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Housewarming and Maker Faire

September 28th, 2010 2 comments

This past Saturday was the big housewarming party for Meg and I. Unfortunately, Meg got sick around the middle of last week, and I managed to catch the bug near the end of last week, so we weren’t feeling great when it came time to get ready, but with a lot of help from Meg’s mom and my dad, the party went off pretty well. Big thanks out to everyone who came out to help us celebrate, and to anyone who couldn’t make it, we hope to provide you with plenty of opportunity to visit in the future. In the meantime, I finally took some pictures of the house now that it has some furniture in it.

I was a little out of it from the cold and being dosed up on DayQuil, but I think everyone had a good time. We’re considering having a Halloween party, but I’m not sure if we’ll be up for another party in just a month or not. See how we feel after recovering from these colds, I guess.

One pretty awesome thing that came out of the party was Tom talking Meg into letting me go to the Maker Faire in New York. He was just fishing for someone to drive Jason back up to NH so he wouldn’t have to, but I’m really glad I went, and it turned out that I didn’t even have to drive.

The Faire was held at the New York Hall of Science and had a wide array of crafters, makers, artists and tinkerers of pretty much every discipline. One tent was devoted entirely to home grown 3D printers, some made with parts produced by others. There was also a group from HoSARC, an amateur radio club based at the Hall of Science, attempting to communicate with amateur radio satellites as they passed overhead. Unfortunately, the attempt we were present for was unsuccessful, but it was pretty interesting all the same.

We also took some time to wander away from the Faire and check out the few remaining structures from the 1964 World’s Fair, including the Unisphere, the Tent of Tomorrow and the observation towers. I’m generally pretty interested in urban decay, but this site in particular is somewhat depressing. After seeing the state of the NY State Pavilion, I decided to do some scrounging online, and it appears that it was pretty impressive during the fair, but fell into disuse and disrepair almost immediately afterward. There was an effort a few years ago to preserve what was left of a NY road map that once covered the floor of the Tent, but I had little luck finding out the final status of that project, and the floor is now simply covered in gravel.

After wandering around that area and snapping a bunch of pictures, we headed back to the Maker Faire to catch ArcAttack and their musical Tesla coils. My spirits were suitably relifted by the arcs of musical plasma and my efforts to capture them on film (or in pixels, anyway.) Once that show was over we decided to pack up and head back to NH.

Another weekend packed to the gills with fun, friends, and fascinating stuff. I’d like to have a quiet weekend at home at some point, but it’s looking like that might be a ways off still.

Categories: Travel Tags: , , , ,

Comic-Con 2010

August 11th, 2010 3 comments

This year for our big vacation, Meg and I decided to go to San Diego for Comic-Con International, a four-day extravaganza of popular culture. Comic books, television, movies, and various other arts gather together to take over San Diego with dozens of panels and a gigantic vendor hall.

We set out on Thursday morning, catching a ride from Jason down to Boston’s Logan Airport to catch our early morning flight to San Diego. Since we were leaving home around two in the morning, we decided not to sleep beforehand. This turned out not to be the greatest idea, as we didn’t get a lot of sleep on the flight, and were dead tired by the end of the day. We still got a pretty full day in though. Once we landed and got our rental car, we found our hotel, a decent little place in San Ysidro. Then we went up to Qualcomm Stadium to take the trolly downtown for the con. We picked up our registration badges, made a feeble attempt at the vendor hall, then decided to grab some lunch. We took the trolly a few blocks north from the con and found Kansas City Barbeque which was okay. We then stumbled back to the hotel and collapsed.

The next morning we had to move to the hotel we booked for the rest of the weekend, the Sheraton Suites San Diego at Symphony Hall, which was considerably nicer than the place we stayed the night before, and was one of the hotels on the con shuttle routes. We dropped our bags and headed back to the vendor hall where we picked up some stuff from The Behemoth (makers of Castle Crashers) and Meg got a Firefly shirt from a pretty cool artist booth. After wandering around for a bit in the hall, we decided to head upstairs and ended up in one of the panel rooms and got to see comic legend Stan Lee give a talk on some of his experiences in the industry. It was pretty incredible to see him in person, and he gave a great presentation. After the session we decided to head back to the hotel, dump our stuff and find some food. I found a nice little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, Maria’s Mexican Cocina, which turned out to be great. Over dinner, we decided we should return the car, as we didn’t need it with the shuttles, then crashed back at the hotel.

On Saturday, Meg decided she needed to get the Doctor Who bags that BBC America were giving away at their vendor booth, so we got up early and stood in line to get into the vendor hall as soon as it opened. We rushed to the BBCA booth just to find out they weren’t giving out the bags yet, so we continued around the hall for a while. There were a ton of exhibitors, including some giant booths for Aliens, the new Tron movie, The Expendables, LEGO, Warner Brothers, and of course Marvel and DC Comics. As we were winding our way back out, we happened to be at the BBCA booth just as they started giving away the bags and Meg managed to score one for herself and one for our friend Cole, who is a giant DW fan.

