banjoplayinnerd

Yesterday the Linux Mint people announced that the RC of Linux Mint 17, called "Qiana" because not all that many women's names start with "Q" and end with "A", is available. Heck with the RC, updates will turn it official soon enough, so I installed it on a partition on my laptop that previously housed a prior version of Mint. Version 13, I believe, because I keep about four earlier versions of Mint on my laptop for no other reason than because I can. There's also an installation of Windows 7, but it has decided it's no longer going to boot so it really doesn't count.

Anyway it took about 2-3 hours, which was really a fresh install. I keep all my data files on a partition separate from the programs so I can just pave a partition, install the newest version, and add any additional programs I need to do the stuff I like to do. In this case that included Flash. For some reason the Flash player wouldn't admit to its own existence on Mint 17, even though apt said it was installed. Five minutes' work and I was able to work the puzzles I like to do, pretending they keep my mind sharp.

Then, since Mint is based on Ubuntu, "Qiana" is a rebranding of Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) with a different user interface. Since Ubuntu trusty has been out for about a month and it's a long-term release that will be supported for several years, I went ahead and installed it, but I haven't decided yet whether I will keep it until the next long=term release in 2016 or whether I'll just update every six months with the interim Ubuntu/Mint releases.

Since trusty has been out for a month now and looks like the rough edges have been smoothed, I went ahead and put Xubuntu 14.04LTS on my desktop server. It seems to be working just fine as well, apart from the same Flash issue I saw in Mint.

So what else have I been doing today? Napping. Listening to some Internet streams Snacking. Napping some more. And counting my many, many blessings that I've been back to work for two weeks and will be going back for a third on Monday.

Speaking of which, I brought my laptop home with me yesterday but I haven't unpacked it yet. I don't have anything I have to do. I just brought it home to test out work's VPN. Maybe I'll just do that on Starbucks on Monday.

When I was a kid we had a Peanuts coffee-table anthology that I enjoyed reading, even when I didn't always get the jokes. I distinctly remember one story line where, after going crazy for a week trying to find an overdue library book, Charlie Brown finds it in the refrigerator. He goes off celebrating down the hall, prompting Schroder to remark, "There's nothing quite like the feeling of being let off the hook."

I know exactly how he feels.

About two weeks ago I was this close (holds his index finger and thumb about a millimeter apart) to having to make some extremely unpleasant choices stemming from my prolonged inability to find a job. That day I got an email from a recruiter in Florida. Usually I ignore those because many of them seem to think I live somewhere near the Washington on the east coast, or that I'd be interested in leaving Seattle to go work a three-month contract doing Java development in South Carolina (wrong, wrong and wrong), or some such thing, but this guy worked for a company I'd had an excellent contracting experience with before, and the job description sounded like something I both could handle and enjoy, so I pinged him back and asked him to tell me more.

After a brief phone conversation, on Monday he sent me a link to a questionnaire designed to assess my skill with computer concepts in general and Linux in particular. He said there'd be about 30 questions and it'd take a couple of hours. OK, I enjoy doing that sort of thing, so I started and answered the first question . . . and the next . . . and the next . . . and the questions just kept coming and coming, and for the most part I kept answering them and kept answering them. Four hours later I had provided answers to 55 of 59 questions, everything from "How do you list the files and folders in the current directory, including hidden ones?" (very easy) to "Have you ever compiled your own Linux kernel? What are the steps to do so? Why would you do it?" (moderately technical). I sent the questionnaire off and went back to job hunting.

This was on Monday afternoon. That evening the recruiter called me, told me the client had been impressed both with my answers and the way I answered them (conversational yet in some depth, and indicating I had had experience with the topics rather than just reading about them), and wanted to know if I could meet him for a face-to-face interview the next day.

Ummmm . . . yeah.

So my daughter drove me to Redmond and hung out at the library there while I met with the client. We hit it off well and the next day I had a job offer. I just finished my first week of work, and I am very, very happy.

