Worrying over BayCon

While my most pressing concern this week is finishing the progress report for Westercon, starting next week I need to start working on Match Game SF for BayCon. This is still "on" for the BayCon Masquerade half-time and aftermath, and I met briefly with the tech team from BayCon at Sunday's meeting.

( It's the Producer's job to worry )

On the good side, we have four panelists booked now, including Esther Friesner, who I anticipate putting in seat 2, Tom Galloway (seat 1), johnnyeponymous (5), and trinsf (6). I've asked BayCon Programming to make "Match Game Panelist" something that program participants can sign up for. johnnyeponymous says he has an idea for a panelist that would fill the "Charles Nelson Reilly" 3-slot as well, leaving only slot 4 to fill.

The plan calls for potential contestants to sign up at the info desk and for us to try and have a contestant briefing on the afternoon before the Masquerade. I think this will work better than random drawing from the audience, but if necessary, we'll do it that way, probably by row/seat draw rather than deal with the mechanics of signing people up.

Oh, and I had a promising-looking bid on an ECM-51 microphone on eBay when the darn seller cancelled the auction on me!

I Couldn't Resist

I'm currently working on an inventory analysis where I take the customer's total demand by stock-keeping unit number (known as a SKU) and compare it to the customer's observed inventory on a given date. From this, we calculate the number of inventory "turns" per period. (For example, if you keep 10 units on hand and sell 120 units per year of a given product, your "turn rate" is 120/10 = 12.) Generally speaking, the higher your turn rate, the better, because it means you're not tying up so much of your capital in inventory.

Anyway, as is common in such analysis, there are some outliers with absurdly low or high turn rates. I sent them off to our person on the scene at the customer's operations and asked him to verify the underlying data.

The subject line on the message? "The Turn of the SKU"

I wonder if anyone reading it will get the pun.