Along the way, we’ll get a forum software upgrade, and an upgrade to our CONGO installation (CONGO is the back-end software that runs our registration pre-con and at-con).  More resources on the hosting server mean we can start working on our long-wanted CMS overhaul and registration overhaul too.  Not sure about the CMS side yet – it’ll probably be a toss-up between PHP Fusion and Drupal.  What would be nice is integrating the forum, the website and the registration for the con into one cohesive community/system.

Didn’t shoot too many photos, but got something like 30 of Mr. T. Zahn, so I’ll be checking those in Lightroom when I get home.  Hopefully there’s at least one good one we can use on the UberCon site.  I also need to get his contact details to see if he minds if I use them in my personal (online) portfolio.  Missed the tear-down of the convention by being a lazy sod and sitting in my room reading.  However, I helped pack the truck for the trip to the con, so I think I’m excused.

MJ brought two of my boxes of books.  I know where one is right now, just need to find the other one and see how many books I can fit in my checked luggage.  I’ll be able to put some in my carry-on too, as I don’t need to be quite as cautious about what goes in my checked luggage this time (for the flight out I had all the camera gear in the carry-on).

Spent several days this week mowing Kevin’s acre of land, after I fixed one of his lawnmowers and the weed-whacker.  The weed-whacker had a combustion chamber and air filter that were full of water, and the spark was all gummed up.  A bit of shaking and leaving in the sun dried the filter and chamber, and a bit of gasoline and sandpaper fixed the spark.  Presto, working weed-whacker.  MJ came down Tuesday evening, and we’ve been having good chats, working on the garden beds and just generally been the good friends that we are.

Didn’t manage to run the BBS at UberCon, but that’s life.  I should have it up and running on the Avatar game host in the next week or so.

Boss has kindly said I don’t have to be on call until Tuesday, which is good – I could do Monday night, but I’m bound to be jet-lagged (my trick doesn’t work so well when going forwards in time zones).  So, I get back to the UK tomorrow morning, and I’ll be back at work the next day.  Pity that, I was just starting to relax properly.

Something sparked in my brain the other day that I really wanted to play Land of Devastation again, and while I was at it, TradeWars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon might be a good idea too. So, off on my hunting I went, excercising my Google-Fu in the quest to find a BBS package that runs on Linux, and supports DOS door games. I ended up finding Synchronet BBS, and a fair bit of documentation on how to get all three games running.

Unfortunately, the documentation wasn’t all right, but it was enough to get LORD and TW2002 up. LOD was a bear – it runs fine in local mode, but refuses to run in door mode. Beeps twice as it tries to load, and then drops back to the Games menu in the BBS. I initially thought it was a FOSSIL problem, and edited game.ctl to use the internal I/O driver, but the problem persisted. Several hours later, having gone round and round and round with compilers (recompiling SBBS), dosemu settings and operating system changes, it occurred to me that LOD’s game.exe has a /P flag. I had been ignoring it, or pointing it to a Linux path. D’oh! Made it /PD: (D: being the virtual drive where SBBS was dropping the call file), and presto, it all works. Now to choose between RIPtel (which runs full screen, with large fonts) or SyncTerm.

I’m off to UberCon in the next few days, and we’re having a bit of a retro kick with the consoles, so I think I’ll help out on the LAN side, and make the BBS available on our gaming LAN for a bit of old-school BBS gaming. Need to get licenses for the software though, so that I can tune the number of turns per day etc – the con is short-lived, and most of these games were aimed at a week or more of playing (LORD in particular was closer to a month). The best part is that all of this is running on an 8 GB USB stick that has a Kubuntu installation on it, so I’ve got a PC on a stick with me that also doubles as a BBS server.

The other thing to sort out is whether to enable the full QWK part of Synchronet, along with the web interface, FTP interface and more. I suppose it depends whether I see a point in doing it other than nostalgia, and whether it would make sense to tie it to Avatar.

We fell a bit short of the expected number I think, but the feedback, in general, was that VIII was a great con.