Want to know how happy I am? A couple of weeks ago the good people at VCon invited me to be a panelist this year. I'm glad they did, because for a couple of years I've had to decline for budgetary reasons (couldn't afford to go) and I was afraid they'd think I'd gafiated or was mad at them and wouldn't invite me back. So since I was still unemployed at the time, I told them I'd be glad to attend if I could afford to, and would know more as we approached October.

I just reserved a hotel room for VCon. That's how happy I am.

I am so happy to look forward to leaving the SNAP benefits (food stamps) behind for others who will need them more than I will.

I am so happy that I'll be able to spend $10 to buy a fellow filker's CD. Actually, I'm happy I can consider paying $10 to buy a CD without worrying about whether I should keep that money for bus fare.

But above all I am happy that finally someone, somewhere, has decided my skills and experience are valuable and has said so, both monetarily and verbally. I am happy that I'm not being forced into retirement with no assets to speak of, because I know what lies at the end of that road, and I'm not ready for that yet.

Did I mention I work less than five minutes away from a Coldstone Creamery? (Yeah, I know, I have no business stopping there very often, either calorie-wise or money-wise. But when my first paycheck comes, I'm gonna splurge just a little. Maybe a milk shake.)

Did I mention that I wrote a new song not long ago? It's only a first draft and needs major revision, but it's the first one in over six months.

Did I mention that my lead told me I was doing well so far and I wowed him with a script I wrote that did an inventory of some of the systems we monitor? That might be the best part of all.

OK, enough of that. I'm going to bed with a smile on my face.

I suspect I've gone a bit overboard in installing apps on my new phone. At least I'm occasionally getting messages saying I have "insufficient storage" to download and install an update. Of course the message helpfully doesn't tell me what directory or item has insufficient storage so I can go fix the problem, and I am left to various spells and incantations like "clear all of your caches" (fortunately there's an app for that).

I don't suppose I strictly need three chromatic tuners, after all, especially since I really like one of them. Pitchlab was very easy to set up for my banjo and even has several alternate tunings besides the standard gDGBD. Once running it displays five lines representing the strings, and in the background is an annulus that reminds me a little of the Stargate. If a string you are tuning is off by a considerable margin you'll see a bowed line above or underneath the representation of the relevant string with a message, "TUNE UP" or "TUNE DOWN." Once you start getting close the bowed line superimposes itself on the string line and dots start rotating on the annulus. When the rotation stops you see a message that says "IN TUNE" and you're ready to go to the next string.

This beats the snot out of the Snark tuner I clip to my peghead. Not that I think the Snark tuner is bad (it's actually quite good) but I've broken at least one and lost another, I forget to take it off the peghead, my grandson decides to play with it and run down the battery, and on and on. I tend to always have my phone with me, and try to keep it charged, so access to it isn't a problem.

So last night once I got the banjo tuned and had run through a song or two, I decided to try an experiment. The banjo, like the violin and unlike the guitar, has an adjustable bridge. Unlike the violin, it also has frets. That means that due to the physics of how strings make sound, you have to position the bridge close to twice the distance between the nut and the 12th fret for the frets to sound the right notes as you go up the neck. Exactly how close is more art than science; you have to fiddle around and adjust to get it right.

The physics of how the strings produce sound also mean that, due to the tension of the strings on the bridge and the thickness of the strings, the point at which a bridge should be in order to produce an octave at the 12th fret is slightly different for each string. There is a type of bridge called a "compensating bridge" that is designed to compensate for this differential, and that's the kind I have. (I also have a standard, non-compensating bridge somewhere in my banjo junkbox.) Since Pitchlab was working so well to tune the banjo with open strings, I decided to see how well the compensating bridge compensated.

The results were surprising to say the least. The third string came out right on pitch, an octave above the open string, but Pitchlab said the first, second and fifth strings were too high, and the fourth string was too low. Now comes the guesswork. Is the bridge really that far out of adjustment? Did I put it on backwards? Would the straight bridge work better?

Or is Pitchlab just blowing smoke and telling me that the strings are in the wrong octave?

I said at the beginning that maybe I didn't need three different chromatic tuners, but I suppose I should try using them to tune up and check the bridge to see what they say. But if I do, how will I know which of them if any is right?

Maybe I should just get a pitch pipe and tune the darn thing by ear.

