Rusty's Blog

Well for most of you it is. For me, I’ve some 12 hours of work left before I begin my weekend, but I don’t get to even start on that for almost 11 hours as I start this (probably something like 10 by the time it’s posted, and if twitterfeed is as timely as I’ve seen it of late, you’ll see this posting about the time I get to work.

So. I’ll get some sleep tomorrow right? Well, perhaps. Though if experience is a guide, it won’t bee till late tomorrow. There is a CONvergence Convention Committee staff meeting tomorrow, and our board of directors election as well. This is going to be one of the last joint election meetings between CONvergence and Misfits. (If you are wondering if you qualify to vote, the bylaws that provide those specifications are posted at the misfits web site some place, http://www.misfit.org/ would be a good place to start. There is a lot of stuff that is still being worked out as part of the separation of Misfits from CONvergence, however a lot of the stuff that each part has done over the years will remain the same.

With elections, ballot counting, and all, on top of a planning meeting for the convention, it is likely that the meeting won’t seriously start breaking up till about 5 pm. With good planning and safe driving, I’m not really expecting to make it home much before 6 pm. Then I get to sleep.

So I will need to get some sleep today. Preferably before I go to work, as it sounds like they are going to be caring tonight whether I am alert or not.

May this note find you enjoying a wonderful event of some sort in your life. Even if it is simply the realization that there is someone wishing you the very best.

I think it’s reasonably well known that I look a bit like Jamie from the Mythbusters. Enough so that people in costume think that I’m not at times. If I shave my head, I actually have to work at changing my appearance to not have people come up to me and say either ‘Did you know you look a lot like …’ or ‘Are you Jamie from Mythbusters?’

From the perspective of being someone else, even my voice is a problem. It sounds a lot like his.

Oh well. That is not really the point of this.

There are ‘myths’ surrounding various science fiction and related conventions. I am expecting to be at two or three of them this year. Conventions that is, I’m not sure about the myths surrounding them. Well, perhaps this would be a good time to sit down with people at one or more of those conventions, and talk with people about those myths.

The conventions I expect to be at this year are Minicon, (where if I attend, at most I will be badging) Anime Detour (This is in Minnesota over the last weekend in April, I’m on staff this year which limits my time for this) and CONvergence, (which if you don’t know about my involvement up till now, you haven’t read my blog much.)

Since it’s early in the year, and there is time, I would like to know if there are any myths you think should be explored at any of these conventions.

I’m not planning on posting anything to YouTube at this point, but if there are people interested in putting some production time into the venture, I would also love to hear about that.

Things that I think would be interesting to look into include: creation myths, activity myths, “where’s reg this year?” and possibly relationship myths.

That last could be either how the conventions do, or don’t have relationships between them, or it could also be how people establish relationships with others at the convention. I only see some people once a year at one of these conventions. But even with that I think of many of those people as very good friends.

Comments are welcome and desired. Are there specific things that you’ve ‘heard’ about these conventions that you would like to have confirmed or refuted?

Are there other conventions that this would be a fun idea for? Marscon, 4th street, or Diversicon? Others?

The only convention I am getting a room for this year is Anime Detour. I have not pre-registered for MiniCon (I never know if I’m going to be able to schedule the weekend off far enough in advance.)

I will also post a note on my FaceBook profile that people can post comments to.

Just to get a feel fro submitting to a writing contest, I put together a quick story a couple of months ago and submitted it to the Misfits Writing Contest.

There is a bit of an influence of Corey Doctrow in here, as I had just finished reading Little Brother. That said, I would not say that it is fanfic by any means.

I would direct you to the http://www.misfit.org web site for more information on Misfits as an organization, as well as additional information on the writing contest. The feedback I personally received at the 2009 CONvergence convention was that every submission that was received this year was of substantially higher quality than much of the material they have received in the past. I believe it was an effort to say that while what I wrote was very good in their eyes, they did receive even higher quality writing that went forward and ended up winning the contest. I also gather that the top 5 entries in each catagory were all agreed to by the judges, thought there may have been some disagreement on the order.

I tend to limit myself to short fiction. There is a fair amount of writing formats that I do not do well. As an example I know that I Need to do a lot of work on Dialog, as well as character development. Dialog can help the story move along very well. I would have to say that most of my writing at this point is more narrative than anything else. As a result it often will feel that someone sat down and ‘gave testimony’ when reading my writing. That said, I will try to write to a wider variety of styles in the future. I shan’t be submitting novels by any means. I don’t expect the judges to consider such worthy of inclusion. Their time is limited, and should be devoted to being able to review and consider each contestant’s writing.

