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Oct. 23rd, 2006 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lagilmanGood convention -- great people, well-attended panels, interesting conversations, and if the hotel was somewhat less than par, we barely noticed. I will definitely be adding it to the rotation of conventions I attend.
(alas, the picture I took of the driver stuck in traffic in the row next to us, reclining with his shoeless feet out the window, talking on his cell phone, did not come out well enough to be worth posting. But it was definitely a bright and amusing moment in the seemingly endless traffic crawl through Maryland)
Great to see people (and take their money at poker), and introduce new folk to single malt (and find a few new bottles mysef), and sign many copies of things, and I will hold those memories as I dive into the rather busy week to come....
(alas, the picture I took of the driver stuck in traffic in the row next to us, reclining with his shoeless feet out the window, talking on his cell phone, did not come out well enough to be worth posting. But it was definitely a bright and amusing moment in the seemingly endless traffic crawl through Maryland)
Great to see people (and take their money at poker), and introduce new folk to single malt (and find a few new bottles mysef), and sign many copies of things, and I will hold those memories as I dive into the rather busy week to come....
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Date: 2006-10-23 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 11:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-24 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-24 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 01:52 am (UTC)It is a splendid little con, isn't it? I've been going since the first one, and I've been quite pleased. (Despite being made FGoH at one...)
They previously were focused on the art of the short story. This year, they made an effort to broaden the scope a bit, and Elaine did a splendid job of beating the bushes for good program participants and giving them interesting things to do.
The biggest glitch was a communications failure between the hotel and the con, which resulted in the con not having some function rooms they thought they did. (See Elaine frantically moving and rescheduling programming around the issue. For reasons that elude me, the con apparently didn't have a resume from the hotel, which would have made what space they had when clear. Instead, they had to decipher banquet orders, and Missed Stuff. Ah, well. Excrement occurs.)
Their biggest challenge is growing the con a bit, but that should come with time.
It was lovely to see you, the coat of many colors was dazzling, and no, you do not need a hair cut.
See you at Philcon?
______
Dennis
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Date: 2006-10-25 02:47 am (UTC)Alas, no. November/December was starting to get very very busy, and something had to give...
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Date: 2006-10-31 05:17 am (UTC)The reason it eludes you is that there was a resume, or BEO since that's what they're all using, from the hotel. C'mon, this is me. The problem was that there were enough other things going on that final week that I didn't give Sam the backup he should have had and we misplaced a room. Fortunately Elaine solved the problem by shifting the evening program from there to another space.
I will warn people that there are actual problems with the hotel, the most notable being that it's a fairly old property. They added some good meeting space but there's not a lot that can be done with the rest without ripping everything out. And we've all long agreed that the bar is too small for a convention with a growing population of readers, writers, editors, and tired people.
On the other hand a fine Frenchman, retired from the Merchant Marine and excited to be told that Fredric Brown's work was not forever lost, had accomplished what every previous year we'd been told couldn't be done:
Hot water that reaches all the way to the top of the building.
Lovely, lovely hot water that reaches all the way to the top of the building.
I think that by now P&T may have forgiven us for last year. I hope so. Patrick did give us a great blurb. They did come back.
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Date: 2006-10-31 01:16 pm (UTC)And we've all long agreed that the bar is too small
That wasn't a bar, that was a table with beer spigots. Seriously. Three of us walked in when it opened, and it was overcrowded.
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Date: 2006-10-31 07:22 pm (UTC)Whatever animal I might be, neither would I. One of the finest things in civilization is hot showers. But last year there was hot water only the lower levels of the hotel, something about water pressure or such. Unfortunately we weren't aware of this and put P&T, our Fan GoHs, on a high floor to be away from noise.
I think that it was Saturday evening when it looked full despite people having commandeered whatever was available nearby. I jokingly said "I would like some space to sit. And, as Chair, you have to do this." People got up and made space. I was stunned to the point of almost being scared: people *never* do something just because the Chair said so. But it might be worth trying. Overall I don't know what we do about the bar but we're open to suggestions. At least this year they took our recommendation to stock decent Scotch. And they actually kept it open.
In any event that hotel has one major thing going for it: I've never seen so many good places to eat within walking distance except at expensive downtown hotels, and it's within walking distance or (a very short cab ride) of transportation. So we put up with it being shabby, managed to keep our room rates the same for two years, and we'll see what happens with the current negotiations. Again, we're fortunate, or perhaps just a very good con, because our members also put up with it, keep coming back, and drag more people along with them.
I'm very glad you enjoyed it. But we need someone to take over responsibility for the poker game . . .