If you go to the Bing front page today (and you should because the picture is great), one of the quotes they list is from Oprah, who says, "Biology is the least of what makes one a mother." I have to agree. My wife and daughter are both mother to three of our grandkids just as much as their birth mothers are. Maybe more. Happy Mother's Day, Sharleen and Tina.

And happy Mothers' Day to all of you mothers out there. The ones who take on foster children who would otherwise be lost in the system. The ones who gladly shoulder the burden of raising grandkids or nieces and nephews for whatever reason. The ones who sit outside at a Starbucks watching the crowd go by and wondering, is that the child I had to give up for adoption when I was too young to handle motherhood? And yes, to those dads who are mother to their kids as well because their wife is no longer there. And of course to all the traditional mothers who are doing the best they can with the tools they have at hand to raise kids that are happy, healthy and well-adjusted.

I was barely aware of Google Voice before yesterday when my sister told me she was using it. It's a service that assigns you a telephone number that in theory will ring through to any set of phones you assign to it. So, I call her Google Voice number and it rings through to her cell phone and her house phone. There are also a bunch of other cool services like caller ID and call blocking. Nifty.

So, I decided to check it out, since I already have a Google account that I'm using for a buncha other things. I go to the Voice web page, answer a bunch of nosy questions, and it offers to either port my existing number, or let me choose a phone number by area code, or zip, or location, or by searching for a word.

Fair enough. I want to keep the cell number I have now, so let's give searching a try, since that is after all supposed to be Google's strength. Give me a 206 (Seattle metro) number, I request.

"No results returned for this search."

OK, how about Seattle?

"No results returned for this search."

Oof. Um, King County?

"No results again, fool."

What about Washington?

That produced results; unfortunately they were all for the other Washington.

Let's search for a word then. How about "Creede"? Nope.

Wait a minute. What about . . . "banjo"?

All right. Now we're getting somewhere. Voice returned a set of five numbers, all of which were of the form 50B-ANJ-Oxxx. Not really what I wanted. I was more looking for something of the form (xxx) xxB-ANJO.

So, on to the next page . . . and I hit pay dirt. The mother lode. Option number three, a phone number in the greater Los Angeles area code, is a keeper. I need to get it on business cards and pass it around to all my friends:

The world can now reach me by dialing 3-2345-BANJO.

(OK, that's really 323-452-2656, but I'm never going to remember that, and neither are you, and neither is anyone else.)

Android phones are little handheld Linux computers, so you'd think it'd be a breeze to move files back and forth between a Linux machine and an Android phone, right?

Ha ha ha ha, silly you.

Well, you'd think at least it would be easy or maybe possible to move them back and forth between an Android phone and a Windows machine, since Windows is only the most popular operating system on the planet?

Ha ha ha ha, silly you again.

I love my new phone, even though it has a couple of minor cosmetic annoyances. It's a second hand phone, and the screen needs to be replaced, but the cosmetic defect is minor enough that it's not normally noticeable when you're using the device unless you know it's there and are looking for it. I can live with that for now. But it should be possible, if not necessarily easy, to move files back and forth between a server or desktop computer and a phone intended to be a media device.

Yet for reasons unknown Linux 13.04 (the latest version, just upgraded today) doesn't properly transfer files from Android. I can connect the phone to my computer, I can see the files, but (for instance) when I go into the media library on my phone and try to copy an MP3 to my desktop, I get a file with a numeric filename (e.g. 174.mp3) of the proper length but no content, no tags, won't play, nothing. Obviously not helpful.

This however is marginally better than on Windows, where the phone won't connect at all. It's apparently a driver issue with 64-bit versions of Windows 7, which at the moment is all I have access to. I tried over three days to get it to connect and managed to hook it up, once, long enough to get the firmware updated to the latest version of Android (I'm now running Jelly Bean). Since then, nothing.

So I found a solution in the Android Market, err, Play Store that says it will let me transfer files back and forth over wi-fi using a browser. Sounds good, right? A nice OS-independent solution. I have a good strong wi-fi signal so this should be a piece of cake.

Ha ha ha ha, still silly you.

