Bill Roper's Journal

I am currently in a stage of a project at work where I am flinging around code madly. This is actually a major improvement over staring at it and wondering how I'm going to sort this out, as the sorting out is better than the staring. But the number of compile errors is large and will continue to be large until the rearrangement is complete.

I still haven't decided which days I'm taking off for Christmas break. The company shuts down in the U.S. between Christmas and New Year's Day, so those are a given, but I expect to take a few more days off around the holiday. I'm also taking three days off for GAFilk and a day for Confusion, so there's a lot of vacation time in the near future, which means that getting more work done is a fine idea.

Tomorrow. :)

And we've had a good night's sleep since returning home.

Three loads of laundry later (and at least two more to go, I think), progress is being made. Trips to various stores have been made too in order to restock the larders.

Work, in likely predictable fashion, had something for me to do today as well.

So life is normal. :)

Today was our last day before heading home. We spent it having an excellent time visiting with Erica and Steve, who we haven't seen in nearly five years. Erica (with Steve's assistance) made a yummy lasagna for dinner.

But most of the time was spent around the kitchen table swapping stories. And that was good.

Tomorrow, we set out for home. We are more than ready to be there, so I'm hoping for good luck on the last leg.

Today, we spent time in three states and three different time zones: Arizona (Mountain Standard Time), New Mexico (Mountain Daylight Time), and Texas (Central Daylight Time). This meant we lost two hours today, so despite leaving on time and making really good time, we pulled into our hotel in Amarillo at 8:30 PM local time. We were trying to figure out where to get some dinner on the way into town and decided to find some place after checking in. As I walked toward the door, I looked over my shoulder and called out to Gretchen, "There's a Chuy's!"

Now, we have greatly missed Chuy's after the only one close to us closed down due to COVID and never reopened. I checked in and ran back out to the car and managed to get us to Chuy's far enough ahead of closing that we were able to have a lovely dinner of stuff that requires a 45 minute or more trip to get to back in Chicagoland.

Tomorrow, we are off to the KC area. The drive tomorrow will be about as long as today's, but we won't lose two hours, which makes us very happy. :)

I had intended to leave Anaheim and Vidcon by 9 AM in order to get back to Phoenix at a reasonable hour. Unfortunately, I woke up in the middle of the night and had a lot of trouble getting back to sleep. Eventually, I realized that I needed to set my alarm for a reasonable hour and then I would be able to sleep instead of worrying about waking up on time. This worked and more sleep was forthcoming.

We managed to wake up at 7:30 AM, get the last of everything cleared out of the room, get to the car, and get rolling by right around 9 AM. I was astonished.

Julie has been feeling crummy since yesterday (when she decided to stay in the room instead of going to the convention center), so when she asked if she could please have something to eat and drink about an hour into the trip, I spotted a sign for a Pilot station with attached Wendy's about 20 miles ahead and asked if that would be ok. It was so we stopped there, gassed up, and bought food and the currently preferred iced tea of small (not so small any more!) blond children.

I didn't buy *much* food for me though, because prices were fairly berserk. Large drinks were $3.50 each, while a single was $7.99. I decided that I could get by with a few chicken nuggets until lunch.

It was a *long* way until lunch though, as there are very few choices from Palm Springs east. We ended up stopping at the same Cracker Barrel where we had eaten breakfast on the way out of Phoenix. This was closer to Jeff and Carol's place than I'd intended, but still an hour out. And it was a bit after 2 PM and I was ready to eat the steering wheel.

Somewhat later, we made it to our destination, unloaded the car, and collapsed in a heap. Gretchen had an excellent time in our absence.

Tomorrow, we set out for the Grand Canyon.

I'm thinking we should leave around 9 AM...

So here I am at Vidcon for my third day (of four), although the first day was mostly just finding registration and taking care of that. But I'm here in the huge Anaheim Convention Center and thinking of having been here in the past for Worldcon. And there are some good things being done with space allocation that I've noticed.

The ginormous main space of the main floor of the convention center is almost entirely open. There are four main stages (one small, two medium, one large, although all are large by some measure) along various walls of the space, along with a massive section that's cordoned off for pre-ticketed (but free!) meet and greet, where you can get professional photos taken with various Internet personalities that are uploaded and sent to you with a link. We're all tracked by RFID chips in our wristbands (which accompany our badges), so matching the photos to the recipients is easier than you might otherwise expect.

The center of the space is the exhibits area. It is chock full of vendors in booths of various sizes. Some of them will sell you a product right there. Some of them are technology vendors (like DaVinci Resolve, which was handing out cards to direct you to their website to download the free version in the hope of selling you the not-free version once you need more capability). NASA is here and advertising their support for content creators. Disney is here, plugging an upcoming Descendants movie. Minecraft is here. (Of *course* Minecraft is here...)

