…. the biggest local science-fiction convention. mia_mcdavid and our son J are already there. It is the tenth anniversary for this con, so they are extending it for an extra day. Hence we will be returning home on Sunday. The holiday helps.
Every Monday night in Irish class we are all supposed to tell a scéal–a story about something that had happened in our lives. The idea is provide to practise composing and speaking Irish. The truth value of the scéal is not particularly important–It can be completely made up. This is personally difficult, since mistakes are inevitable and I do not deal well with making mistakes in public. But it is obviously important, so I go ahead.
In the scéal I try to talk about something that really happened, simply because I want to relate Irish to the rest of my life. Last night I said a little bit about Convergence. This may have been too ambitious, since I had to look up some specialized vocabulary. However, the work was fun. Continue reading
This was a good con. Getting there
mia_mcdavid and I are going to Convergence this weekend. Mia is already there. I will be joining her after work. James is staying home. Mia reminded me last night that it has been a long time since we went to a con without children. Our last convention before James was born was Windycon XIII, in November 1986. It was at the Hyatt Regency Woodfield, a very nice hotel in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. The world has changed a lot since then, and so have we, but we are still fans.
Later last night mia_mcdavid and I watched ice cream being made with liquid nitrogen , then ate some of the results. It was a good, rich ice cream.
Afterwards we looked in on a couple parties. I watched some more swordfighting demos by Aegis Academy, then joined Mia at the music circle. This was really quite dead, although we had another nice talk with Frank Hayes when he stopped by briefly. We got to bed about 1 AM. I think James came back to the room about 2:30.
Slept past 9 this morning. Not a lot of convention for me and James, since Mia took us to the airport at 11. This worked out OK, although there was about 1/2 hour of hideous traffic on I-94.
James and I returned home precisely according to plan, again changing planes at O’Hare. James handled the weekend’s air travel very well. I am quite pleased with him.
His laptop computer did not do so well. It was very slow. Perhaps a virus had finally gotten into to it. Or perhaps, as a Windows machine, it was uncomfortable at a Linux event :-)> My little Nokia 770, which runs Debian Linux, did just fine….
This was one of the best cons I have been to in a long time. I need to reflect on why that was. It was quite different from what we have here in Minnesota–what about these differences appealed to me?
Mia is driving home, and is spending the night with family friends in Chicagoland.
daisy_knotwise has started an interesting discussion (Thanks to mia_mcdavid for the link).
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 