Chicon 7 Day 2: Preliminary WSFS Business Meeting

An attempt to move the WSFS Business Meeting from 10:30 AM to 10:00 AM was almost destined to be futile, in my opinion, but when the "pink sheet" program updates and the online program also said the meeting was at 10:30, the die was cast. WSFS Business Meeting chairman Don Eastlake ruled that most reasonable members of the convention should expect the meeting to begin at 10:30, so 10:30 it remained. The next two meetings will also start at 10:30 AM (Saturday and Sunday), both in Columbus CD.

Lisa got the tripod set up to record the meeting, not helped by the tech team moving the floor microphone around. It started on the head table, then moved to the floor, then out into the middle of the aisle, and in the end she had the choice of covering the head table with the camera or the floor microphone, but not both. In the end she mostly pointed the fixed camera at the floor microphone and shot other parts of the meeting with the handheld camera. If we're really lucky, we might someday get it all edited together.

Late this afternoon I took my computer down to the convention floor and uploaded the videos. To my dismay, after 90 minutes of uploads, YouTube rejected them. Then I realized the problem. While my personal YouTube account is cleared for longer videos, the Worldcon account is not. By then it was too late to try again; however, I've been able to hitch a ride on one of the people who bought wired access and have wired access in my room for the next few hours. I set the uploads going again while Lisa and I went out to dinner with Chris Carson, and much later in the evening after we came back from the parties, the uploads and processing were complete.

See this post for the videos, or go directly to YouTube:

Part 1

Part 2

The video is in two parts because our camera can't record more than about 45 minutes per file even if there is a larger memory stick in the camera. You don't have to change sticks, but you do have to stop and start the recording at least once every 45 minutes or it will shut itself off.

We would love to edit these two together and edit in the various hand-held close-ups, but decided it was more important to get the footage out there fast and deal with clean later.

( Summary of the Business Meeting )

Lisa and I were mildly annoyed that the meeting ran its full time slot because it takes time to take down the cameras, pack up the gear, work our way through the elevator queues, change out of our WSFS uniforms into Giants gear, and work our way back down to the street. We had tickets to the Giants game!

Chicon 7 Day 2: Take Us Out to the Ball Game

Chicon 7 had purchased a block of tickets to the Giants-Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field, and I'd bought two of the tickets. After getting shut of our Business Meeting responsibilities as quickly as we could, we headed down to the Red Line (after several wrong turns by me, which is annoying because I'd made a point of scoping out the route previously) and managed to get to the game and to our seats before the end of the first inning.

I'd loaned Lisa my orange Giants t-shirt and was wearing my San Francisco MLB All-Star Game polo shirt and my Giants cap festooned with buttons. There was a lot of orange and black in our section, but nobody shined like Jeremy Lassen in his three-piece orange zoot suit, which was a big hit with us.

Alas, the Giants weren't doing any big hits, having played a night game in Houston last night and then having to fly to Chicago and play a day game, and the Cubs won the game 6-4. But we still had a good time in pretty good seats, in the shade, and an intermittent breeze helped. However, Lisa and I are still sick — she's still coughing worse than I am, but that's probably because I'm a week behind her — and we also kept dozing off in the warm, muggy air.

When the game let out, our group sort of scattered to the winds, but Paul Dormer joined Lisa and I for the walk and ride and walk back to the hotel. We bade Paul goodbye just short of the hotel, where we went to the grocery store and got some pastrami to put on the bread we bought yesterday. At that point, what Lisa and I wanted to do was to take off our shoes and sit in air-conditioned comfort while we were eating.

After recovering somewhat, we went down to the Exhibits, where Lisa sat at the Luna Society table while I sat at the Westercon 66 table telling people to go up to the "Ordinary Hotel Room" for this evening's gathering while I dealt with mail and the failed attempt to upload the WSFS videos that I managed to perform much later in the evening. I also got to chat with John Mansfield, who I'd not seen for a while, and we caught up on a few things. Later, Lisa and I took Chris Carson out to dinner (Noodles and Co again; sorry we're not dining high, but we're not in good enough health to appreciate it) and then tried to work our way through the parties.

The smart way to do the party circuit is to take an elevator to the 34th floor and then use the stairs to work your way down through the upper floors of the hotel. But because of all of the pasta we'd eaten, we started at 23 and worked upward for the exercise. Alas, the room number we had for the Nippon party must have been wrong because there was a Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and we were never able to find the right room. We did hit most of the major parties — except those too crowded to enter or too loud to endure — but I'm way past my sell-by date and went back to the room by 11:30 PM.

Lisa and I volunteered to be blocked in the party zone to forestall noise complaints, and we now find ourselves almost directly above a very loud party that seems to have been playing the same driving bass beat now for about 90 minutes. We can handle it, and at least we know nobody's going to complain about the sound of our coughing.