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hazelchazPart 3 of 3
[I'm posting this using the free Wi-Fi service available at The Goat, at Argyle & Haugh. They're open 11 am to midnight; they kindly allowed me to come in and do my net stuff while they set up. They don't start serving food until noon, though..]
On Wednesday afternoon, Sandra Battye,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
library_lynn, Colin Hinz, Christian McGuire, and Rincewind were all very helpful in setting up the Fan Gallery. It was an all-day affair. We learned from Ops that Art Show had All The Pegboard Hooks, so we took 400 hooks from them. I set the first hook for each panel -- each photo area was 4 feet wide, using two of three 2' wide boards. So I had to decide whether the leftmost or the middle board would be where the "first hook" would go. library_lynn helped set hooks in their planned positions. Losing the server in July meant I'd lost the latest version of my software to chart the photo locations, as well as the latest version of the list of photos. I got most of it working, but I didn't re-invent the inch-to-metric hole conversion, so I did that by hand by writing up a conversion chart: if it says [5] (meaning 5") count 7 holes, [6] = 8 holes, [7] = 10 holes, and so forth. Lynn did an excellent job while she could, but her brain got fuzzy after doing a third of the display.
Meanwhile, Christian worked on assembling photos, frames, and captions, and was a great help; Lynn worked with him when she got burned out on the hook-setting. There was a fair amount of work, because I'd added a number of photos to the collection immediately after the exhibit cases had shipped in June. The server crash meant that I didn't have any captions for them, so I've printed the names of them on a mostly blank sheet of paper, with a note saying -"Help us fill in their bio captions"- and I've handwritten in what little I had on them from their original "Wanted" entries.
Colin Hinz came along and got us tape from Ops, and started hanging up the actual photos. Mark Olson turned up and told us that the photo enlargements that Sharon Sbarsky had printed back at NESFA were around somewhere, and eventually he and Lynn fetched them back so we could figure them out. Lynn also brought me lunch -- a cold cornish pasty from the mini market. (They don't have a microwave there.) I was dubious, but ate it cold anyway, and found that it was tasty that way, too, even if it was a little different from my expectations. I'm going to go through a lot of meat pies this week...
Sandra Battye and Rincewind came by late in the day, after I'd started placing all the enlargements up. I have 28 places (28 boards) where the blowups can be placed, and more than 28 blowups. Christian had helped by going around and marking where I had two or three or more blowups in the same spot, and Sandra Battye and Rincewind took care of rearranging them to make it convenient to flip some of them over throughout the convention. By the way, thanks to Sharon for the work back home to make this possible; we had blowups printed and mounted from Noreascon, but didn't want to deal with shipping them to and from the convention. I elected not to worry about obtaining foamcore and mounting them, because that would cost us both time and money ("dollar points and people points"). So by the end of the day, about 1800 or 1900, the whole exhibit was up, blowups included, a few signs posted explaining the exhibit, and my "as built" chart checked to make sure that I had an accurate record of what photos we've hung. We have 389 pictures of 419 fans in this display, our largest yet I believe.
Sandra Battye, Rincewind,miramon, Giulia De Cesare, library_lynn and I went to dinner at "Yen" which is in the round "Casino" building at the far end of the car park. Go out past the Armadillo and keep walking, you'll find it. Be careful, though, it can be very windy. The Campanile hotel is almost as far (it's the closest hotel that isn't the Moat House), and has some sort of bistro -- we'll try that tomorrow. They have Chinese food upstairs and Teppanyaki downstairs. (If you've been to "Benihana" you've seen teppanyaki.) Same problem as the other restaurants, the cigarette smoke from other tables kept spilling over, but it was a fine dinner. They were extra solicitous of library_lynn's particular needs -- i.e., no soy sauce, no marinated meats, no alcohol -- and served up a fine 8 course meal with her dishes tailored for her. She doesn't care for seaweed, so the seaweed-wrapped cone of sticky rice didn't appeal to her, and we might not have told them about no soup and no tofu. But these were minor inconveniences, and the food itself was fine. Dinner for the two of us was 57 pounds (which included at 10% service charge), and we threw in an extra 3 pounds because they did so well with the food. Which included dessert: a "drop scone" -- essentially a big fluffy pancake -- cooked on the grill, wrapped around a chunk of vanilla ice cream, put on a plate with strawberry/kiwi/orange slices and a bunch of chocolate sauce swirled on the plate, and then ignited with flaming brandy (except Lynn's). It was delightful and delicious, and Lynn was happy to get her daily ration of ice cream.
Steve recommended that we look for Iain Banks's book "Raw Spirit", a Scotland travelog that covers many of the distilleries including, likely, the ones we might visit later in our trip...
And then home, to go to bed, or in my case to write up our adventures for eventual posting on-line. And plug our phones into the charger. I tried going back to The Goat, but they closed at midnight. They open again at 1100, I'll come back and try them in the morning. I found that out by asking; most of the businesses in these parts don't seem to post when they open or close, so I still don't know when the nearby laundrette opens in the morning.library_lynn is starting to run out of shirts, so she wants to get some laundry done on Thursday before she goes down to visit the Tenement House.