There's a Festival Stage outside, but it is in the next county near Registration (which was, sadly, in the next county, but in a big enough space there for all practical purposes). I am not going to see much that happens at the Festival Stage, because I am doing enough walking without going there.

There are food trucks outside (two lunches of bulgogi so far), but there are also convention center booths selling food in the exhibit area and in a patio area inside which seem to be *slightly* better priced than the food trucks. I may investigate this tomorrow. There are also convention center food sales in the foyer.

There's a shortage of places to sit, other than the big stages in the hall. But places can be found if you are sufficiently old and determined. I am both.

Oh, and each of the big stages has a video production crew at the back of the hall so that the activities on the stages can be projected on a huge screen behind the panelists. Expensive? Probably. Necessary? Very.

And the panelists are usually sitting on comfy couches (which I have seen occasionally at Worldcon) and working with multiple wireless handheld mics. It's a good arrangement, much better than sitting in an uncomfortable chair at a table.

People are constantly moving through the huge open exhibits space. Some of them are even watching where they are going. I was walking toward a woman today and desperately looking for some form of eye contact so I could guess which way she was going to go so I could avoid walking into her. I'm not sure what she was looking at, but it clearly wasn't me. I avoided the collision anyway...

I'm thinking that if you have this kind of space (which not all Worldcons do!), this is a good way to arrange things. The only area requiring heightened security is the Art Show, which would fit nicely into the secured meet-and-greet space. And then there are four events programming areas at the periphery of the exhibits area, which is both exhibits and dealers. There are plenty of breakout rooms upstairs for smaller programming items.

I don't recall this sort of space allocation at the last Worldcon I was at in Anaheim (2006!), but my memory may be faulty. Certainly dealers and exhibits were in separate spaces and large programming wasn't mingled with them.

But it's nice.

If you have the space. And the money. :)

The drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles through mostly blazing desert heat improves immensely when you have air conditioning. We got into the L.A. area at the beginning of rush hour, hit some areas of congestion, but still made it to the hotel about eight hours after we left Phoenix, which was pretty good.

Our room is as far from the elevators as it is possible to be in the hotel. Happily, my digital key worked. Unhappily, the digital key only worked for one of the two kids, so we had to go to the desk and get physical keys. And then we lit out for Vidcon.

It is a very long walk from the Anaheim Hilton to the convention center, which is where registration was. Maybe there was a shorter route. Maybe we will find it tomorrow. But we got registered, the kids met up with friends, and then we headed off for dinner.

Which was *another* long walk. And a long walk back and then a long walk to the room.

I think I am walked out for now.

Hi!

Our vacation continues and I have been offered the use of a computer desk to type at, so here I am.

We spent two days driving down to visit my brother Mitch in DFW, which included a stop at Meramec Caverns, as the kids had never had a chance to go down into a cave before. Then we spent several days relaxing there and catching up with Mitch. Activities were minimal, but included a trip to the new Rangers ballpark to see the home team beat the Mets, which is always a good thing. It was a lot of fun. Sadly, we didn't get to see my sister Judy, because she was on vacation in Colorado and returned the day after we departed. We'll figure something out in the future. And it was great having a chance to get down and spend time talking with Mitch.

Two more days of driving (including stops at the Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, and Meteor Crater) brought us to Phoenix, where we're staying with Gretchen's brother Jeff and his wife Carol. It is very hot and we are staying out of the heat as much as possible. More catching up is happening -- not as I type, because Jeff has run out to pick up dinner, but it's catching up.

I've taken advantage of the computer time to catch up on emails I need to send and checking in on a few things. Tomorrow is laundry day before the kids and I depart for the con, leaving Gretchen in Phoenix for more relaxing and catching up.

It has been a *long* time since I've done this much driving. :)

I booked another motel room for the vacation today, leaving two left to be booked. Since the rooms seem to be pretty thoroughly non-refundable on any time scale that would actually help, I'm going to stall on the last two rooms for a bit until I have a chance to collect some intelligence from my brother on actual driving conditions in Texas. Google Maps is being quite unhelpful in its discussion of road closures along the interstates there, leaving me to wonder what the heck is going on.

So when in doubt, ask the native. :)

We went over and talked to a friend today about vacation plans and taking care of Ruby the Dog and Sunshine the Cat during the time that we're out of town. The outline of a plan now exists, so we just need to fill it all in.

And clean the house. Cleaning the house is *very* important. :)