Worldcon Chairs Party

I am once again being lazy and admitting that I probably will never get around to cleaning up my photos, so here is a photo dump of the Former Worldcon Chairs Party held on the final night of Denvention 3. This was the same room as the post-Hugo Party, and even with a lot fewer people in it, the room was very hot. People bailed out into the side rooms, which were cooler. I have a theory that the huge master suite has the exact same cooling capacity as the much smaller side rooms.

I really enjoyed this party. It was among the most relaxed times I had at the whole convention. Tom Whitmore introduced us to a new poker game variation that crosses poker with If I Ran the Zoo Con. You get three sets of chips: each set represents goodwill, people, and money points respectively. When your opponent bets, If you want to call, you must match the color of that bet, and if you can't match the color, you must spend two of a different color to make the difference. It's very strange and silly. We played it tournament-style, with everyone given the same starting chips, and we did it as a short Texas Hold-em tournament. ( Poker chatter )

( Meeting one of Fandom's Founding Fathers )

Kent Bloom, after getting a late dinner, arrived fairly late. As he entered, I shouted out, "Look everyone! It's the Man of the Hour!" and started a big round of applause for him. I then found sfrose, Mistress of Ribbons, and suggested she give a Former Worldcon Chair ribbon to Anticipation co-Chair Robbie Bourget to give to Kent. Sharon did so and Robbie proceeded to award him this coveted ribbon. We gave him another round of applause and congratulations for having survived a Worldcon, thus managing to join the club of Former Worldcon Chairs. (There are a few photos of this in the uploaded set, but they aren't very good ones, for which I apologize; I was in a hurry as they wouldn't hold still long enough!)

( The Witching Hour )

And now it's time for about five hours sleep or so, as we have a goal of maybe getting out of here by 10 AM and heading for the Georgetown Loop Railroad. We have no reservations because we've decided not to commit ourselves to a specific train. This means we may end up finding no room on the rails, but if so, we'll just end up getting to Leadville a little early, that's all. That wouldn't be a disaster, particularly if we have time to stop and do some laundry.

Rethinking Travel Plans

I've been working over our return driving trip. On the way out here, I think we were pushing harder than we find comfortable, even though it was pretty slow by other people's standards. One of the big hassles was moving in and out of hotels each day, which consumes at least an hour or two. When Lisa wakes up -- I'm letting her sleep while I do my calculating -- I'm going to suggest we drop one of our planned stops on the way back (the Western Pacific Railroad Museum in Portola) and instead change two of our planned stops to two nights each. We get back the same time, but will be able to not have to be in a constant panic of moving. Besides, we might actually find a time and place to do laundry, either in Leadville tonight or Grand Junction after that.

Revised Travel Plans

After discussing it with Lisa, we agreed that we need to stretch out our travel plans a bit and insert a shorter segment (and thus more hotel time) at a particularly point. Therefore, the new plan is:

( Drive Across the West )

This means we skip the WPRR Museum, but we're more likely to be able to go see that, and we simply must stop more often or we'll be so run-down that we'll do stupid things like fall asleep at the wheel. I have no desire to be another convention-travel tragedy.

We're busily packing the rest of the room, so I'll be shutting down soon and getting going. I hope the extra time we spent this morning reworking travel plans, calling hotels and such won't delay us so badly that we miss the train ride at Georgetown Loop.

Limited Communication

When we got to our hotel this evening in Leadville, I fired up my computer, as is my wont, to give it time to "warm up." It wouldn't boot. It powered up, but would do anything after the initial power-up screen. Later in the evening, I brought in the other computer -- the one that usually powers Match Game SF. It booted okay. I then swapped hard drives, and reproduced the problem -- there's something wrong with the hard drive on my primary laptop.

This is annoying, but not a complete disaster. It's possible there may be a way to get at the data on the drive, but I won't know until I get back home where I have more things I can try. For now, I can use the spare machine for basic connectivity.

Speaking of basic connectivity, while I could get my machine to see the hotel's free wi-fi network, the network refused to issue an IP address, and thus I couldn't access the internet. I don't think that's anything I can fix. Lisa suggested that I take the computer to downtown Leadville, which proudly boasts on a sign outside the city that they have free wi-fi downtown. I did so, and it worked. And thus I am sitting in a nearly-deserted downtown at 11:15 at night with a county sheriff coming up to ask me if anything is wrong. And I'm not joking. I just explained to the deputy what I said above, told him where I was staying, and that it didn't seem worth waking up the hotel office people, and that seemed to make him happy enough.

I'm not sure I'll necessarily get back online again until the day after tomorrow, where we currently plan to stop at Grand Junction. It's a pity, really, because we had a lovely day at the Georgetown Loop, and have a number of pictures we might want to post, but I'm less willing to do so if it requires me lugging the computer back and forth like this.

We did spot a laundromat in town, so we'll have a chance to do laundry tomorrow night. And since we are staying here two nights, we can sleep in and catch the 2:30 train rather than having to rush to catch the 10:00 train.