Both in London and hear in Glasgow, our lodging has been within walking distance of halal butchers. Not sure if that's relevant; I haven't seen any kosher places yet.
Did I post about the traffic lights? The traffic lights here go like this: green, yellow, red, red+yellow, green again. Some of them also go to flashing yellow at one point. Not sure what they mean! We've also seen zig-zag lane markings in the streets, what are they for? A mystery, glad I'm not driving. I remember how surprised I was by flashing green in Michigan, where it means that you can make a protected left turn. Comparable to having a green arrow light up. I don't remember whether it means that you can go straight if you want to as well. And a flashing green in Boston means, I think, all pedestrians can go anywhere and traffic should stop. A dangerous signal aspect, methinks; what if the flasher breaks but the light doesn't? I would have felt a lot safer on foot if the signal was a flashing red, or red plus something else. Something to look into if I make it back to Boston some time. Boston USA, that is; there's a Boston here, too, which I suspect is the original one.
(If you haven't figured it out by now, this is my first trip to the UK, and my first time overseas even. So a lot of this is strange and new. For example I'd heard Eddie Izzard mention "Jammy Dodgers" in his act -- we have some of his CDs -- but didn't know that they were a vanilla sandwich cookie with a fruit-flavored jam filling. (Excuse me, I mean a biscuit.)
And did I mention the address numbering? Apparently our system of even numbers on one side of the street, odd on the other, isn't followed here. Our number 36 is between 35 and 37. Also parking your car on the side of the street you're allowed to drive on -- not followed much here. Both sides of St. Vincent Crescent, you'll see cars parked facing both directions. And on Minerva, there's a parking lane in the middle of the street!
Another thing: our room's lock works with these old-fashioned style keys. The long skinny kind with a little blade on the end, that you leave in the keyhole? I guess they never saw any reason to upgrade the locks on the rooms. (The main door to the house uses a modern style key, though.) Wonder how old this brick thing is...
Update: Majestic Laundrette, on Argyle at the corner of Argyle and Corunna, will do a load of laundry, wash and dry it and fold it for you, for 5 pounds a washer load. We're going to dump our dirty laundry so far on them Friday morning and pick it up Saturday, I think. They're open 9 am to 5 pm M-F, 9-4 weekends.
[I'm posting this using the free Wi-Fi service available at The Goat, at Argyle & Haugh. They're open 11 am to midnight; they kindly allowed me to come in and do my net stuff while they set up. They don't start serving food until noon, though..]
On Wednesday afternoon, Sandra Battye,
library_lynn, Colin Hinz, Christian McGuire, and Rincewind were all very helpful in setting up the Fan Gallery. It was an all-day affair. We learned from Ops that Art Show had All The Pegboard Hooks, so we took 400 hooks from them. I set the first hook for each panel -- each photo area was 4 feet wide, using two of three 2' wide boards. So I had to decide whether the leftmost or the middle board would be where the "first hook" would go. library_lynn helped set hooks in their planned positions. Losing the server in July meant I'd lost the latest version of my software to chart the photo locations, as well as the latest version of the list of photos. I got most of it working, but I didn't re-invent the inch-to-metric hole conversion, so I did that by hand by writing up a conversion chart: if it says [5] (meaning 5") count 7 holes, [6] = 8 holes, [7] = 10 holes, and so forth. Lynn did an excellent job while she could, but her brain got fuzzy after doing a third of the display.Meanwhile, Christian worked on assembling photos, frames, and captions, and was a great help; Lynn worked with him when she got burned out on the hook-setting. There was a fair amount of work, because I'd added a number of photos to the collection immediately after the exhibit cases had shipped in June. The server crash meant that I didn't have any captions for them, so I've printed the names of them on a mostly blank sheet of paper, with a note saying -"Help us fill in their bio captions"- and I've handwritten in what little I had on them from their original "Wanted" entries.
Colin Hinz came along and got us tape from Ops, and started hanging up the actual photos. Mark Olson turned up and told us that the photo enlargements that Sharon Sbarsky had printed back at NESFA were around somewhere, and eventually he and Lynn fetched them back so we could figure them out. Lynn also brought me lunch -- a cold cornish pasty from the mini market. (They don't have a microwave there.) I was dubious, but ate it cold anyway, and found that it was tasty that way, too, even if it was a little different from my expectations. I'm going to go through a lot of meat pies this week...
Sandra Battye and Rincewind came by late in the day, after I'd started placing all the enlargements up. I have 28 places (28 boards) where the blowups can be placed, and more than 28 blowups. Christian had helped by going around and marking where I had two or three or more blowups in the same spot, and Sandra Battye and Rincewind took care of rearranging them to make it convenient to flip some of them over throughout the convention. By the way, thanks to Sharon for the work back home to make this possible; we had blowups printed and mounted from Noreascon, but didn't want to deal with shipping them to and from the convention. I elected not to worry about obtaining foamcore and mounting them, because that would cost us both time and money ("dollar points and people points"). So by the end of the day, about 1800 or 1900, the whole exhibit was up, blowups included, a few signs posted explaining the exhibit, and my "as built" chart checked to make sure that I had an accurate record of what photos we've hung. We have 389 pictures of 419 fans in this display, our largest yet I believe.
