thank goodness for bluetooth earpieces
Sep. 5th, 2009 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
justalurkr(or, the con report as was e-mailed to mom and a select few RL buddies)
With wireless earpieces, geeks in costume can stand there talking to themselves in public and look slightly less crazy because generous passersby will assume they're on the phone.
(The above observation brought to you by Dragon*Con.)
Highlights of yesterday: Saw William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy onstage together for the first time in decades (or ever, depending on whom you believe) at a sci fi convention. After 44 years of friendship, it was like the Old Married Couple Comedy Hour and well worth getting up at 5:20am to get down there. Not even much of a line, as the panel was moved to a bigger room, and the originally scheduled room was used for a live video feed for the overflow. Rather than wait in line *outside* *in* *the* *heat* for three hours, I had a nice breakfast at the Hyatt buffet, which turned out to be worth it, as I took "all you can eat" seriously and didn't need a meal break for the rest of the day.
I also gave blood to lead the valiant effort by Dragon*con to beat Comicon's results, for which we need 2100 usable units or something. It's nice to know that spending 10 months in Spain in 1982 is no longer a bar to giving blood if and only if you were a civilian, but not so nice to find out they still won't take the blood of anyone who's been in Europe in the last 29 years (or maybe between 1980 & 1996; the rules are a little byzantine) if they were attached to the military, even as a civilian aid or dependent. People sign up for the military assuming that if they're going to die, it will be in battle, not because they had a burger in a foreign PX. (The bar, by the way, was increased risk of a variant form of mad cow disease, which would have killed me within 4 to 8 months had I actually had it. I still don't get the threat 30 years later.)
SM Stirling, author of my current favorite SF series, is attending the con also. He's a trip on a panel, as most of what he writes can be considered apocalyptic fiction, so everyone else there fits the category of slightly crazed survivalist, and he seems to enjoy playing with them a little bit. Downside to that panel: I found out that I live in the New Madrid fault zone, for which FEMA has no recovery plan, as there isn't expected to be anything to recover within 400 miles if that thing goes off. It's a totally different fault from the San Andreas, apparently. Oh, and it also turns out that certain types of solar flares don't just interfere with your cell phone reception, they can actually cause your phone to explode.
I may not be attending any more of the Apocalypse Rising panels; this is all in the category of Things I Did Not Need To Know.
Tomorrow, I think there's supposed to be a panel on the Electronic Frontiers track about how your telecommunications provider is screwing you over, which I feel a professional need to infiltrate. TO WHAT DEGREE ARE THEY ONTO US?? On the other hand, it's opposite a panel with the Stargate: Atlantis cast, including the extravagantly good looking men who played John Sheppard and Ronon Dex, so I might just go be shallow, instead.
~C
With wireless earpieces, geeks in costume can stand there talking to themselves in public and look slightly less crazy because generous passersby will assume they're on the phone.
(The above observation brought to you by Dragon*Con.)
Highlights of yesterday: Saw William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy onstage together for the first time in decades (or ever, depending on whom you believe) at a sci fi convention. After 44 years of friendship, it was like the Old Married Couple Comedy Hour and well worth getting up at 5:20am to get down there. Not even much of a line, as the panel was moved to a bigger room, and the originally scheduled room was used for a live video feed for the overflow. Rather than wait in line *outside* *in* *the* *heat* for three hours, I had a nice breakfast at the Hyatt buffet, which turned out to be worth it, as I took "all you can eat" seriously and didn't need a meal break for the rest of the day.
I also gave blood to lead the valiant effort by Dragon*con to beat Comicon's results, for which we need 2100 usable units or something. It's nice to know that spending 10 months in Spain in 1982 is no longer a bar to giving blood if and only if you were a civilian, but not so nice to find out they still won't take the blood of anyone who's been in Europe in the last 29 years (or maybe between 1980 & 1996; the rules are a little byzantine) if they were attached to the military, even as a civilian aid or dependent. People sign up for the military assuming that if they're going to die, it will be in battle, not because they had a burger in a foreign PX. (The bar, by the way, was increased risk of a variant form of mad cow disease, which would have killed me within 4 to 8 months had I actually had it. I still don't get the threat 30 years later.)
SM Stirling, author of my current favorite SF series, is attending the con also. He's a trip on a panel, as most of what he writes can be considered apocalyptic fiction, so everyone else there fits the category of slightly crazed survivalist, and he seems to enjoy playing with them a little bit. Downside to that panel: I found out that I live in the New Madrid fault zone, for which FEMA has no recovery plan, as there isn't expected to be anything to recover within 400 miles if that thing goes off. It's a totally different fault from the San Andreas, apparently. Oh, and it also turns out that certain types of solar flares don't just interfere with your cell phone reception, they can actually cause your phone to explode.
I may not be attending any more of the Apocalypse Rising panels; this is all in the category of Things I Did Not Need To Know.
Tomorrow, I think there's supposed to be a panel on the Electronic Frontiers track about how your telecommunications provider is screwing you over, which I feel a professional need to infiltrate. TO WHAT DEGREE ARE THEY ONTO US?? On the other hand, it's opposite a panel with the Stargate: Atlantis cast, including the extravagantly good looking men who played John Sheppard and Ronon Dex, so I might just go be shallow, instead.
~C
