Construction: Friday Night

Between twenty and thirty (I didn't take a close count) people came to Friday night's Dessert Social at ConStruction, hosted by SFSFC. As expected, some were local fans who wanted to come and socialize, but will not be able to attend the rest of the convention. Others will be here for one or two of the conference's two official days.

( A couple of pictures )

As the reception broke up, some of us went down to the restaurant and had a late snack. I had some calamari, although maybe I should not have eaten anything at all. I had a 188 blood sugar this evening one hour after dinner on account of having no time to exercise. I therefore had to cast a covetous eye upon the tray of desserts and limit myself to a couple of cups of tea with Splenda and one small cookie.

Then it was up to my hotel room. For some reason, they put me in a handicapped-accessible room. I called down to make sure I wasn't taking a room away from anyone, and let them know I didn't need the accessible room. They assured me it was okay. It may have been the only non-smoking king room left when I checked in. Gosh, this is a huge room. It feels like it could hold two of the rooms we had at the Mission Valley Marriott at Westercon. Not that I'm offering to host a room party in my room at ConStruction, mind you, but if I was, this is a good room for it.

I did buy the internet access (but I'll be charging my company for it), and found some work-related e-mail sent to me from our Chicago office and time-stamped 10:50 PM their time. I spent about an hour dealing with their issue and sending back questions -- they'll probably be working on this tomorrow -- then dumped the photos out of the camera.

Fortunately for me, I don't have a panel first thing tomorrow; however, I do want to attend the programming. That's the main point of this conference, after all.

Construction: Saturday Morning

Breakfast was a bit rushed because of dealing with work stuff. Fortunately, there is nothing needs delivering today, so I can actually sit in programming rather than stay in my hotel room. There is wireless in the public areas, and just barely enough in the function room, so I can get a weak web connection, not a solid VPN connection to my company.

ConStruction is low-key. Because con registrar Cindy Scott's office moved this weekend, she handed registration (one small box of stuff) to me, and I am the Floating Registration Desk. There are expected to be between 20 and 30 total attendees.

I took some pictures, but they don't look very interesting to me. Really, we're mostly sitting around a couple of function rooms discussing nuts and bolts convention planning issues.

When we took lunch, I heard that a bunch of people were going off to an Indian restaurant near the Fairmont. After putting my stuff in my hotel room, I hot-footed it over there, only to learn (via a phone call from David Gallaher) that they'd gone to Peggy Sue's (where I had eaten breakfast) instead. Oh, well, I need more exercise.

Construction: Saturday Afternoon

The afternoon session got a little disorganized, with most of the attendees getting involved in a hands-on workshop that turned into a walk-the-halls-of-the-Convention Center exercise, while a relatively small number of us stayed to talk about hotel housing bureaus, a discussion that turned more into hotel horror stories.

Although between 20 and 30 people have attended the conference, we have not had the breadth of convention attendance that I hoped for. It's mostly FanimeCon and SFSFC people, with almost none of the other conventions of the area being represented except for a couple folks from SiliCon. This is unfortunate. I know there are good reasons, including we at SFSFC not doing the best job of reaching out to as many groups as we could have done, and the utter impossibility of picking a weekend where one of these groups isn't doing something. Still, while ConStruction has a strong FanimeCon present -- FanimeCon's support keeps the con going as much as the original SFSFC sponsorship -- ConStruction is meant to be more than just a FanimeCon training session. We'll have to do some thinking about how to go about broadening the attendance for future years.

SFSFC Board Meeting

After the afternoon session, it was time for the dinner break, but for those of us who are SFSFC directors it was a working dinner, as we went to the hotel's restaurant, where we'd reserved the private dining room, and had the regular SFSFC Board of Directors meeting over dinner. We did however take a recess when the food arrived. Having a medium-hard deadline of 8 PM, when the evening programming started, did help to keep us a bit more focused than usual, and we ground our way through the agenda.

We continue to persue a bid for the Harry Potter Symposium sanctioned by Harry Potter Educational Fanon. This year's event in Las Vegas is called Lumos 2006.

We also continue to express our interest in a future World Fantasy Convention somewhere in the Bay Area. That committee continues its work.

We set up several more committees to look into other conventions (no, we are not bidding for a Worldcon, darnit!) or other activities that SFSFC might want to get involved with organizing. These plans are sufficiently diffuse that it's not worth a lot to talk about them until the committees have had a chance to study the situation and report back to us.

We did also agree to a minor administration change to the SMOFCon Scholarships. The $500 scholarships will be issued as $450 up front and $50 when we get the after-con report on the scholar's experience. The Board wants to see those reports, even if they're negative (one has been), because it's the only significant feedback we get about what we're doing, so we put some incentive into it.