09:00
Regi is open, people are trickling in. Normal for a Saturday morning, it takes a few hours for everything to get into motion. Loony Labs Rabbit is running a game across the way. Some folks are playing UT2004. Been discussing with Dave what might be giving us trouble with CONGO on the virtual server that runs ubercon.com.

…

and here ends the majority of the con reporting. A friend of mine who I haven’t seen for ages has shown up, so I’ll be spending the rest of the con talking to her.

We started the LAN setup last night, which is unheard of for UberCon – we’re normally still setting up the LAN as the doors are opening! So, I give you a pretty picture of the shiny Dell PCs and flatscreens that power our LAN this year. I’ll find out in a short while if the imaging was finished last night after the hockey game or not. If it wasn’t, I’ll have time to slip the EVE client on!

10:00
The EVE client is downloading for addition to the master image, and a bunch of MUD addicts are using the free wireless in the hotel to get online and play. The guy doing the LAN imaging work hasn’t been to sleep yet apparently.

12:00
The sharp, pointy-object vendor is setting up, helpdesk is setting up, and EVE is loaded onto the master image for the gaming machines. Prize closet was set up last night apparently, and I’ve shot a few photos of that too. MUD addicts are still MUDding. The LAN guy still hasn’t slept. Registration is setting up out front, so pre-printed badges should be up and running soon.

15:30
The ballrooms are a small hive of activity. Vendors are busy unpacking their wares, tables are getting labelled for the boardgame folks. The LAN is now getting imaged – lack of a gigabit switch, and the server software refusing to multicast means we’re doing 1 or 2 machines at a time, for a 60 GB image (and I don’t think he’s slept yet). The folks who are meant to be running the tournaments haven’t showed up yet. My badge says staff, which is bad I think. Oh well, at least I can take photos. We’re definitely more organised than previous cons, even if the two folks who know about everything that should be happening were both asleep at the same time.

17:30
Just finished a game of Settlers of Catan – lost quite badly. More people showing up, but early Friday is always a quiet time.

Time for bed.

Went for a walk around 9 to see which shops in the local mall were still around. Looks like the mall is closing down, as a good half of the stores were shuttered and empty. Took a few photos of a butterfly and some seagulls that were infesting the parking lot. Got back to find Dave (who runs the ‘con registration) and girl-friend up and about, so joined them for (a second) breakfast. Quite amusing to see three people sitting at a table, eating breakfast, with laptops out and reading e-mail – a bit like how the movies always portray businessmen with their breakfast and a newspaper. We then retired to the lounge of the hotel to chat, lounge and generally be useless.

Somewhere around noon (no watch, and can’t be bothered to pay attention to the time), we meandered back over to the mall to acquire something referred to as ‘lunch’. It’s apparently good for you if you’re hungry. Watched Scott eat two footlong subs from Subway – he reminds me of my maternal grandfather, slim build and tall. Haven’t got a clue where he puts all the food. Popped into the local grocery store to acquire some Vicks 44D (unavailable in the UK for whatever reason, perhaps the fact that the primary ingredient is alcohol), hot chocolate and granola bars. Due to IBS, I’m avoiding oranges for the moment, which is a pity.

Got back to the hotel and crashed – I’ve somehow acquired what feels like a cold, so a 1 hour nap seemed like a good thing. That 1 hour nap became a 3 hour one, but if that’s what my body wanted, that’s what it wanted. Just finished off a hot chocolate while typing this, and I’ll probably be wandering downstairs to see how the unpacking of the truck went, and how far along the imaging of the gaming systems is. Then I’ll probably collapse back into bed and try for a good 8 or 9 hours of sleep. Con goes live tomorrow at 4 pm, whee!

Feedback in our forum indicate that better maps of the con would be appreciated, so I’ve worked out a design that’ll let us display maps that are about 3 foot by 3 foot and a schedule of events down the side. A few of these dotted around the hotel should help people know where they are and where they want to get to. They’ll also be durable, which makes them reuseable for multiple cons. Even better, they won’t cost us an arm and a leg to build.