New Hugo Award Web Site

[Cross-posted to multiple communities, with apologies to those seeing it many times. Feel free to redistribute this news.]

WORLD SCIENCE FICTION SOCIETY
Contact: info@TheHugoAwards.org
http://www.TheHugoAwards.org/

Release Date: August 20, 2007

NEW WEB SITE TO CELEBRATE SCIENCE FICTION AWARDS

Hugo Award the preeminent science fiction award for 54 years

The Hugo Awards, one of the highest honors in the field of science fiction and fantasy, have a new official web site at http://www.TheHugoAwards.org. The Hugo Awards honor the best in written and dramatized science fiction and fantasy as well as other categories. This new site serves as the definitive site for information about the Hugo Awards, including historical winner and nominee lists, pictures of past Hugo Award trophies, information on how to nominate and vote for the Awards, and an explanation of the rules and procedures for the Award.

( More About the Hugo Awards )

(Postscript only in my own LJ: The HASH committee set up by WSFS last year has been working on this for some time now, and I'm really happy we were able to get it rolled out before Worldcon.)

No Overnight Explosions

Well, I was relieved when I got up this morning and found that I did not have hundreds of angry e-mails from people protesting the new Hugo Awards web site. There are some minor problems and bugs out there -- it appears that Safari doesn't get along with the site that well -- and minor quibbles over wording here and there, but we're dealing with it, and by we, I mostly mean Cheryl, who has made the rest of us look good by doing most of the heavy lifting, and I for one appreciate it a lot.

Hugo Awards on Safari

We have run across a problem with the new Hugo Award web site that we could use some help fixing. The basic problem appears to be a bug in Safari (specifically 2.0.4 for the Mac, though it may be in other versions). The HTML is correct in View Source, but the page is incorrectly displayed causing broken links. The problem does not occur in IE or Firefox, or in Safari for Windows. We are looking for people with Macs who can check stuff for us. Specifically:

1. We need to know if the problem is fixed in Safari 3

2. We want to test some alternate ways of coding the site so as not to cause Safari 2 to fail.

3. If we are really lucky, someone reading this will have worked on issues like this before and be able to make suggestions.

Edit, 13:05: It's not the problem with actual site (we seem to be tracking it down, but I originally misspelled the domain name in the message above (there's an "s" on the end of "TheHugoAwards"), which was why those of you who tried to click through to it were getting "site not found." Whoops!

Sleeper Train Travel in Japan

Because at least one person commenting to my LJ thought otherwise, I'm posting this reply from NTA regarding sleeper reservations:

Thank you for inquiry. Unfortunately you can not make a reservation out of Japan first you have to exchange Japan rail pass to actual pass then make a reservation

sorry we can not help you
Best Regards

Kazuko Mito
NTA America inc,San Francisco Bay Office

Oh, well, I guess we'll see what's available Sapporo-Tokyo Ueno or Aomori-Tokyo Ueno for September 12 when we arrive at Narita a week from tomorrow.

I'm In the Money

On my way to the office this morning, I got a call from the bank branch near my office telling me my foreign currency transaction had arrived. (That's not bad; it was only processed on Friday.) So I stopped by on my way to the office and collected my JPY120,000, which was mostly 5K notes but also had some 2K and 1K notes, so we should be okay.

Based on the exchange rate, the rule of thumb conversion of 100:1 (drop last two zeros to get dollars) seems like it should work most of the time.

Edit, 21 Aug 12:35: Corrected order-of-magnitude error on the bill denominations.