Here's to 6 PM Starts

Tonight's Giants game was an early evening 6 PM start. We only got there a half-hour before the game, because we were both tired this afternoon -- Cheryl took a nap and I think the only thing that kept me from doing so was knowing that if I did, we'd miss the game -- and so we missed all of the excitement about the unveiling of the new Orlando Cepeda statue and the Bengie Molina bobbleheads. (They did tell us that we might still have been able to score bobbleheads if we walked around to the Willie Mays gate, but we passed and went without.

As I mentioned earlier, these seats were nearly in the same place as the last game we attended. But instead of baking in the sun, we enjoyed an evening of perfect weather, and an exciting ball game.

( Cut for those as don't care about baseball )

As is our wont, we walked both ways between Embarcadero and the ball park, which helped work off the garlic fries and other ballpark food. In the late innings, Cheryl bought us a couple of hot chocolates, which were welcome, but not the utter survival necessities they'd been when we went to a game at the Frozen Confines of Wrigley Field early this season.

Because the game started so early, we got home only slightly after 11 PM, even including a stop to pick up some groceries we'd forgotten earlier today.

That's our last baseball game for this season. Our thanks to Holiday Inn for the (in effect) 40% off voucher.

Preparations for Silicon

I went down to the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose this afternoon for the SiliCon staff meeting so I could meet briefly with the head of programming and the hotel liaison to review the set-up we'd prefer to do Match Game SF at SiliCon. The current plan is for us to be the final program item before the "Hiss & Purr" session on Sunday, with a run time from 2 to 4 PM. That means that in practice we have until 1:45 at the latest, and based on our usual run time per game, the most we could conceivably fit into that time is five games, and four -- or even three if we go into tie breakers -- is possible.

They are putting us in the primary programming space -- the same room as the Masquerade and other "big tech" items. That's good and bad. The good is that it has a stage and therefore we should be able to do the staggered-tier seating for the panelist. It's good because we'll have the mainstage tech available. It's bad because it's likely that the convention tech team will want to run the tech, and that's likely to going to cause Lisa to not want to do anything at all. She can do a very good job on the tech if people get out of her way. What's not easy is bringing people up to speed on exactly what we want to do with no rehearsal or set-up time.

Remember that I fret a lot over set-up, and that the shows normally go pretty well. As the show's executive producer, my job is to worry. As the host, my job is to smile and make everyone else look good on the day.

The SiliCon folks were kind enough to let me get my business done early, so I could go ahead and leave less than an hour after I arrived, which meant I only had to pay for an hour's parking.

Hooray for UPS

...and I don't mean the package delivery service.

This evening, we had a brief power failure. The backup rechargeable flashlight we keep plugged in for times like these came on, and the uninterpretable power supply began making alarm-type noises to tell us "You're on battery backup power! You have 15 minutes to Do Something!"

We began an orderly shutdown of the computers, but by the time I had my computer shut down, the power came back on again. Still, it's nice to know the UPS works in real conditions, as opposed to just testing it.