, at 11th and Peoria. This is the place that I remembered from two years ago, that had the "lip service" non-smoking section.

Up until recently, in Tulsa, the "non-smoking section" in a restaurant meant the part that didn't have ash trays. It wasn't, say, a smoke-free section, in other words. At Corner Cafe, they had a wall separating the two sections when I was there last. But you had to walk through the smoking section to get to the non-smoking tables in the back, and the wall was mostly windows with two-inch gaps all the way around the glass. You could see through the wall -- and it was no hindrance to the smoke, either.

That was then. G. tells me that last year a new ordinance finally took effect, making most restaurants smoke-free. Now, in order to have a smoking section, they're supposed to have a completely separate walled-off section, with its own entrance, a separate ventilation system, and a negative-pressure system so the smoke doesn't leak out when you go through the door quickly. I'm hear to tell you it doesn't quite work. They've swapped the two halves (i.e. smoking is the additional room, the side with the cash register is now considered the non-smoking side), and they've got a different door to get in. They also took those two-inch gaps I told you about and filled in with wood, so there's a wood-and-glass window arrangement now between the sections.

But the door between the sections swings wide every time a server goes through it, and after dinner (Frito Pie) and dessert (Pecan Pie), I was starting to feel the effects of the smoke. So we got out of there.

---

Ribbon story part 25. (I'm going to call it quits here, until I start talking about the Unofficial Ribbons Exhibit coming together.) These are plain ribbons that are all for laconiv.

• SHINY
• Denver 2008
• Chicago in 2008 Worldcon Bid
• Top Dog
• Dave
• Not Dave

I thought "SHINY" ribbons would be fun to have at Worldcon; Christian had ribbon envy (because cfmiller is getting five titles of silly ribbons, I believe), so he's going to hand out SHINY as well as the others he came up with.

"Denver 2008" was requested by someone from the Denver bid.

"Chicago 2008 Worldcon Bid" is going to the bid's members, I believe; "Top Dog" goes to the class of bid presupporters who have paid the maximum to be a Friend of the Bid.

"Dave" and "Not Dave" are from the Chicago in 2008 bid as well; their bid chair's first name is David.