Thanksgiving weekend

( Thanksgiving )

( aside: buying beer in PA )

Friday we (I rode with Robert) headed out to Darkover Grand Council, a science-fiction convention in Timmonium MD (near Baltimore). The name is a bit misleading; while the con has its origins as an MZB con, the amount of Darkover content has dwindled over the years. I'm not a fan of the series, but I can still find reasons to go to this con. It has the strongest music track I know outside of cons dedicated entirely to music. So I go to perform, and I go to listen. And I go to visit with friends.

( people )

( Clam Chowder )

( On the Mark )

( so *that's* where they keep the cushy rooms!, and hotel misc )

We had a new "interim" CD at this convention. Some of its contents will eventually go onto a "real" live CD, but that will be a couple years away and we wanted to have something for people now. So we did this one on the cheap (allowing us to sell it for $10), but had enough decent material to fill up a CD. It was fun, and it includs a bunch of stuff that we haven't previously recorded.

( Shabbat challenge: probably boring to most readers )

On the way to the con on Friday, the biggest challenge was the dense fog in the mountains. (I couldn't see the car in front of us, and we were following pretty close. Fortunately, I was not driving. Had I been, I would have had to wait it out, and then hope I could get to the con before sundown.) On the way home, however, traffic was worse than usual. It was still much worse going in the other direction; we counted a ten-mile stoppage at one point on the turnpike. I'm not really sure what caused our erratically-slow traffic; we saw two accidents and one near-accident, but there were also just some standing waves in the traffic. (Near-accident: note to driver: if your wheels are going up onto the jersey barrier, you are not centered in your lane.)

All in all, it was a fun weekend!

Addendum: extra bonus -- two nights completely free of the usual snoring soundtrack!

minor observation

I forgot to mention this in the previous entry. There are now two Subways in Breezewood, one on each side of the road. I guess they wanted the extra business and realized that people won't make left turns in congestion, or something.

Oddly, however, I ordered exactly the same thing both times (Friday lunch and Sunday lunch), and the prices differed by 27 cents. I don't know whether the west-bound Subway is more expensive, someone screwed up, or they charged me a quarter for the crutons for the salad. (On Sunday they offered them to me and I said sure; on Friday they didn't offer and I didn't ask.)

oh, the irony

I just sent mail to the administrator of the Reform movement's mailing lists asking him to stick to the standard. :-)

---

Dear [name],

Thank you for your reply.

> There is no text only version currently available for [list].
> We may pursue this in the near future.

I would like to encourage you to provide this for all of your mailing lists. While of course any service provider is free to support or reject any formats he chooses, the internet community as a whole works better when standards are followed. So far as I know nothing has superseded RFC 822, which calls for email to be sent in plain text. This specifies a minimum, and many modern mail programs also support HTML. However, older mail programs do *not* support HTML well, and even when the mailer itself does, text archives are rendered unreadable if they are not in plain text.

The result of this for me is that while I can mostly read the messages, I cannot usefully save them or pass them on to other interested members of my congregation. Perhaps this is your intent -- that the mailing lists be ephemereal and that people have to subscribe directly. That wouldn't have been my guess, however.

Thank you for your time in considering this matter.