If you happen to like my writing, or story telling, I would have to suggest finding a copy of the Misfits Writing Contest book, and read some of the other writing as well. I am a poor judge of my own writing. I have been told to continue, and to submit further pieces. I know I will do the former, and I’m hoping to do the latter as well.

If you are interested in a completely separate piece, and I’m not really happy with the ending of it, so I may re-write it in the future, I have published here as well, http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog/2008/10/short-story-time/

Both stories can be considered a bit dark, though I hope you will find humor in them as well.

I know people who have worked for The Department of Homeland Security. I’m pretty sure that if they wished to they could poke holes in this story that you could pilot the Queen Mary through. I do not hate what they stand for, though I don’t always agree with everything they have done so far, and strongly disagree with some of their policies and recommendations. That said, the people of the USA as a group as well as as represented by or representatives and senators, has elected to effectively eliminate certain ‘rights’ that some consider as included in the Declaration, the Constitution and the bill of rights. Whether you agree with those people or not, we will be experiencing issues for some time to come that we can point directly at those decisions, and recognize that what we ended up with was the logical outcome.

Without further foreshadowing, or other writing…

(more…)

We had a rather significant issue happen after convergence wrapped up this year. I had a short, immediate need to create a volunteer card drop box. I had already been handing out t-shirts, and was able to free up a box that I had brought in with t-shirts. I cut a hole in the top, used a marker to flag it a the Volunteer card drop Box, and directed people to drop their cards in the box as things progressed.

Somewhere along 5 pm on Sunday I dumped all the cards that had been dropped off into a separate box that I took home with me Sunday night, and did a first pass sort pulling out cards that had already had a T-shirt for working 15 hours or more as a volunteer at the convention, and left the box on the table.

Note that at no time have I indicated that the box had been decorated in preparation for being a card drop box. It had not.

In the past we had noted on the volunteer cards that the card drop box would be at Cinema Rex, and for whatever reason it was never there. So I advised the Bridge (our operations people) that the box would be available, and while working out where it would be, we ultimately decided to leave it at the volunteer desk. The combination of events turned into a bit of a mistake.

After we completed packing up the rest of the stuff for the volunteer desk, we honored our agreement with everyone and left the drop box at the desk, and left to come back and finish Monday morning.

So this morning, (Monday) I stopped by what had been convergence central, no box.

I stopped by the Bridge on the off chance that it had been moved there, no luck. So I wen tto where we have historically set up the Volunteers at con Monday morning, and waited.

It turns out that after we all left, the hotel cleaning staff made a final walk through and picked up everything that looked like trash. They folded up the tables, stacked and rolled away the chairs, took down all the remaining posters. Yes, anything that looks like trash. Including boxes that were not decorated. Like the Volunteer Card Drop Box.

So If you dropped off a volunteer card after 5:00 pm on Sunday, your card probably didn’t make it to the Volunteer department, as you trusted it would.

I appologize personally for my involvement, and I know that everyone else I have talked with on the board who has been involved has personally appologizes as well.

We would like your help. If you know you dropped off your volunteer card about the time Closing Ceremonies on Sunday, or after, Please send an e-mail to volunteers@convergence-con.org and let us know what badge number you had (if you still remember or have it) we would like to know that as well. Also any breakdown of departments, however

We do expect to be able to recover most of the information for most volunteers, but we know that there will be some people who’s hours are not going to be captured correctly.

So we will be doing things a little bit differently for next year. Granted I’m expecting not to be the head of the department next year. For that it is a given that things will be going a bit different.

Minor setup stuff. I use a G1 phone from T-Mobile and have very much enjoyed the experience. One of the things that I’ve been looing for since I started using it has been a way to post microblogs to http://identi.ca. There are a couple of apps out there for twitter users, and while I do use twitter, it’s had a few problems that make it unsutible in my view for ongoing use.

There really are several different ways of getting content out of identi.ca onto my phone. sms messages, e-mail, web browser, gtalk/xmpp, etc. However I really didn’t want to be reading messages from identi.ca, I’m a bit more interested in sending messages to there.

