Concussion Newsletter – Behind the
Scenes 
Monday night 23:07
Got up this morning (good start!), had breakfast, handed out copies of last night’s masquerade newsletter to the people sitting in the breakfast area and then headed up to the newsletter room. Jan was busy laying out the first issue of the day, so I typed some stuff in and then headed off for my midday programme item. Dashed through the dealers room afterwards (as it was due to shut at 1pm) and ended up spending well over half an hour talking to various dealers (both about the newsletter and about other things). The dealers loved having the Sudoku puzzles in the newsletter. Then back up to the newsletter room to assist with getting the afternoon (after closing ceremony) issue completed. We got SMS to come in to tell us about the Phlosque and Beyond Cyberdrome award winners. Mike drew a “dead dog” graphic (for the dead dog party at the end of the con). I went down to the closing ceremony to get the list of award winners (and to accept a box of chocolates as head of newsletter) … the newsletter crew did their usual excellent job and had the final issue of the newsletter ready for people as they left the closing ceremony, including the hall costume winner and SMOFF winner who had only just been announced on stage (we got the results early by chasing down the appropriate people, or by them coming and volunteering the information to us). Spent time from about 17:00-18:00 or so packing up stuff in the newsletter office, tearing down computers etc. then out for a meal with friends (Ichiban, a Japanese noodle/sushi place) before coming back around 20:45, grabbing the laptop and then sitting here in this chair chatting about conventions, filk, education and 101 other things before deciding that we weren’t going to be doing a “dead dog” issue. And now I’ll update this, shut down the laptop and go back to socialising with my friends.
Monday morning 2:30am
Non-stop again … my thanks to the valiant efforts of the newsletter team (Wilf, Jan, Mike and everyone else that has helped out and taken on shifts …) It meant that I could get up this morning, have breakfast and come to the newsletter room knowing that everything would be in hand and organised … and sure enough it was! It left me time to panic about producing Orbital 2008 membership forms … which (thankfully) it turned out we didn’t need as the post-bid flyer had been updated to include a line for credit card number and expiry date. Ran through the Orbital bid presentation on one machine in the newsletter room while Jan got the morning issue sorted out. Then it was time for the bid session. Convoy went first with a presentation that seemed very much “you want an Eastercon, we’re prepared to run one, vote for us and you’ll have an Eastercon next year” which seemed to puzzle a number of people in the room. There were questions from the floor such as “who are all of you?” and “what city are you bidding for?” Nevertheless Convoy won (over abstention and “no convention next year” by a vast amount (90%+ of the room seemed to vote in favour, no more than three or four voted to have no convention and there were a few abstentions). Then there was the Orbital presentation (me and Eddie C. and PowerPoint slides Eddie had prepared with photos taken by Mark) and it was slick and we received several impressed comments afterwards. We answered questions from the floor and won the 2008 (unopposed) by at least as many as Convoy (and I don’t think I saw anyone vote to hold over the decision until next year). My favourite question was “Why didn’t you run for 2007 and give us a choice against Convoy” and our answer of “Convoy is an excellent team and a great hotel and we wanted to support them, and anyway, we’re running Redemption in February next year and one major convention a year with the majority of our committee is enough for us” or words to that effect).
Then I attended the Eastercon Forum where we discussed “Expectations” and several other matters pertaining to running Eastercons and I promised to get the Eastercon website modified by May 1st.
Then back to the newsletter room to see how I could help (everything was going fine without me), a short stint back on the Orbital membership desk, back to the newsletter room to help convert an MP3 to audio CD for one of the masquerade entries (Peter Westhead) and then out for dinner with the Orbital team and didn’t return until nearly 9pm. As the masquerade was scheduled to start at 8pm and I was supposed to edit the Masquerade issue, I was a little worried that I might have missed the entire masquerade … as it was when I entered the main hall, entry number ONE was just going on stage! (They had rescheduled to 8:45pm and by the time everyone was sat down, the judges introduced etc., I hadn’t missed anything!)
Wilf (thank you Wilf) had organised additional photography for the newsletter and got the list of winners. MikeF went back and got the entrants detail sheets so we could get all the names right and so it was back to the newsletter room to process all the incoming photos, pick ones for the newsletter, crop, scale, greyscale, adjust contrast and brightness and drop into Word … that was all fairly quick … then it was the battle with Word 2003 to layout pictures without everything already positioned moving all over the place. I gave up after a while and Jan finished it off while I produced the web versions of newsletters 3, 4, 5 and 6. He got the pages printed off and started the photocopying and I converted issue 7 (the Masquerade special). And then I updated this while the 26Mb of data for those five issues was uploaded.
And so to bed …
Saturday 4pm
Well, the second issue of the newsletter made it out, again behind our personal schedule (but since we’re not publishing guaranteed issue times, it’s not too bad, aside from those people (like Redemption) that wanted a newsletter article advertising a programme item for 2pm … at least we were out 20 minutes before that!
And my main machine is working! Yay!!
Of course I now find that my laptop is running really slow and that a program called “tskdbg.exe”
is taking 90% of the resources … and a quick google reveals it’s likely to be a
Trojan virus-thingy … so I’m running AVG (an excellent free virus checker from
Grisoft) and downloading a copy of ZoneAlarm (since I’ve not been using this
laptop connected to the internet before, it’s wide open to attack!) … and now
to get on with issue 3.
