Satellite’s gone up to the sky. Things like that drive me out of my mind. I watched it

[hazelchaz]

More pictures from Noreascon 4, Sunday night and Monday (parts 39 through 50) have been restored. Click on the picture of l_zinkiewicz to see them.

Anyone going to be in Philadelphia this weekend? I could use some more help with the party Saturday at Philcon, please!

To continue my Loscon narrative... Friday night, we'd left my blue folding cart and my neighbor Tom's green wagon in the ballroom. On Saturday, I couldn't find it. I mentioned going to bed about 2 am; sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 my phone went off, and Maria wanted to talk. Among other things, she needed us to wire her some money. I promised I'd take care of it, and that if she hadn't heard back from me in 24 hours to check her e-mail. (Bad move; I should have told her to call us back, because we had proof that her calling in worked...)

I was scheduled to sit in the Fan Lounge for a shift, but I had to go out and do more shopping and take care of the wire transfer. The Friday night Kansas City party had cleaned us out of almost everything I ent out and bought for the convention, so I needed to get more cans of soda, another case of water, buy some macaroni and cheese, get some ice (so I wouldn't have to rely on a run down to the hotel's back ice machines) and so forth. Thankfully, library_lynn agreed to sit the room for my shift. As I left the building, she reminded me to get something solid to eat; I promised I'd get a burger at In-N-Out as soon as I got out of the parking lot.

I had a headache. I'd taken some Tylenol, but it was still hurting. I thought perhaps I was a bit dehydrated, so at In-N-Out I got myself a jumbo lemonade instead of my usual iced tea. From there I went to the bank branch at Sepulveda and La Tijera, then Ralph's in the same neighborhood. At Ralph's there were Girl Scouts selling cans of nuts. I didn't know the Girl Scouts had nuts -- well, the ones on Sepulveda do, anyway... I bought a can of toffee peanuts. I knew the closest Smart & Final was down on Rosecrans; nope, apparently they've moved, but I found their new location in Lawndale at 15205 Hawthorne. (Since then, I've learned the 10100 Crenshaw Blvd location in Inglewood is closer; as you know, Bob, the 10000 block is at Century Blvd. so it's just a matter of heading east from LAX and turning south on Crenshaw.)

At Smart & Final I still had a splitting headache, and I was miles from my Tylenol stash. And they were all out of Stouffer's macaroni and cheese -- I grabbed the Lasagna instead, I figured we could either smash it all into the crockpot or use the roaster oven.

I found a 7-Eleven that had a Western Union transfer machine, and took care of Maria's thing, and headed back. Tried to call Lynn to tell her I wasn't feeling well and would need help when I got back to the hotel, left a message. Head's still hurting, starting to feel generally lousy all over. Got to hotel garage. Parked in space 138, which appeared to be between 139 and 140. (Space "139" is mismarked, it should have been marked as space 136; the garage has two 139s and no 136.) Rehearsing what I was going to say when I got to Con Ops, basically centering around "I need help please" because I wasn't going to be able to get the ice upstairs on my own and it had to be rescued before it melted. Got to Con Ops.

At Con Ops I saw that the green wagon was there. colleency saw me come in, asked "Are you okay?" and I shook my head, no. "Do you need help?" she asked, and I nodded my head, yes.

Con Ops (someone whose name I didn't catch, and Bree) took care of me, while Colleen went out to the truck to get the party supplies upstairs. They gave me a glass of water and some Tylenol, and phoned upstairs to have someone make me a sandwich, and Bree went out to the elevator to go and get it. By the time I'd drank a glass of water I felt a little better and wanted to go upstairs and put myself to bed -- and our room's on the same floor as the Con Suite -- so I said I'd go meet my sandwich upstairs. Bree was still at the elevator so we rode up together and when we got to the prep room/staff lounge I sat down and ate a bite or two of my sandwich, and asked for water.

They were making salads, and there were some big bowls on the table. I asked katt1028 where the bathroom was, and she told me about the restrooms by the elevators; I took a bowl with me, in case I didn't make it in time. (I did, though, and brought the bowl back unused. Took me a little time to wash out my beard, though...) Lynn turned up and helped me back to the room; I had her carry the sandwich and I took three bottles of water, and I went back and took a nap.

More later, I've got stuff I need to do. But meanwhile...

[Image has been fixed and removed from this location.] Recovery is going slowly, there's a heartbreaking amount work and loss in the project. As an example. here's a photo of Michael Mason. The image has been corrupted by the disk drive failure. I can probably spend a few minutes rearranging blocks of pixels -- usually there are three rectangles that can be shuffled around and cropped, recovering most of the image. In the block of 100 recovered JPEG files that this photo comes from, we have 46 large images (viewing or high-res size) that can be rearranged as described to create an image that looks good enough, 3 thumbnail size images in the same category, 45 completely unblemished thumbnails -- and no unblemished large size images at all.

So I'm keeping the jigsaw-puzzle images, with an eye towards doing a lot of work down the road to bring those back, but it's still a daunting task to sort out of the pieces.

If anyone has saved copies of photos from my website, and they're not on my Picture Gallery anymore, please consider sending them back to me! A CD-Rom to my PO Box will work fine, if there's a lot of them.

Comments

Re: Helping out with picture editing

[testerscot.livejournal.com]

Hi Chaz, I'm willing to try helping out on this.

Let me know a section that hasn't been taken yet & I'll see what I can do.

PS - Unable to get bumper stickers for Glasgow _anywhere_; I'm considering setting up a website offering the things for towns/cities in Scotland, as no-one else does!!!

Re: Helping out with picture editing

[hazelchaz]

Thanks! Take a look at
http://www.boston-baden.com/hazel/Recovery/jpgfiles/export-08-ok/jpg-08-11-lasfs/ then.

Chaz