For me a critical point is that I have a jabber/xmpp server running on one of my own servers. As a matter of fact I had already linked my jabber account there. If you have a gmail account, you might prefer to use that. However a pointer there is that any time you receive an IM at your gmail gtalk account, it very well may be using an sms message to talk to your phone. That can get expensive. I recommend using a server of your own, or getting an account on jabber.org or a public server and use that resource for sending and receiving jabber to identi.ca messages.

Now getting a jabber message from a phone to a jabber server is not really difficult. I suspect that I could install a development package on my desktop, write a bit of code for the android environment, compile a package, put it on a server I have access to, install the package to my phone, test, and repeat the steps from write a bit of code on, until testing gives me the results I expect.

An alternative that has just recently shown up is the Android Scripting Environment. http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

With the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) you can write scripts in Bean Shell, Lua, or Python. By default Bean Shell is installed, but you will need to install the interpreters for Lua and Python. The Environment is a .8 code base, which means it is very functional, but may not be complete from the perspective of a general user.

I’ve personally never done well in Java, and Bean Shell really is a scripting environment for Java. If you happen to like Java, it may be all you need. I’ve also never worked with Lua, but from what I see in the collection of scripts that are available as examples, it appears to be a reasonable language as well. I have played around a bit with Python, and while the environment is hardly complete, it seems to be sufficient for what I need. For android, it does include xmpp support, as well as support for pulling down URLs, interpreting html, and a few other elements as well. All I needed this time was the Android support and the xmpp support.

I’ve liberally copied code from a couple of different resources. For an example of how to send a message to a jabber server, (which was not written for the android platform, but it’s python and all the referenced libraries are included in ASE) I used the tutorial at http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/618

Here’s the sample:

import android
import xmpp

droid = android.Android()

# User interaction stuff
message = droid.getInput('identi.ca update', "What's Up?")['result']
tag = droid.getInput('tags?',"What tags? (Prepend w/#)")['result']

# Varios Variables we will use
_SERER = 'jabber.server.you.use', 5223   # put in your own jabber server name and appropriate port
username = 'your.user.name'              # give it the user name you want to use
password = 'your.password'               # until I figure out how to store these credentials securely
fullmessage = tag + message              # build the message we're going to send. (could use improvement)
destid = 'somename@jabber.server'        # for identi.ca use 'update@identi.ca'

# send the message
cnx = xmpp.Client('jabber.server.you.use') # don't need the port so don't use when creating a connection instance to use
cnx.connect( server=(_SERVER) )          # establish a connection
cnx.auth(username,password, 'G1')        # authenticate yourself, and give a 'presence' (G1 in this case)
cnx.send( xmpp.Message( destid, fullmessage ) ) # Send the message

# exit 'cleanly'
quit = droid.exit()                      # we're done, time to go

And that pretty much summs it up. There are a few things I will be investigating over time. I suspect that using a dictionary, I can create a set of ‘tags’ that I want to use regularly (#cvg2009, #c25k, etc.) then feed that to some sort of a pick list, and hopefully I could enter the update and select the appropriate tag all in one dialog. Worst case, 2 dialogs sort of like what I’m doing now. This currently has a bit more flexibility, but in the end I would also like to be able to identify if this is to be a message to update, or to some other specific user.

What am I doing with this? Well, as a department co-head for the 2009 CONvergence convention, I wanted a way to update my facebook, twitter, identi.ca and planet pages with what I’m doing, and what’s happening now. I’m pretty sure that I can update twitter directly, and possibly through that facebook, and it looks like I could import from there to identi.ca, which also would propogate to my world page, but after seeing the problems that twitter has been going through with it’s growing pains, I didn’t think that was the best route. If it works for you, ok. The facebook app for Android has been having problems since facebook changed something recently, so that was out. And it’s been a while since I wrote anything I considered interesting like this, so here it is.

How things work from here. My jabber server accepts a connection and forwards the message to update@identi.ca, which then places the update in my stream. Through the facebook interface it posts an update to facebook. I also have my account configured so that all events are posted to twitter as well. My planet page pulls any updates I’ve made in the past couple of hourse every 2 hours from twitter and identi.ca. Hey it pulls an update that I’ve posted a blog as well. Handy little page at times.

I always seem to discover ‘issues’ that need to be corrected that have almost nothing to do with the specific project at hand, except that they got in the way. Today I discovered I had not punched a hole for tcp through my firewall for jabber clients. I had punched one for UDP, but since nothing is listening for that…

Have fun. If you find the app useful, and want to let me know about updates, I would appreciate hearing about them.