I'm now going on about 45 minutes of trying to download one MP3 album so I can fix the tags and the track names will show up properly. I keep getting errors, and of course there are no helpful error messages. I don't want to have to go in, pull out the SD card, load it up on the laptop, transfer the files to the desktop where MP3Tag (a Windows MP3 tag editor but the best one out there by far in my experience) can fix them, then transfer them back to the laptop and finally back over to the phone.

I really think it should be easier than that.

Ha ha ha ha, silly me.

UPDATE: I finally got the files downloaded, edited, and sent back to the phone. I was so tired out I took a nap afterward while the phone's battery charges. In the process I found that somehow I had put two copies of Led Zeppelin IV onto the phone. Hey, I love "Stairway To Heaven" as much as the next child of the sixties, but once through at a time is sufficient these days.

Oh, by the way, the album that was giving me all the grief was The Duras Sisters' Rubenesque. Totally worth the effort.

Yesterday I came home from work and found a package waiting for me. I expected a package – I'd ordered a high-capacity battery for my new phone. This package was much larger than you'd ship a battery in, though, unless it was a car battery.

The return address was cryptic. "The Conflikt Fairy, c/o Conflikt" with a PO box number here in Shoreline. Curiouser and curiouser. I had no idea why I would be getting anything from Conflikt. I don't have any official affiliation with the con and hadn't won any trophies or anything.

So, I opened the box, and . . . oh my flying spaghetti monster. The box contained a Blue brand Yeti model USB microphone.

About three weeks ago Woot.com featured one of these on their Tech page. I liked the look of it. It looked like a throwback to the big bullet-shaped microphones from the Golden Age of Radio. It looked like R2-D2 on stilts. The specs were pretty sweet, and Dara Korra'ti (who knows these things) said it was a pretty nice microphone. Certainly much better than the condenser microphone I blogged about a year or so ago. The price was a bit steep, though, so I figured I'd just wait until I had a better handle on the rent and the bills and could afford to buy one the next time it came around on Woot.

And here it was, in my possession, ready for me to hook it up and start recording.

There was a note attached, telling me the microphone was a gift from the Conflikt Fairy, who did not want to be otherwise identified. Actually, I'm fine with that. Anonymous giving is one of those things that makes the world go 'round. I did want to say "Thank you," though. This is something I would never have dreamed of, and it is a beautiful gift, and I thank you, whoever you are.

We're all familiar with the idea of paranoia, the thought that someone is out to get you. Less well known is the idea of pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. The idea that someone, somewhere, out there wants to do good things for you and make your life better. Today, I am feeling very pronoid. They really are out to help me!

I wasn't going to buy anything on Friday. Honest I wasn't.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm one of those contrarian types who is opposed to shopping on Black Friday. It's as much an unwillingness to go out and drop a bunch of money on stuff I don't need as it is just not want to go out and fight my way through a bunch of crowds to do it. Throw in a huge dose of "I have no money for anything this year" and you've got a pretty good handle on my situation.

But then one of the mailing lists I subscribe to came out with a super tempting deal, offering a year's free top-tier membership to Treehouse (ordinarily $600) for $99. The catch was, they had 12 deals lined up on Black Friday, and each one was only good for 2 hours, so I had basically between 12:00 and 2:00 on Friday afternoon to take them up on it.

Perhaps I should explain what Treehouse is and why this was such a tempting deal. Their stock in trade is video instruction. They break down the subject – whether it's Javascript, CSS3, Ruby programming or starting your own business – into strings of short videos, anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes long, where they present a code sample that illustrates what they're teaching. There are about 120 "badges" you can earn in these subjects, and more coming down the road all the time.

As you probably know I have been trying to learn Ruby lately with an eye toward branching out into Ruby on Rails development. I had been going through instruction books and the few free resources I could find, and was learning a few things but not enough. So when this offer came along – a year's worth of drinking from the instructional firehose – I started agonizing over it. I still had the contrarian streak, still had no business spending any money, and it was still Black Friday, but this looked like such a useful way to learn, and $100 for a year's instruction is cheap.

At about 12:15 my wife came into the bedroom and we were talking, as we often do these days, about money. I told her about this deal and how I thought it would be useful, but I really had no business taking them up on it when we had so many other places for our limited means to go.

