Moving Day

[kevin_standlee]

I've been trying to time shift, but despite staying up until after 4 AM this morning, I've only managed to shift about two hours forward. Well, I usually can't sleep on airplanes, so maybe that will make a difference tomorrow night. Meanwhile, today is for doing laundry and packing my bags, which seem to get heavier by the minute as I think of other things that might be needed in Australia. Sometimes it's not that I don't think I could buy what I needed there, but that I figure that when I will need whatever it is, I won't be able to afford the time to go find it.

Last night I helped co-host the live coverage of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards Ceremony at Au Contraire, working from, as I described it, "the palatial ConReporter.com studio in Fremont, California." We did get at least 9 people in the coverage, which is not bad considering what time it was in most of the rest of the world that might have cared about the results. It also gave us a chance to test out some of the things we might do at Aussiecon 4, coverage-wise. We'll say more if low-probability Sekrit Plans work out.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They did explain who Sir Julius Vogel was, right? A pioneering 19C SF writer, probably NZ's first, and also the country's prime minister! Quite a guy.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I wasn't at the ceremony itself, so I had to do on Cheryl's description of the event. I think this was in the ceremony's "front matter."

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

The con book covered this, before listing the nominees. I can't remember what was said at the ceremony.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Apparently he was also into railways - or at least funding them; this was not particularly controversial in the 19th century. (I checked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Vogel on the theory that any NZ PM would have to have a wiki page.) His writing sounds interesting, and the far-future world of the year 2000 sounds vaguely plausible considering the distance from which it was written; the title 'Anno Domini 2000 – A Woman's Destiny' is quite 19th century, and it apparently had Weber-worthy infodumps included in the text (for the enlightenment of the populace, perhaps?). While I've not dived into it yet, the text is available at http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-AnnVoge.html for the curious.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

Have a safe trip. I am sending a box of flyers, charity auction items and trades for the Comic Alley ahead to my hotel at Dragon*con tomorrow by Priority Mail. It saved me 20 pounds in my bag and will probably help me not pay $50 in baggage fees on delta.