No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

It's been a very busy last day or so with the roll-out of the Hugo Awards Logo Contest. And, as is the nature of such things, it's not possible to do anything without someone criticizing you. John Scalzi very generously mentioned the Logo Contest on his blog, and in the comments, we've been denigrated for not hiring a professional designer to do the work and for victimizing poor innocent graphic designers by making them do work "on spec," which is unethical, I guess. And when I made a parallel between what WSFS is doing here and the RFPs to which my company responds (and on which I spend many hundreds of hours a year working, and which are not as cookie-cutter as he seems to think they are), my work as a database programmer and supply chain model designer was effectively denigrated as not being "actual work," such as what a Real Graphic Artist does. Yes, I Are Insulted.

I'm trying desperately to keep up with my real job as well as the Hugo Contest correspondence and also get ready to leave in about three hours to head to Oakland airport to fly to Seattle for Norwescon.

Norwescon Move-in

I had an uneventful flight to Sea-Tac, made nicer by the middle seat not filling on the Alaska 737 -- an equipment type I don't see anymore ever since they started exclusively using CRJ-700s on the Portland-Bay Area flights. I took the hotel shuttle to the Doubletree, checked in fairly quickly, then walked around the corner and found Lisa sitting at the table that will be SJ2011/Anticipation's on Friday. No problems.

( Not everything went so smoothly that evening. )

There do not seem to be any parties tonight, and I had to stay clear of the casino -- I'd initially wanted to volunteer to deal blackjack -- because the noise bleed from the dance next door was too much for me. We'll turn in relatively early because we have two rather energetic and late nights ahead of us.

Unfortunately, poor Lisa's tinnitus is as bad as ever, and it really prevents her from getting decent sleep. I can wear my CPAP machine to sleep soundly, but we have no solutions that work that well for her. She has rigged a white-noise generator, but it's not always effective. I wish there was more that I could do for her.