She thought about it for a second. "Well, I can think of one reason why you might want to do it," she said.

"What's that?"

"Every dollar you've spent on education in the last 20 years has come back to us many times over."

My wife is a very wise woman.

About ten minutes later I pulled out the credit card and signed up.

This was an extremely good move.

It's been a little over 150 hours since I signed up and I've completed all of the Ruby Foundations badges, everything from explaining what variables are (for the real beginners in the crowd) to writing tests for your programs as you go. Actually, writing the tests before the programs.

It doesn't hurt that Treehouse has a somewhat whimsical sense of humor. The "Hello and thanks for signing up" video involved a very steampunkish airship and a guy with an eyepatch setting out for Treehouse Island.

So what did I do today?

OK, I'm going to admit to doing something dumb. A while back I managed to wipe my desktop clean, as in "rm -rf Desktop/". (I mean, who hasn't, right?) There was a bunch of important stuff on that desktop, including my ham radio logbook spreadsheet and a folder with all of my electronic QSL (contact verification) cards. I found a random post out on the Internet from a guy who wrote a program to download all of your QSL cards from eQSL.cc, the website that handles the service. The problem is, he wrote this program in some kind of oddball Windows scripting solution that I'd never heard of.

So, I decided to write my own. I started looking for ways I could do this and came across the web documentation for Ruby's Mechanize gem, which allows you to write scripts to load web pages, fill out forms, keep track of cookies and the like.

After about seven hours I had a working program that not only downloaded the eQSLs, changing one variable would determine whether you downloaded all of your eQSLs or just the ones you hadn't retrieved yet, and gave them sane names as opposed to the indecipherable string of digits eQSL saves them as. This is probably less time than it would have taken to go in and download all 200-something of them by clicking on them one by one, and certainly less boring.

On the basis of this and some other scripts I've written I feel confident enough now to put Ruby on my resume. There are a lot of positions and recruiters looking for Ruby, sometimes as a standalone skill but more often as a way to work with Ruby-based tools like Rails, Chef and Puppet.

And that's what I've been doing for the past week.

And yes, I think this sort of thing is great fun. Beats sitting around moping while I look for work.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned my brand new development box, workstation, computer, toy or whatever you want to call it. I've been tinkering with it since that post and it is still the bee's knees. As of right now it's running a browser (chromium), an email client (Thunderbird), an instance of Windows 7 running in a virtual machine (virtualbox) that's busy running some ham radio software and the Zune music software, an IRC client (xchat), and somewhere down there in the silicon maze are daemons for apache and mysql and other things that come to think of it don't take up a lot of resources. I even kicked up the CPU clock speed to turn it from a 3300MHz processor to a 4000MHz processor, and it's not even heating up significantly.

This is sort of like when I bought my banjo almost 10 years ago now. I wasn't absolutely sure at the time that I should be spending the money on a toy when there were other things I could have been doing with it, but I've never looked back, and look at the friends it's helped me make and the fun I've had doing it. The only regret is that I didn't do it many years ago, and I could have been having all that fun this much longer.

Similarly, when I'm out of work it seems a bit foolish to spend about $400 on a new computer. But I don't look at my computer as a toy. (Well, not entirely, OK?) I look at it as a tool. Computers are how I make my living, and like I said before, the old one was driving me around the bend because it was so underpowered. I can do things on this computer I can't even do on my laptop (a dual-core 1.8 GHz machine from when Windows Vista walked the earth), much less the old single-core 1.3 GHz machine. With any luck at all this machine will last me another 5-6 years, or until software starts outpacing the hardware again. But running today's software on XUbuntu 12.10, it is great.

One of the things that a blazingly fast computer doesn't help with is doing the actual programming. Someone once said that most of a computer's time is spent waiting for you to do something, usually type in a command or click a mouse. That's true as far as I can tell. The browser comes up fast and the mail is pretty quick, but if I'm writing a program it still takes me the same amount of time to type in the code or debug it. I get the results faster, but for the stuff I'm doing now, imperceptibly so. Then again there are the times I had to wait for the old computer to play catch-up in some other process before I could get back to work, so I'm glad I don't have to worry about that at the moment.

