I Choose Early

Having awakened at 4:30 AM, I decided that "early" was better than "cutting it close," and so took the 8:19 train. ( Travel blather. )

Of course, my lack of waiting in lines was a function of being there excessively early during a period when there were no flights going out. There's no telling whether I would have got through as (relatively) quickly had I gone two hours later.

In a few minutes I'm supposed to call Lisa's father -- Lisa is supposed to have already left to go photograph equipment at the Oregon Electric Railway Museum this morning -- and confirm that there are no schedule hitches.

Nebula Coverage Tonight

[Yes, I know that's a Hugo trophy I'm holding in the icon. I don't have a more appropriate icon to go with this post.]

If all goes well, tonight SF Awards watch will be hosting CoverItLive coverage of tonight's Nebula Awards Ceremony. Neither of us can be there, but people Twittering about it (assuming they use the #nebula hashtag) and anyone able to get an internet connection that allows them to reach the CIL coverage will be helping us out. Poor Cheryl will have to be up in the middle of the night to start the event; however, I am supposed to be there later -- it depend on me getting from Portland to Mehama after the errands and shopping we're supposed to do on the way back -- to cover the moderation duties and let Cheryl get back to sleep.

Nebula Coverage Underway

As I type this from Mehama, Oregon, our coverage of the Nebula Awards is underway, with people chatting during what I've called the "pre-game show." This technology does show a fair bit of promise for things like the Hugos, particularly if we can somehow get internet access into the room where the ceremony is.

Nebula Results

Are posted on SF AwardsWatch, but you already know them if you were following our live coverage. We must have had something between 50 and 100 people present -- the numbers are hard to count because some people popped in and out for technical reasons, and the tools only count entries, not exits. I thought it was a lot of fun, and hope we can manage to put together something similar for the Hugo Awards this August. Unfortunately, internet access inside the Palais is so expensive (C$375/person was the quote I heard) that we can't easily do what we really want, which is to have our laptops running from inside the event.

Meanwhile, I hope I didn't goof when I posted the results on SFAW. I don't do a lot of the primary entries for the site and I always worry that I've made a mistake. In this case, I actually started with the HTML for the list of the nominees and just removed the ones who didn't win.

Our online coverage turned up what appears to have been an accidental embargo leak on the results that popped up briefly mid-ceremony and then went away. (I kept a screen shot of the page in question.) I take minor cold comfort in learning that others have made such technical goofs; unfortunately, the fact that they happen at all makes award administrators very reluctant to give our embargoed results at all.