Sandra Battye, Rincewind,
miramon, Giulia De Cesare, library_lynn and I went to dinner at "Yen" which is in the round "Casino" building at the far end of the car park. Go out past the Armadillo and keep walking, you'll find it. Be careful, though, it can be very windy. The Campanile hotel is almost as far (it's the closest hotel that isn't the Moat House), and has some sort of bistro -- we'll try that tomorrow. They have Chinese food upstairs and Teppanyaki downstairs. (If you've been to "Benihana" you've seen teppanyaki.) Same problem as the other restaurants, the cigarette smoke from other tables kept spilling over, but it was a fine dinner. They were extra solicitous of library_lynn's particular needs -- i.e., no soy sauce, no marinated meats, no alcohol -- and served up a fine 8 course meal with her dishes tailored for her. She doesn't care for seaweed, so the seaweed-wrapped cone of sticky rice didn't appeal to her, and we might not have told them about no soup and no tofu. But these were minor inconveniences, and the food itself was fine. Dinner for the two of us was 57 pounds (which included at 10% service charge), and we threw in an extra 3 pounds because they did so well with the food. Which included dessert: a "drop scone" -- essentially a big fluffy pancake -- cooked on the grill, wrapped around a chunk of vanilla ice cream, put on a plate with strawberry/kiwi/orange slices and a bunch of chocolate sauce swirled on the plate, and then ignited with flaming brandy (except Lynn's). It was delightful and delicious, and Lynn was happy to get her daily ration of ice cream.Steve recommended that we look for Iain Banks's book "Raw Spirit", a Scotland travelog that covers many of the distilleries including, likely, the ones we might visit later in our trip...
And then home, to go to bed, or in my case to write up our adventures for eventual posting on-line. And plug our phones into the charger. I tried going back to The Goat, but they closed at midnight. They open again at 1100, I'll come back and try them in the morning. I found that out by asking; most of the businesses in these parts don't seem to post when they open or close, so I still don't know when the nearby laundrette opens in the morning.
library_lynn is starting to run out of shirts, so she wants to get some laundry done on Thursday before she goes down to visit the Tenement House.Both in London and hear in Glasgow, our lodging has been within walking distance of halal butchers. Not sure if that's relevant; I haven't seen any kosher places yet.
Did I post about the traffic lights? The traffic lights here go like this: green, yellow, red, red+yellow, green again. Some of them also go to flashing yellow at one point. Not sure what they mean! We've also seen zig-zag lane markings in the streets, what are they for? A mystery, glad I'm not driving. I remember how surprised I was by flashing green in Michigan, where it means that you can make a protected left turn. Comparable to having a green arrow light up. I don't remember whether it means that you can go straight if you want to as well. And a flashing green in Boston means, I think, all pedestrians can go anywhere and traffic should stop. A dangerous signal aspect, methinks; what if the flasher breaks but the light doesn't? I would have felt a lot safer on foot if the signal was a flashing red, or red plus something else. Something to look into if I make it back to Boston some time. Boston USA, that is; there's a Boston here, too, which I suspect is the original one.
(If you haven't figured it out by now, this is my first trip to the UK, and my first time overseas even. So a lot of this is strange and new. For example I'd heard Eddie Izzard mention "Jammy Dodgers" in his act -- we have some of his CDs -- but didn't know that they were a vanilla sandwich cookie with a fruit-flavored jam filling. (Excuse me, I mean a biscuit.)
And did I mention the address numbering? Apparently our system of even numbers on one side of the street, odd on the other, isn't followed here. Our number 36 is between 35 and 37. Also parking your car on the side of the street you're allowed to drive on -- not followed much here. Both sides of St. Vincent Crescent, you'll see cars parked facing both directions. And on Minerva, there's a parking lane in the middle of the street!
Another thing: our room's lock works with these old-fashioned style keys. The long skinny kind with a little blade on the end, that you leave in the keyhole? I guess they never saw any reason to upgrade the locks on the rooms. (The main door to the house uses a modern style key, though.) Wonder how old this brick thing is...
Update: Majestic Laundrette, on Argyle at the corner of Argyle and Corunna, will do a load of laundry, wash and dry it and fold it for you, for 5 pounds a washer load. We're going to dump our dirty laundry so far on them Friday morning and pick it up Saturday, I think. They're open 9 am to 5 pm M-F, 9-4 weekends.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-10 12:25 pm (UTC)That's the standard traffic light pattern for most of northern Europe. The flashing yellow means proceed carefully following the normal rules of the road.
It didn't seem to matter much to the Glasgow taxi drivers anyway - they went full bore through the red light without even seeming to notice.
Flashing yellow
Date: 2005-08-13 03:03 pm (UTC)I'd only seen it for late-night operations where (say) the north-south stoplights have flashing yellow, and the east-west stoplights have flashing red (=treat as a stop sign and come to a full stop before going).
traffice lights
Date: 2005-08-24 01:58 am (UTC)Sparks