---

While I'm knocking around the house looking for work I have been working on improving my skill set. Part of that is learning new languages and new technologies. I was once labeled a "one-trick pony" by an interviewer; fortunately I got that job since the one trick I knew (Perl) was the one they wanted. I'm trying to shed that these days by learning some new skills, languages and technologies, or at least getting an idea of what they're about so if someone says they want a guy who knows something about Hadoop, Nagios, Nginx or Puppet I can discuss them semi-intelligently rather than saying "Nope, no idea" or, worse, something dumb.

To that end I've been working on learning Ruby. Ruby is sort of similar to where Perl was 15 years ago, a hot scripting language that's making its presence known as an engine for creating interactive web pages. It's a typical open source success story, similar to the one behind Linux itself. In 1993 a Japanese programmer named Yukihiro Matsumoto (known to one and all as "Matz") decided that the scripting languages available to him left something to be desired, so he set out to create his own that was "more powerful than Perl and more object-oriented than Python." I don't know if it out-muscles Perl, but it is certainly object oriented. Everything in Ruby is an object, including what would normally be simple primitives like integers.

Ruby was first released in Japan at the end of 1995 and interest was pretty much confined to Japan for about four years, when the first English-language Ruby mailing list started up. It gained a modest following, but really took off in 2003 when David Heinemeier Hansson was developing an application that would eventually become Basecamp. He was working on some web scaffolding for Basecamp, and realized that with a little work he could create a general purpose web application framework, which he released under the name Ruby on Rails. (Again, this is similar to the history of Perl, where Larry Wall realized that a one-off script to do some text parsing could be expanded into a general purpose Practical Extraction and Reporting Language.) In some ways Ruby on Rails is Ruby's killer app; it does a lot of the heavy lifting involved in creating an interactive web site, and it does it all in Ruby. "Ruby on Rails" is one of the most common desired skills I've been seeing while doing my job search.

Before I dive into Rails I want to do some general purpose scripting in Ruby to get a decent grounding in the language. To that end I've been rewriting some projects I've done in other languages in Ruby. For instance, I have an application I wrote that sends a bunch of tweets at regular intervals. It's written in Java, in part because I wanted to say I had written a Java program. It took me about three days to get everything written, tested, debugged and functioning, and even so it still isn't working 100% right (in part because I don't have my class path set to work properly from a cron job . . . but I digress).

Today I got out of bed at about 8:30 and decided I wanted to convert this script to Ruby. So my morning looked something like:

8:30 - get up, get showered and get dressed

9:00 - sign on to boris (my big bad dev box) and in a separate window load up sitka (the remote server the Java code is on)

9:05 - copy the list of tweet contents from sitka to boris. Close the connection to Sitka. Format the strings for use in Ruby (mostly removing the String identifiers in Java - Ruby uses flexible typing, similar to Perl)

9:30 - install the Twitter Ruby gem (package) and take a look at the documentation

9:45 - create a sample tweet with the Twitter gem and see it appear in my timeline

9:50 - Do a little more experimenting with the gem to see how tweet objects are formatted (for use later)

10:10 - Write the code for sending the tweet lists. Test it. Fix a few bugs and try it again

10:45 - Run a full simulation, not sending tweets but testing the timing

11:00 - Done. Off to answer my mail and contact some of my recruiters.

The Java original took me three days to complete. Now granted I already had the login information and the strings I want to tweet, but putting the Ruby version together took me less than two hours, and that was with breaks to look up code examples online.

My goal is to get somewhere near the expertise I have in Perl as fast as possible, preferably within a month or two. If today's experience is any indication, I may be able to reach that goal with time to spare.

So as many of you know, I was the Interfilk guest at Conchord which happened about ten days ago, thanks to the sponsorship of Juliana McCorison and Kathleen Sloane and the other board members at Interfilk. Pre-con planning was a bit chaotic but we finally got all the ducks in a row, I got my ticket and off we went.

