The Garfield Minus Garfield comic strip keeps getting stranger and stranger:



Who knew that John Arbuckle was really a bottom? (Linked because my parents read this LJ and probably don't know what that word means in this context :-P )

In other news, the Chipotle in Ardmore is offering FREE BURRITOS today! I'll be there around 7 PM feeding my fat face.

I bought Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel for the Play Station 2 last weekend and beat it last night. Yeah, I'd say it was worth the the $12.99 I paid for it... and not a penny more. I'm glad that game's over.

Some recruiter decided to call me yesterday at work. I cannot begin to wrap my brain around what prompts these people think: "Gee, I'm going to call someone at work during business hours and try and get him to leave his job there!" Then said recruiter went screaming over the line as she war-dialed her way across the floor and bothered some other co-workers too. Not cool.

Also speaking of work, was CCed on an e-mail from a co-worker a short while ago. That's not unusual. The fact that the primary recipient of the email was the Cron Daemon was, however. In fact, I don't think I ever saw that done before. :-)

And finally, in Anthrocon news, we have a couple of featured musical performers this year. Both Tom Smith and Alexander Adams will be performing live concerts on the evening of Thursday, June 26th at AC.

Well, a normal person who collects swords from Xena and Highlander, that is. :-)

From An article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:



Glad to hear that he got along well with us. That's always a good sign.

Yesterday was pretty crazy. The first thing that blew my mind was discovering that one of the regulars from the Anthrocon forums not only lives half a mile away from me, but also rides the same train into Center City every day. We pretty much saw each other on the train on a near daily basis without knowing it! Maybe I should start wearing my Anthrocon t-shrits around town more.

The second thing was the vandalism I saw of a Cottonelle ad at Market East Station:



Here's a closeup:



So yeah, it's been an interesting week I think.

Got my days off for Anthrocon. All 5 of them. From the Wednesday before the con until the Tuesday afterward. The Tuesday is my day of recovery. :-)

In other news, my mom "found" a $50 savings bond from when I was born. That should be worth quite a bit by now. However, she is holding it hostage until I buy her and my father Anthrocon memberships. Wait, what?!

I spent last weekend in Pittsburgh for some Anthrocon Business. The first thing I wanted to mention is that we have some pictures of The Doubletree in Pittsburgh. The full album is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157604208248727/

But this is probably the most important picture, taken directly in front of the entrance to the Doubletree:




After our business in Pittsburgh was concluded, some of us took a sidetrip to Randyland. For those of you who dined in the Orchid Restaurant at the Westin last year and interacted with the rather lively and animated waiter named Randy Gilson, you all know who I'm talking about. For those of you who didn't... well, Randy is a bit of a community hero in Pittsburgh. This is a picture from Page 2 of the phonebook:



Happy fellow, isn't he? :-)

Randy is known for creating what is dubbed "Randyland", a section of homes in a rundown part of Pittsburgh that have been painted all sorts bright interesting colors and designs:









The full album of Randyland pictures can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157604203902962/

Share and enjoy!

Not sure if there are any fans of Rifftrax here, but for those who aren't, it involves the MST3K crew doing commentary on much more recent movies.

Well, it seems they mentioned Anthrocon in their commentary on Batman and Robin. The clip can be heard over here.

(Crossposted to furrymedia)

EVERYBODY PANIC

But seriously, the situation isn't quite that dire. :-) We expect some cancellations in late April/early May right before the one night deposit is charged, so that should free up some rooms. Also, The Westin has a waiting list, if you would like to be contacted as rooms become available.

Finally, there are other hotels nearby that may be worth investigating. However, we do not currently have room block contracts with any of those hotels and cannot guarantee any rates for our membership.

After the period of cancellations and deposits pass in late April/early May, we will re-evaluate the situation and examine the feasibility of entering into a room block contract with any other area hotels.

It's been a busy week for me! Between work and home, I've barely been in IM.

Work has been... work, and at home I've been playing with the nginx webserver. It's lightweight, configurable, and fast. I already have PHP and Drupal running under it at a pretty reasonable speed.

