Worldcon music panel

As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the panels I'm on at Worldcon is called "performing with other people". Last week, I learned that I was on this panel (and not only that, but the moderator!) by grepping for my name in the published schedule. (I just wanted to confirm times for the items I knew about, and then this popped up in addition.) So I found email addresses for the other participants and sent out email.

I've heard from almost everyone, and *no one* knew they were on this panel. (One said "gee, good thing I read my email".) The sad thing is that this is probably going to be the most interesting of the items I'm on, and we've had almost no time to prepare for it. I got notifications for my other program items a few weeks ago; I wonder what went wrong this time.

To catch people before they left for the con, yesterday I declared a meeting time and place by fiat. I hope that's ok with people. I'm also developing a topic list, in case no one else has time to think about it. I much prefer to do these things by consensus and not fiat, though.

I wonder what the odds are of torpedoing the now-very-marginal panel that I'm on immediately before this one. The organizers didn't respond to my "gee, I'm not sure this works with the current set of people" mail. My current plan is to leave that panel early (so I can get to the other one on time) and leave the other participant to fend for himself for the last 10 minutes or so.

food

In most ways, working on the South Side is great. Parking exists and doesn't cost an arm and a leg; my commute is about 15 minutes (not counting slow elevators and the walk from the lot to the building), the view from our building is nice, the neighborhood has character rather than a collection of impersonal skyscrapers, and so on.

I just wish it had Shadyside's or Squirrel Hill's restaurant options.

There are a couple places that are very good (Sushi Two and Mallorca), though they're a little more pricy than typical lunches and they are actual restaurants; they don't work well for either fast or cheap. We are largely lacking in ethnic places; other than these two and one low-end Chinese take-out place that I can't eat in any more (I've seen what passes for their sanitary standards), this neighborhood is mostly delis and bars. Which is fine if you like deli and bar food, but I'd really be excited if some (other) Chinese, or some Thai or Indian, moved in. Or any place that understands that "vegetarian" does not mean you pick most of the bacon bits out of the salad before serving it.

Fortunately, there's a Giant Eagle nearby and they have a salad bar, so I often go there.

I guess it's time for a field trip to Queria. I hear you guys have Indian food there. :-)

interface hell

It doesn't take that much effort to get software to the 90%-usable stage. I wish the publishers of the D&D character generator had tried. :-(

It's not hard to figure out how to use (which is good, as there are no menus and not much help -- it's a pure click interface). The character sheet that it eventually generates is pretty painful, though -- grayed out text that actually did matter, poor contrast on the reverse-video bits, etc. And they include all sorts of info that I don't need (like spells I don't have), which probably motivated them to make everything small so it would fit in only 4 pages. Sigh.

Now if I could write a script that would take this file and transform it into a plain text file, I'd be quite happy. Sadly, I think I lack the relevant skills. Hmm, maybe if I take the character file, send it over to a Unix box, and run "strings" on it? Gotta try that. (It'll probably give me disembodied numbers without the names of the stats, but we'll see.)

1:19 minutes of fame

The nice folks who run Conterpoint (the DC instantiation of the floating east-coast filk convention) sent me some copies of the Conterpoint III CD a few days ago. (On the Mark has one song on it.) It's a good CD, even setting aside that natural inclination to view it favorably. :-)

Our track (We Be Three Poor Mariners) came out pretty well. Kathy is too quiet relative to the rest of us, but Kathy is always too quiet relative to the rest of us, and this wasn't a studio situation where we could each have our own mike. Oh well.

Conterpoint IV was in June; I wonder if any of our songs came out well enough to end up on that eventual CD. (I haven't heard the official tape of the set yet.)

"Ya Done Stomped on my Heart (and mashed that sucker flat)" just went by -- Joe Bethancourt's rendition. I first heard it from Clam Chowder, as a fairly lively country-western piece. Joe did what he described as "honkey-tonk"; I don't know enough about these modern music styles to characterize that. (It was more talky than melodic, but not in the way that blues often is.) I like the Chowder version a lot better, though that could be familiarity. I'll have to listen to this CD 20 or 30 times to see if this one grows on me. :-)

One of the highlights on this CD is Bethancourt's "Unanswered Questions", which starts: "Does anal-retentive have a hyphen or not?" and goes from there. (Yes, Monica interjects, of course a multi-word adjective has a hyphen.)

I see that the CD is going to finish up with Clam Chowder's version of the Agincourt Carol. Think calypso. It's very funny.