The trip out was relatively uneventful, except that due to traffic we got to the airport, bags checked, through security and into the boarding area just in time to board the plane. This would not have been so bad except that we hadn't had any breakfast yet, and I was worried my blood sugar would drop. (Not without cause, as we shall see later.) I had counted on getting breakfast at the airport but there wasn't really time to do so, so I ended up having to pay $7 for a cheese and fruit "plate" to share with my wife. It and a Zone bar did the job well enough until we landed in San Diego, where we were met by Kate Evans, Conchord's guest liaison.

Kate helped us schlep bags out of the terminal and into her SUV. One of the guide rods on the smaller suitcase got bent, making it hard to roll the suitcase. It made me glad they didn't give me any grief about taking the banjo on the plane. It fit very nicely into the overhead compartment.

Fifteen minutes later we were at the Town & Country Resort. It's a very nice hotel and the staff was quite friendly, but one of the first things we learned was that it's a captive hotel. They have about half a dozen restaurants on the premises, but the prices are about what you would expect for a hotel restaurant in Southern California. After checking in and resting up a bit we decided to make the trek to a mall across the light rail tracks, where we were told there was a food court. No need not to, it was a nice sunny pleasant San Diego afternoon and we had lots of time to stop and rest along the way. Good thing too, because looking at the map it looks like we walked the better part of a mile to get to the mall's food court. We had fish tacos and a shrimp burrito at a place called Rio's (I think), after which I had a phone screen with a potential employer. They decided not to move ahead, but I couldn't complain much about having a job interview while sitting outside in San Diego, sipping a soda and watching the passers-by pass by.

The con is a bit of a blur. We got to meet Laura Reynolds, the artist GoH, who does primarily soft sculptures. Hers are much more elaborate than my wife's. We ordered pizza because it was easier and cheaper than anything at the hotel. We ran into some old friends, including Bill Laubenheimer, the guy I shared the COnflikt 5 songwriting prize with, and his wife. Blind Lemming Chiffon was there, as was Heather Dale (of course, since she was the music guest). And I got to hear some fine Southern California filk in the Friday Night showcase. One guy in particular who I'd like to arrange for a couple of performances is Tim Griffin. He does songs about science and math, mostly geared toward children, and performs them in schools. Most of his performances are around the Los Angeles area, since that's where he's from, but if I can persuade enough schools to have him in to make it worth his time, he said he'd be happy to come up. (Did I mention he does this for free? He's organizing a non-profit to coordinate his activities, and hopefully pay him a living wage.) Afterward we retired to the open filk room to run through all of the songs nominated for the Kazoo Awards (25 of them, if I remember right). By the time we got to the last one - which was Tom Smith's Seven Drunken Nights In Space, and which was Conchord's first chance to hear me sing - it was pretty late and I ambled off to bed. I don't know if anyone else stayed up for open filking.

Saturday was the big show! I got to open for Heather!!! (Oh. And Ben.) It was a good crowd and since for the most part they hadn't heard my stuff before, I'm glad they laughed in the right places and figured out to clap along with "You're A Hack." The set list went something like:

You're A Hack
Colour
Batman's Really Cool
The Loneliest Pro At The Con
Ghosts
Dark Lullaby
Roll Down The Water
Half The Battle
Crossroads

Afterward Heather and Ben were their usual awesome selves, followed by Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, who were their usual awesome selves. It was a good show and I was happy to be a part of it.

Sunday I sat in on a songwriting workshop Jeff gave. I always learn when I go to these things, even when I'm on the panel (I wasn't this time), and Jeff broke down how he writes his parodies. It was hugely useful, and I hope to put it to good use. Ben did a guitar technique workshop; a guitar is a guitar and a banjo is a banjo, but some things cross over, and it was cool just to hear Ben talk about how he approaches their music. After the official end of the con a bunch of us got together at the hotel's steak house (the only restaurant open on the premises) and chatted and had a good time over dinner, after which we headed back to the hotel for a dead dog filk. The dog finally stopped kicking about 10:30, plenty of time for us to get up to the room, pack our bags and be ready for the red-eye out of SAN.

This has already gotten pretty long, so I think I'll continue the Ballad Of The Amazingly Annoying Return Flight Home in another post.