2009 Preliminary Business Meeting Video Posted

The video of the 2009 Preliminary WSFS Business Meeting held Friday, August 7, at Anticipation is now online. If you have difficulty viewing the video through Vimeo's online viewer, you can download the video (WMV format) to your machine using the link in the lower right corner of the video's web page.

Due to Vimeo's upload limitations, the Main Business Meeting will not be posted until next week.

The Preliminary Business Meeting includes reports from WSFS committees, consideration of resolutions such as extensions of eligibility for the Hugo Awards, first consideration of new constitutional amendments (two were proposed; one morphed into a non-binding resolution and the other was killed by Objection to Consideration), and setting initial debate time limits for items to be discussed at the Main Business Meeting.

While the bare summary of what the PBM may sound boring, there were some parliamentary fireworks at Friday's meeting. Indeed, I would suggest that from a meeting-watcher's point of view, Friday's PBM was probably more interesting than the Main Meeting on Saturday. It was, however, more stressful for Your Humble Chairman, although he was mostly ready for everything that happened that day.

Why Not YouTube?

Since I've already fielded this question once, I'll say it here and hope to short-circuit more of the same: The reason I don't upload the BM videos to YouTube is because YouTube has a maximum video size of ten minutes. To upload the BM video, I'd have to spend hours -- days is more like it -- editing more than six hours of footage into ten-minute pieces, and I simply don't want to do it. Vimeo allows longer videos, but has a 500 MB/week limit for free accounts, and I don't upload enough video to justify paying out of my own pocket for a Vimeo Plus account.

Up On The Roof Again

Yesterday, after knocking off from the Day Job, Lisa and I started work on this summer's Big Project: the Old House Roof, again. I've talked about this before several times, and the Mehama Flickr Set starts off with photos from last year's encounter with That Darn Roof. We have only the rest of this week before I leave for California on Saturday, so we have to move as fast as we can.

( Hot, unpleasant, and somewhat dangerous work )

After three hours of this preparation work, Lisa was worn out. So was I, and I mainly was just standing on the ground watching and occasionally pulling on ropes and holding ladders. She came down from the roof and collapsed into a bath while I went and got elk-burgers from the Gingerbread House restaurant here in Mehama.

The bad news is that we don't have nearly enough time as we would like to do this work. The good news is that what we did yesterday -- setting up the ladders and ropes -- is probably the most difficult piece of the job, and we could simply leave the stuff in place overnight and get back to work on it this afternoon after I'm done for the day.