We grabbed lunch at an Irish pub near the hotel, Stout Public House, which was delicious, then went back to stake a claim in the session hall in anticipation of the Mythbusters panel later that day. Leading up to the main event were panels for Warehouse 13 and Eureka, which were both entertaining. Meg hadn’t seen Eureka before, and we’d only seen a few episodes of W13, but still really enjoyed the sessions. Then there was a preview of a new show, Nikita, loosely based on the French film of the same name and other derivative works of the film. It was okay, but I didn’t feel it really felt like something new, more just a rehash. I guess we’ll see how it does when it hits the air later this year. Human Target followed, a show that neither of us had seen, but it looked fairly entertaining, so we may check it out. Then came the panel we were waiting for, Mythbusters.

Apparently this was the first convention where the entire cast appeared together, so that was kindof cool. We had actually had a hard time taking photos of Adam, as he rarely stopped moving for more than a few seconds. Jamie on the other hand was the master of the two word answer, one of them generally being “umm”. It was a very entertaining panel, though I would have liked someone to have asked them if they ever felt they had too many explosions.

On the last day of the convention, we again wandered over early to try to get into the Castle panel. When we saw the line for it, Meg wanted to give up and just wander around again, but I convinced her to wait it out, which payed off. While we were waiting in line, we met a girl who had travelled over from Australia for the con. She’s a huge Harry Potter fan, and had tattoos of a golden snitch along with the Hogwart’s house crests down her spine. She’s also how we found out about the pen stabbing incident in one of the larger sessions the previous day. As we were heading into the Castle session they were handing out shwag boxes containing water bottles. Turns out some of them had passes for a special autograph session with the cast, and Meg had handed one of the boxes with a pass to the girl we met in line on the way in. Meg was a little annoyed that she had been so close to meeting one of her idols, but was happy that it went to someone who would appreciate it. Again it was a great panel, Fillion was hilarious, reading a passage from the book supposedly written by his character from the show. In general he was hamming it up the whole time and Meg could barely contain her drooling.

After Castle there was a panel for Merlin we decided to stay for, mostly for Anthony Stewart Head, who Meg liked from his role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Afterward we decided to hit the vendors again, but the hall was so jam-packed with people that we could barely move. Apparently I was several feet from Danny DeVito at one point, but missed it due to being preoccupied trying to shovel people out of my path.

After calling it quits on the con, we met up with my friend Matt. He’s been living out in San Diego for a few years now, attending UCSD. He took up to El Zarape for dinner, where I had some delicious Mahi Mahi tacos, then off to see some of the sights in the area. We got to see a children’s beach that had been taken over by seals, then a rock outcropping covered in sea lions. We wandered around a beach for a bit, and the UCSD campus, seeing their impressive library and some of their outdoor art installations. Also an odd amount of nocturnal wildlife, including a number of rabbits, a raccoon, and a guy sleeping on a lawn. Eventually we called it a night, and settled back into the hotel for our last night in SD.

Overall we had a great time. It was an awesome 4 days, but exhausting as well. We’d like to go again, but probably not for a few years. We did learn a few lessons for next time though.

  1. Bring a backpack stocked with water and snacks. Buying supplies at the con is way too expensive.
  2. If we want to see anything in the large halls (H or 20), we need to be up way too early to get in line.
  3. Buy anything we really want from the vendors before Sunday. Sure, the deals are to be had on Sunday, but you have to beat a path through the crowds with a cricket bat.
  4. Skip the rental car, public transit is more than adequate for the convention.
  5. Plan a longer trip so there’s time to relax before heading back to work.
Categories: Travel Tags: , ,

Life, the Universe, and Comic-Con

July 21st, 2010 2 comments

Good morning, Internet! I’ve got the day off from work to prepare for our trip to San Diego, and while I’m waiting for laundry to cycle I thought I’d post a little update.

Life in the house is going well. We’re mostly unpacked now and have most of the rooms mostly in order. We turned on of the bedrooms into a craft room to hold Meg’s yarn and my computer stuff, at least until I can get the basement set up the way I want with a server closet and workbench. Then I’ll be moving most of my computer stuff down there, and probably just have a workstation up here. I think our next steps will be getting some more furniture so the place doesn’t feel so empty. It’s time to finally get some real bedroom furniture, as we currently just have a mattress on the floor and the room looks really bare.

Work is good, I’ve been doing some IPv6 deployment, and it’s nice to finally see that getting some traction in the real world. Also been playing around with netdot, mostly for it’s IPAM features. A little hairy to get installed on FreeBSD, but once you get it on there, it seems to work out pretty well.

Meg and I are going to be heading out to San Diego tonight for Comic-Con this weekend. It’s out big vacation for the year and we’re really excited about it. Bunch of big names will be there, including Stan Lee and Ray Bradbury. Hoping to get some autographs and generally have a good time. Also, Geek Chic will be there, so we’re going to be checking out their Emissary table. We’re thinking about getting one for the dining room, but I want to see one in person before dropping that kind of money on furniture.

Time to go move laundry around. I’m sure we’ll be posting plenty of pictures from this weekend, and I’ll try to remember to post about it when we get back.

Categories: Personal, Travel Tags: , , ,
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