If you haven’t heard of it by now, you could probably be accused of living under a rock. Possibly in an effort to save yourself from space junk.

A little over a week ago, an astronaut at the space station was working with a tool bag, and reportedly the grease gun in the bag popped. The report sounds a bit suspect to me, but for whatever reason the tool bag in question drifted out of reach of the astronaut, and ended up floating away.

Ever since then I have been seeing reports of people on the ground spotting the bag in orbit. Personally I suspect that it is at the top of the list of orbiting objects being searched for on ‘http://www.heavens-above.com/’ or it will be soon. Actually I suspect that most people who go out looking for it will miss seeing it entirely.

Why? Well, to be honest most people who go out looking for the tool bag in orbit won’t know what to look for. Reeportedly the object is showing up as a magnitude 8 object. For people who are thinking that means it must be pretty bright, a minor bit of explanation. Astronomical objects are described as appearing to have a brightness relative to a theoretical magnatude -1 star. For a detailed explanation, see http://www.stargazing.net/David/constel/magnitude.html

The relationship of each level of magnitude is the base of the natural logorithm. e. For unenhanced or ‘normal’ vision, the brightness of stars in the sky in a rural area on a clear night is from Sirius at -1 down to magnatude 6 stars. The dimmest of the stars normally seen in the constelation ursa minor is 5.4.

This means that if you live in the city, even if you have really good eyes, and a solid understanding of the type of flight path that the tool bag should have, it is very unlikely that you will see a magnitude 8 object.

If you know what to look for, exactly where to be looking, and a good pair of binoculars, it’s possible that you could see the tool bag.

I’ll be honest though. I think there are a lot of other things out there in the night sky that are just as interesting to look for, and a whole lot easier to see. Watch for Iridium satelites. These are satelites that were put into polar orbits that just happen to have features that do an absolutely wonderful job of reflecting the sun as they fly overhead in orbit.

The Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are both highly visiable when their orbit is over head during the appropriate times of the evening and morning.

And at various times during the year, the sky puts on some absolutely wonderful fireworks shows worth spending hours watching. Meteor showers, and after a CME Aurora events are both often spectacular.

But if you really do want to see the Tool Bag, I would suggest doing a bit of research. At some point, probably in about 2 years, the bag will re-enter the atmosphere. I haven’t heard a lot of information one way or the other, but I would suspect that it will mostly burn up on re-entry, and very likely will put on a brief, but bright, show. If you are in the right place, and alert at the right time, I strongly suspect that it will be very visiable.

Promotion

I don’t often do this, but here goes. As I’ve noted a few times in the past, I am involved with the CONvergence science fiction and fantasy convention held over the first full weekend of July. I’m also a fan of Jonathan Coltan. If you don’t know who he is, I’d suggest digging yourself out from that rock I mentioned earlier.

In any case, there is an open request out there for Jonathan Coltan to be ‘demanded’ as an appearance at CONvergence. See <a href=”http://eventful.com/performers/P0-001-000132714-3/demands”>the eventful.com page</a>

I’m not getting any money for the link. I don’t work for Eventful, and while I do a lot of work for CONvergence, it is part of a non-profit. If I get anything out of this promotion it’s the opportunity to see John perform or appear at the CONvention, and even that’s not gauranteed for me. (Potential wor schedule concerns are cropping up.)

I would appreciate it if you would add your voice to the demand requests. But if you’re not interested, that’s fine too.

Have a great Thanksgiving day, and a wonderful weekend.

I have posted photos from both Field Day 2008, and CONvergence 2008. I did not post all o fmy CONvergence photos. If you are aware that I took your picture, and want to see it posted, Please let me know. I also took down a few photos that just didn’t turn out well.

For both, I have limited the posted image size to 1500 pixels in the larger dimension. If you are looking for a higher quality image, I do shoot 6 m raw in pentax format, and can provide either full sized jpeg images, or the raw image if you are interested in manipulating that for a different effect.

My Picasaweb album is http://picasaweb.google.com/rusty0101 and these are the latest two albums in the gallary. Comments here, or in the album are acceptable. If you are in a specific image, and do not want it on the album, I can take it down, please let me know.

Thanks everyone

As some of my friends know, I’ve been the head of the Volunteer Department at CONvergence for a couple of years. I think I got there the way that one should, start by getting involved with the convention some how, then work your way up through the ranks, learning more about what you are doing, and doing what you can to make the convention a better place for everyone.