Been to Anthrocon at the Westin Hotel in Pittsburgh? If you were and you ate at the Orchid restuarant, you may have been served by a waiter known as Randy. You'd remember this, beacuse he was a very animated guy--to say the least. Well, it turns out that he is just that animated in real life, too. This article talks about some of his artistic ventures when not working at the Westin, such as this one:


http://www.popcitymedia.com/features/Randyland0206.aspx

I think this sort of volunteerism and community spirit sets a fine example that we can all try live by.


Oh, and I found this lovely video of snow leopards, too:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc6ftNEOfyY

Happy Thursday!

This was certainly a surprise.

I need to start reading this comic.

I created an implementation of Google's MapReduce algorithm. In PHP. It was pretty crazy, but I got it to work pretty well in my test environment. It also doesn't have nearly the bells and whistles that Google's implmentation has, but I have some Evil Plans for the next revision of the framework.

I upgraded SaveArdmoreCoalition.org from Drupal 4.7 to 5.6. It wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it would be. And I was able to add some jQuery goodness in to the site now.

I transitioned another random domain to Google Apps.

I made some headway on my issues with my IRAs. But I need to wait until the office opens on Monday to get things taken care of. Gah.

I acquired some new hardware -- an extra charger for my Powerbook, so now I don't have to worry about always packing my charger whenever I travel, and an extra Linksys WRT54G router/access point. So now I can start playing with custom firmware, and not have to worry about bricking my main router.

unclekage and I processed just a few Anthrocon registrations earlier tonight:



Those of you who registered on the site recently, watch for your confirmations in the mail!

I had another Anthrocon stress dream last night. I dreamed it was the day of the con and I had not yet updated the front page with hours or any sort of programming information.

On the way home tonight, I bumped into whitefeet who was also heading home from work. That's a first, because I never expected he'd be out of work that early. o.O

I had some RSS fun earlier tonight, and have been playing around with some RSS aggregating tools so that I can have a little more fun with massive amounts of RSS feeds.

Yep, that would be one big twinkie.

 
I occasionally get emails from recruiters who find my resume online. But never before had I gotten one that mentioned Anthrocon...What was also interesting is that rather than say, "I have some opportunities available", the recruiter went into detail regarding 3 specific startups, including their finances and profit figures.

Definitely not the sort of thing you see every day...

[Edit: No, I did not take them up on their offer, nor am I looking for work. I'm happy where I am.]

Apparently since the Brewers were in Pittsburgh during Anthrocon, they have done pretty poorly as far as winning games goes. They used to be in first place, and they have since slid down to second in their division. Here are the stats. If you look closely, they have lost 7 out of the last 10 games.

Also, if you look at their July schedule, they really got spanked in Pittsburgh. And this is coming from having won 7 of the prior 10 games to Pittsburgh. The second half of the season looks even worse for them so far.

Full article: Brewers suffer the "Curse of the Furries"

If there is anything for the Brewers team to learn from, it may be this: don't be so uptight when you're around something you don't understand. Just relax and let other people do their own thing.

Also, I'd like to thank co-worker M for explaining to me how baseball stats work. I think it's the first time I ever closely examined them. My male ancestors must be so proud of me right now. :-P

On the train ride back from Confluence tonight, I bumped into neighbor A. We chatted about our weekends, and I had mentioned I was out in Pittsburgh. He asked what for, and I mentioned Confluence. I also mentioned Anthrocon having been out there a few weeks prior at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

It turns out that my neighbor knows the architect who designed the DLCC! Who'd have thought?

Also, I got a flier in the mail today for a local Target that is opening up. Gee, I wonder where that might be...

[Edit: It has since been pointed out to me that I made some incorrect assumptions about the situation. As such, I have edited this post to reflect the facts of what really went on. I apologize for not getting the full story the first time around.]

The Anthrocon website is back up, with no data lost. Here's the post-mortem of what happened:

At about 7 AM this morning, the company owning the data center, Limelight Networks performed some scheduled maintenance on their power grid. Unfortunately, Murphy's law intervened, and their main breaker malfunctioned and cut power to many machines. Included in the outage were Limelight's own email servers and phone system. Even more unfortunately, while Limelight did the right thing by notifying their customers about the scheduled outage beforehand, some of the emails to their customers (including NearlyFreeSpeech) simply never reached their destination. It's unclear what exactly happened to the emails, other than that they failed to make it into the recipients' inboxes OR spam filters.

