Printing

In an unfortunate violation of the "5 hour rule" regarding how much sleep one should get at a convention, I was up at 2 AM this morning printing my GoH talk. The Hilton's business center is open 24 hours, accessible by hotel room key. Figuring out how to make my laptop print on the printer in there, even though it had a USB connection available, was somewhat challenging. I'm glad I'd purchased another day on the wireless system, as I ended up needing to download a driver for the printer.

I don't mean to frighten people away, but the speech is 35 pages long. Don't panic! That's 35 pages of Courier 12 point, double-spaced typed, like a script for a play or something like that. Printing this way (a) makes it much easier for me to read and (b) gives me a better idea how long it should take to deliver. Rule of thumb for such documents is about one page per minute, whereas when printed in proportional fonts, it's much more difficult to judge length. MS Word says it is about 7,700 words. I'm not sure I should post something that long on this LiveJournal, but if I do, I'll be sure to put it behind a cut so (most) of you reading this can avoid it if you want to do so.

Now to see if anyone shows up to listen to me. More news later. But first, breakfast. No way I want to face something like this, which could on one level be described as the high point of my life in fandom, on an empty stomach.

CascadiaCon FGoH Speech

This is a backdated entry posted on September 26 containing my Fan Guest of Honor speech given at CascadiaCon, the 2005 NASFiC. This is more or less the document I took with me into the speech, with the headings shortened (they were originally an outline of the speech before I wrote it) and some typographical errors corrected. What I actually said when I did it "live" was somewhat different, including ad libs and cuts made on the fly when I realized the 37-page speech was going to run long if I didn't skip forward a bit.

( About 7700 words of GoH talk behind the cut. You Have Been Warned. )

Step by Step...

CascadiaCon is spread out between two facilities: the Seattle Hilton & Conference Center (itself spread out between multiple buildings) and the Radisson Hotel down the street. Some of the panels I was scheduled for today and that I wanted to see were down in the Radisson. On the way back, I did a Standlee Unit Measurement -- that is, I counted how many of my paces (which are approximately 1 meter/1 yard/3 feet) it is between the front door of the Radisson and the front door of the Hilton.

I can report that the Radisson and the Hilton are 745 Standlees apart. This is a fairly good hike. I reckon it's a good thing, though, as otherwise I wouldn't get my regular exercise during this weekend.

There is, by the way, a continuous shuttle bus service between the hotels.