And as far as that goes, I think I’ve done fairly well. That said, I think that very few people would envision me as running the Volunteers part of a convention. Not because they wouldn’t think I could do the work, but because, if anything, I’m not exactly a charismatic personality. And I do think that it is important that the people trying to get other people to help out at the convention do be charismatic. OK, not at the level of a evengelical minister, but at the very least at the level of having people help out with very little in the way of a push or pull into the task.

I am hoping that the proceses that I’ve helped get set up, are at least useful for people to follow along after me. I’m fully willing to acknowledge that I’m not ‘great’ at the entire wrangling volunteers, and strongly suspect that I’ve had some quiet help along the way, for which I am very, Very appreciative.

When I started out at the lowest wrungs of the volunteer department, the latest significant development or discover was that we had a lot of people ghosting the convention. Ghosting the parties is more or less an expected activity. We know that there will be people who visit the convention, just to attend the parties. I’m not going to tell people not to do that. Mostly because it’s entirely up to the hosts of the various parties at the convention to decide if they will allow people who are not attending the convention as a whole to attend. If you really want my opinion, you’re missing the point by doing so. The convention is a fundrasing event. CONvergene and it’s sister organization MISFITS are a charitable organization, working with schools to bring interesting guests, authors, scientists, and writers into schools to let students know how each of these people find what they do to be exciting, and worthy goals to strive to achieve. Just going to the parties, and ghosting them to do that is an insult to the goals of the people providing the opportunity to enjoy the party. But that’s your decision.

Perhaps the most common excuse given for ghosting the parties, and not paying to attend is that it costs ‘too much.’ “If only you offered a ‘day pass’ or so, I’m sure you would have more people paying to attend.” Right. Now I’ll grant you that $65 (this year’s at the door) or $60 at the door (next year) membership may seem steep in comparison to going to see a movie ($20-$40 if you buy popcorn, softdrinks tickets for 2 people) or the ‘cheep seats’ of the local baseball games, but I would note 3 things about those prices:

1. they arn’t keeping people away
2. if you compare what you can get to what that would cost you, it’s a great value
3. that’s the price you pay at the last minute.

Regarding item 1. every year they anounce the ‘warm body’ count as well as the ‘registered body’ count for the convention. I may not have attended each and every closing ceremony, but I do know that every year the number of people who attend has gone up. That number reflects both pre-registered and at the door registrations having gone up every year.

As to item 2, sure you can think of it as just a party that you can attend, get a little drunk, etc. But there is a lot more to it. The guests of honor very often demonstrate what they do at the convention. You get to see authors reading from their works, makeup and special effects artists doing their thing, prop makers showing off their wares, scientists explaining esoteric and comon topics, movies, musicians, artwork both simple and complex. You get fed, free coffee, soft drinks, and a whole lot more. I challenge you to find that available elsewhere for $65 that you can enjoy at any time over 4 days.

And yes, Item 3. The $65 at the door fee is only applicable if you can’t plan out more than about 7 weeks in advance. We do do 4 price ‘tiers.’ If you are at the convention, and you decide you want to attend next year, it’s $30. From the end of the convention till the end of the calendar year it cost $40. From then till the middle of May the price jumps up to $50. And only after that point do you end up having to pay the At the Door rate.

You might be wondering why we are willing to offer such steap discounts that far in advance. Just as we recognize that you can save money that way, we end up saving money as well. The better information we have regarding how many people we should expect at the convention, the better deals we can negotiate with people who are providing services. Live performer fees to ASCAP and BMI (etc.) are due in January for the year that they will perform. If we can tell them that our history says we will see 3200 people, fees are significantly better than if we have to say ‘well it could be 1,200 people, or 5,500.’ Want to take a guess as to which number will be the basis of the amount paid? With a range like that you are likely to pay the 1200 people rate over the 5500 people volume. Likewise if we are way off, say we predict 2000 people, and 3000 people show up, then the licence management companies are going to take a higher percentage, even if no more people could possibly hear the performers. Beyond licence fees, we can negotiate better prices for food from large vendors, rather than waiting till the last minute and going to Cub. We can get better deals on bulk materials and so on. And we can negotiate better room rates with hotels in the area if we fill the room block.

And as mentioned beforewe are not doing this to earn money for ourselves. Every one of the members of the convention comittee and board for both MISFITs and CONvergence pays their own way into the convention. And we all work our tails off both before, and at the convention.