Friday 1:23am
The first issue of the Concussion Newsletter was beset by various problems, chief amongst which was that the main PC we were going to use for layout had a hard disk corruption in one of the boot files for Windows XP, which meant that even in Safe Mode it wasn’t possible to get the machine started. Meanwhile the wireless networking that we were going to use to connect the machines failed to get working (we had two wireless routers, a backup is always useful, and one refused to work and the other wouldn’t allow anyone to connect, or so I believe). The machine with the access to the external network (via a wireless PC Card connection) didn’t have built in wired Ethernet, so it was using either the external internet or swapping that card out to use the wired Ethernet adapter … as we didn’t have the wired connections setup, we ended up having to do the entire first newsletter by having people keying in files on three separate laptops and passing the files around on several USB keys.
My backup laptop (which had the wireless card) had been having problems with a flaky keyboard (though thankfully, and touch wood, the problems have stayed away) had the CD-ROM drive fail (to be fair, it’s never worked properly and I just don’t usually use the CD drive but it would have been really useful today … I’ll have to look into getting a replacement sometime) so I couldn’t install the web editing software etc.
We actually have four laptops in the newsletter room at the moment, one on Windows XP, one on Windows 2000, one on Windows 98 (not SE) and one is a PowerMac. Of the Windows machines, one has no working USB ports, and both of the others only have the slower USB 1.1, and we haven’t got networking setup yet so file sharing is a real pain (sneakernet).
And then there’s the printers … we’d asked for a laser printer to do the quality output for the photocopier … but we didn’t get one. We’ve got two HP inkjets, one of which (mine) is now glitching on feeding paper, so getting a clear master print from it is a hit or miss affair, the other we don’t have drivers for on three of the machines … sigh.
And while trying to get all the machines working, of course there were problems (as one person was trying to configure machines, another would have taken over the machine to type in an article etc. causing lots of frayed nerves and frustration as everyone was trying to do what they saw as the most important thing).
For a very obvious reason, I’d chosen MS-Word as the official layout software of the newsletter. The obvious reason is that, regardless of how much people like or hate it, most people working on newsletter have used it and know the basics, which is not true of any other bit of software. Yes, with more time I’d have found some nice layout software, located editors and made sure they had a basic training in how to use it (and a standard template) before they got to the convention. This may have been a mistake …
SMS wanted to run a reasonably fun ad for the Priestesses of Neptune … but he had used all sorts of text boxes and images that had to be “just so”. When we tried to scale them down and drop them into MS-Word it caused all sorts of formatting problems and we wasted probably the best part of an hour fighting to get something laid out without breaking everything else … and then when we printed out the proof copies we discovered that (for some stupid reason) Word had set the paper size to US Letter rather than A4, so we’d got big gaps top and bottom. After a couple of horrendous attempts to quickly change the paper size, we decided to go to press with the gaps and fix it for the second issue tomorrow (and to ban SMS from doing the fancy text box layouts until we were using a better layout program)
The saga of my main PC
My main PC failed to start - it would get to that point in at Windows XP boot where it is mostly a black screen with “Windows XP” in coloured text and a small progress bar with the three little blue blips moving along right to left to indicate progress, and then just freeze. We tried various things including starting up in safe mode (where it froze after doing the “agp400” driver so we guessed it was possibly a video card problem and tried removing and reseating the graphics card, which didn’t help.)
Jan did a great job trying to get the Dell 8250 (2.4Ghz P4 with 1Gb of RDRAM) working but no luck. He knew how to do the disk diagnostics (I believe it is ALT+CTRL+D while booting) which identified an error with the C: drive. Then Naveed arrived and he volunteered to take the PC offsite (back to his place) and configure up a new C: drive (what a hero!). Meanwhile AlexMc had gallantly volunteered to do a run to Staples to pick up some essentials (some more blank white paper since we had far too little, some batteries etc.), and while he was out we contacted him and got him to pick up a new hard disk from PC World. Naveed took the PC and the hard disk offsite and returned a while later with a machine with a new (working!) C drive. And then another chap (whose name temporarily escapes me but I’ll find out and update this) wandered in and offered the use of an external USB drive caddy to see if we could get at the data on the old corrupt drive that Naveed had pulled … and it looks a lot like it is just a boot sector or driver file that has been corrupted as the rest of the drive works perfectly (so all my data and applications are there, which is great, though of course I’d backed up all my data files on that PC before coming to the con, so it wouldn’t have been the end of the world). So one of the jobs for tomorrow is getting the desktop PC replacing this laptop.
At which point I’d been working on the newsletter pretty much non-stop since about 11:30am and hadn’t had lunch yet (and it was 7pm) so my friends came and dragged me out for dinner, leaving everyone else to finish printing off and distributing the newsletter.
After I returned from dinner, I went to the director and cast commentary version of the Captain Tartan Saves the World … Again DVD presentation, and then back up to the newsletter room after midnight to type this up and to upload the first issue of the newsletter.
Just a little longer here to reformat the standard template for A4 paper, and then to swap the laptop for the main PC, and then it will be off to bed.
If you have something for the newsletter, please email it to ConNewsletter@gmail.com
This page maintained by Chris "The Magician" O'Shea - Last updated April 17th 2:51am