Our webhost noticed that all their machines stopped responding at the same time, and promptly tried to get in touch with Limelight. This was complicated somewhat since Limelight's phone service was still out. Once they did get in touch with Limelight, they were informed that a second shutdown would be necessary in about one hour to replace the main breaker. At this point, NFSN proceeded to bring things up in a limited capacity, since the power would be going out again.

After about 1.5 hours, it turned out that the second shutdown would not be necessary after alll. So NFSN proceeded to finish up their file system checks and start bringing all of the servers back up. The webservers were brought back online fairly quickly, but the real bottleneck was bringing all of their MySQL servers back online, it took about 40 minutes to start them all.

One additional problem remained: routing. Since routers were also affected in the power outage, some of the database servers were unreachable by the webhosts. (3 /24 subnets for the curious) This was responsible for about half of the total downtime.

So what did I learn today? NFSN is pretty awesome when it comes to dealing with service issues and staying in touch with their customers. They were active in their forums and gave us updates about every half hour or so. They even went so far as to look into renting a truck so as to move their servers to a new data center if the outage proved to be extended.

I'll tell you what's going on with the website. Straight from our provider:

22441. Power Failure (Pending Auto-Close)
Opened: 52 minutes ago	Updated: 4 minutes ago
Details: Our provider has had a significant power failure due to a malfunctioning breaker. They are working to repair it as quickly as possible. This affected all of our sites and services, as well as everything else in their building including their own sites, email, and phone systems. At this time they have restored power and we are working to bring all of our equipment back online. This includes performing a full filesystem check on our master fileservers, which will take some time. They have warned us that it is likely that they will need to interrupt power again in about an hour to replace the failed breaker. We are hoping that with added warning we can arrange a clean shutdown and avoid the need to restart the filesystem checks. We apologize for this issue and we are working as hard as we can to get everything back online as soon as possible while avoiding the chance that we'll end up right back here as soon as we finish.
Response: From: Jeff Date: 2007-07-17 13:09:43 We are working on configuring member sites to display a more useful error message while we wait for full service to be restored, and working on restoring full email and DNS service. We are also exploring the viability of renting a truck and just moving all our equipment to our new datacenter.

Wow, they' willing to rent a freaking truck to try and get their customers back online. Now that's some damn dedication.

Taken in front of the Steel City Diner:


Taken in front of the local Buca di Beppo:


No, we are not accepting 2008 registrations yet, nor is the Westin accepting 2008 reservations yet.

From his blog post:

Wow. o.O

[Edit: No, I did not make this poster. I saw it linked to from the Anthrocon LJ community.]

Some folks may be aware of the 6-2-1 Rule at furry conventions, which states:

- 6 hours of sleep per day
- 2 meals per day
- 1 shower per day

It is believed that following those rules will help reduce the chances of you being exhausted, catching con crud, or having an "aura" about you that may offend other attendees.

At the most recent Anthrocon, it was explained to me by one DI that their very own Dr. Bob Passovoy has now proposed the following version of the 6-2-1 rule for Anthrocon:

- 6 miles walked per day
- 2 snacks per day
- 1 nap per day

If you are not a member of the DI, do not attempt to follow the new rules. :-)

Wow. What a blast.

Our total attendance was 2,849. Our fursuit parade had 353 fursuiters in it.

From an operations standpoint, the con went amazingly well. I got into Ops on Wednesday morning, and everything that we needed pretty much fell into place. Radios and conbooks had been delivered, the equipment truck arrived on time, and we had plenty of volunteers to help offload stuff. Rather than go into more details about all this stuff, I'll just skip to the part where I thank people for making this such a successful con. :-)

First, the Operations staff. They kept the office running during the day and evening hours and dealt with all of the things that came up during the con. These hard workers include: greenreaper, swift_fox, tchall, mach, evil_dwagon, kellicjtiger, Decker, and Kasi Frost.