There are other reasons not to do things like ‘day passes.’ Chief among them is that no one has demonstrated that the costs associated with managing day passes is less than the additional sales would be generated. If you really want to know what the costs are, think of the artwork, training, and handling of the materials involved, then remember that even a $20 day pass will be looked at as ‘too expensive’ by a significant percentage of the ghosts we have already.

Lastly, remember that the cost of registration is not a ‘ticket fee.’ It is a membership. Your contribution is going to far more than just the stuff you see at the convention.

Some of you may want to continue to moan and complain. Fine. I’m not really interested. I pay for my own registration, and will buy additional registrations for people I think deserve the ‘reward’ as I can within my means. I don’t ask anyone else to do that but it would honestly surprise me if there were not a few people doing that. Likewise I’m pretty sure that there are a few people who buy registrations in the last half of the year, so that they can sell them after pre-registration has closed for the year, and potentially earn some money by selling them for less than the ‘at the door’ rate. I don’t know who they are though.

OK, enough. And that’s in more than one way enough.

This last year was both rough, and rewarding. We did a lot more this year, with only a few more people. We dealt with a variety of surprises, including people going missing, as well as some really stupid situations at the convention. I’m sorry people having been up late the night before is no excuse for snapping at 10 year olds trying to make sure that you can get to your destination. And yes that did happen. I wrote software I wasn’t sure I was up to, built hardware that I couldn’t aford to buy an alternative for, and ultimately had the time of my life with a lot of really great people.

And this is the only time in this blog entry that I will even note that I spent entirely too much time at the convention in costume as Jamie. If you see pictures of me on the web, feel free to send me a note pointing them out to me. I know about some of them, but the rest are also of interest.

Thank you, I’ve had a great time, 2009 is going to be my last year as the head of Volunteers, and I hope to have someone who is better at working with other people involved at every level next year with me, who if they don’t want to take over for me, can at least work with whomever comes in after me. I may be called in to help out after that, but if I do, I will feel very much that I have personally failed in handing off the reigns. I don’t know who will be in charge in 2010. I really hope to be solving another set of problems that I see. A side effect that I would very much love to have is that I hope to be enjoying a lot more of the convention. (Realistic knowledge suggests that I won’t be seeing much of that in 2010, but I think that we will get a lot of problems worked out then anyway.

CVG2008 – 4 days of some of the best parties I’ve seen. Thank you to all.

~Rusty

I think that there are probably a lot more of your friends who know other friends of yours, than you realize. Consider your work and say one avocation of yours. I can easily pick from work and two avocations, but if we start with just one, it is a bit simpler to explain.

At work I am part of a team of about 20 people, some in the city I work in, some in a couple of others. I also work with people from other teams on a shift overlap related basis, So if I simply include the people in the city I work in, I am part of a team of about 30 people that I work amoung with some regularity.

One of my avocations is helping to run a science fiction convention. This last year the convention attracted some 2500 people. Of those some 250 were part of the dedicated volunteer team helping to keep things moving. Of that I work directly with some 40, and somewhat less directly with another 40, or about 80 total.

So that is something on the close order of 110 people who I can state overlap directly with me. None of the people I work with are a member of the set of people I work the convention with. I have absolutely no doubt however that there are people in each of the groups who know people in the other groups. Sure there are a lot of people in each group who do not know each other. But that’s not at all difficult to find in most cases.

I am not counting third level aquaintences at this point. One of the people I work with regularly at the convention is married to a stewardess. Since I work with people who have a need to fly from time to time, it is amost certain that she has met one or more of the people I work with. Likewise I have a friend that I see ocasionally at work, but don’t work directly with, who has been involved with running the convention in the past, so obviously he knows quite a few of those people as well.

Why is it that we tend to know people that may completely unbeknownst to us know each other? I think it has a lot to do with what kind of people we are. Whether you work in Marketing, and socialize in a church that has no-one from your company in it, or you work as a publisher and spend your free time at bar’s or even dances, there is some aspect of your work life that tends to be a part of your avocations. In my case I fully acknoledge that I am a geek. Some may say Nerd, and I don’t have any need to argue with them.

In any case both what I do for work, and being part of running a science fiction convention, tend to involve interacting with other geeks. That being said, both sets of ‘friends’ are part of a larger set, geeks. You can undoubtedly find similar set overlaps between the people you consider friends at work, and friends at play.

It can also be fun to find out who amoung the various sets of people you know, do know each other. Some of those relationships may be entirely unexpected.

Enjoy.