Next, the Dorsai Irregulars. Around 40 strong this year, they performed general security services and crowd control during the day. During the nights, they took over the Operations Office so that it could be kept running 24 hours a day.



We wouldn't be the same without a Super Sponsor Lounge, either. Due to health issues, Cynthia had to step down from running it. We had to look around for new people with a few months notice, and got a referral to Melissa Clemmer and Karen Klinck, who have been doing this sort of thing for science fiction cons for a number of years. They were highly recommended and did not let us down. They were able to keep the lounge open from 10 AM to 10 PM every day. Their staff did a great job, too.

I'd like to specifically thank a fellow by the name of White Wer. He had the adjoining suite next to the SSL and opened it up so that Karen and Melissa could make use of it. Also, both him and his roomates pitched in and volunteered for a lot of the work in keeping the lounge up and running. I don't think it could have been as successful as it was without their help.

A big hand goes to the volunteers who helped with packing up the truck, unloading it at the storage facility, and unloading it again at Philadelphia.

Mwuricon, thanks for the bottle of single malt scotch. It was appreciated!



We got some media coverage from the local newspapers:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/search/s_515974.html
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07188/799987-51.stm


Mark Evanier really liked us:

http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2007_07_08.html#013689


If you lost/found something, have some comments for the convention as a whole, or have pictures to share, please stop by our post-2007 forums:

http://www.anthrocon.org/forums


If you attended the con, we would appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes to fill out our post-con survey:

http://www.anthrocon.org/survey


If you have pictures to share, feel free to upload them to Flickr, where we have our own community:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/anthrocon/

My pictures can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157600750815163/

As a bit of an afterthought, I spent some time walking through the DLCC on Sunday evening, after Hall C had been mostly empty, just taking pictures. It was kinda creepy seeing this whole "empty" look to the place. For example, this was the scene of the fursuit parade:



Most of the staff are going to take a well deserved break for a few weeks. We'll still be reading our email and the forums, but may be a bit slow to respond.

baconcoyote and simbab, I'm sorry I missed you guys at the con. Maybe next year!

And yes, this is just a box. Leave it alone!


Our 2008 convention, "It's a Jungle Out There!", will be once again held in the Westin Hotel and David L. Lawrence Convention Center from June 26th to 29th, 2008. Our Guest of Honor will be Floyd Norman. ("The Jungle Book", "Monsters, Inc.", Disney's "Robin Hood", and more!)



We'll see you there!

http://www.furrytalesthemusical.com/

So, who else is going to see this on Thursday night?

Tickets are $15 each and can be ordered online from here. (They charge a $12 "handling fee" though. Yeccccch!)

[Edit: greenreaper informs me that the price varies per order. Ordering one ticket has a handling fee of $7.50. Two tickets is $12. There are probably price breaks for larger quantities. Tickets could always be bought at the door, but who knows if there will be any left on Thursday night?]

Okay, here's my itinerary for Anthrocon:

Tuesday

tailen and I will be leaving for Pittsburgh. We will arrive around 1 AM on Wednesday morning. If the hotel's bar is still open, we'll be closing it! Anyone reading this is welcome to join us. :-)

Wednesday

I'll be spending most of the day doing setup, with later in the evening being free.

Thursday

I'll be spending most of the day doing setup and meetings. I intend to attend the Furry Tales musical at 10 PM that night.

Friday

There won't be any setup going on that day, so it will be a light workload for me. I'll be hosting the wikifur party starting at 8 PM.

Saturday

There won't be any setup going on, so it will be a light workload for me. I'll have some commitments later in the evening. (none of which involve "Burning Panda Rape", I might add)

Sunday

Teardown. I'll be involved with that. I may have some hours later in the evening free.

Monday

Load up moving truck and return to storage locker and then Philadelphia.

Tuesday

Recover. Drag tailen up into a tree.

During the con, I should be pretty easy to spot. I'll be wearing a conbadge that looks like my avatar here, sans the Danish flag. I usually wear a shirt and tie at the con. And finally, I shave my head.

I hope to see everyone there!