My Motley Meanderings

On Saturday I drove down to the Gaspodes' place at Aylesbury for the Odyssey 2010 volunteers' barbecue. After food and chat we watched Doctor Who on the giant projector screen, followed by DVDs until after midnight.

Sunday morning I carried on down to Southwold to meet the invaluable, incomparable, ineffable and rarely incoherent morris1000, who also drives a Morris Minor Traveller and will be coming with us on the AIR. On the way there Fenchurch's clutch wore down sufficiently that I was having trouble changing gear, so I had to spend a few minutes lying on my back on the drive adjusting it to take up the slack (modern cars do this automatically I believe). In hindsight I realise I should be checking how much free-play there is in the pedal at each service, as I hadn't done anything to it since I changed the gearbox last year.

morris1000 and I talked about various things (including all the work he has yet to do on his car before the rally!), then went to see some friends of his and had a ride in their immaculately restored Morris Eight. We had lunch in the local pub, went for a bit of a drive around in Fenchurch, then I had to set off back on the marathon seven-hour trek home up the A14, A1, and M62. Total distance covered over the weekend was around 600-650 miles.

After work on Friday I drove down to the_magician's place near Heathrow. There had been an accident on the M6 in the afternoon and the matrix signs were still making their proclamations of eternal doom ('long delays J16-J13' etc), but it had all cleared by the time I reached it. Incidentally, the_magician has agreed to be my co-driver/co-navigator/photographer/evening entertainment organiser for the Around Ireland Rally.

On Saturday morning we paid a visit to B&Q, unsuccessfully attempted to fix a leaky central heating pipe (hampered by the fact that the system is so bunged up we couldn't drain the water out of it), and had a look at some loose guttering, before rushing over to fifitrix's house west of London for an Odyssey 2010 committee meeting. I'm not exactly sure yet what I'm going to be doing for Odyssey but it sounds like I will have fewer responsibilities than I had for Orbital. I left at 2:45PM because I wanted to get to Poynton Ceilidh near Stockport when it opened at 7:45 - the website warned us to get there early because they only let a maximum 110 people in.

After a fast run up with only a couple of brief stops and one misread signpost, I arrived at my destination at about 7:55. It turned out that I needn't have rushed because it started off very quiet and never got really busy. Apparently there were two other ceilidhs going on elsewhere that had drawn a lot of people away. It was a friendly crowd with a reasonable mix of young and not-so-young dancers. At the start of the night there were more single blokes than single women but the ratio evened out later on. I sat out the first dance, then on the second one a girl came up and asked me to dance. After that I was lucky the rest of the evening and didn't get turned down once. The dance floor was fairly small and I imagine it could get pretty cramped if they had the full 110 people in and most of them were dancing. I was slightly disappointed that the bar felt it necessary to charge 40p per pint of tapwater, and briefly considered refilling my glass from the sink in the gents. Overall it was a good night with some fun dances. I'm not sure if I'm getting worse at dancing or getting better at noticing when I've done something wrong - some of the early dances were a bit of a mess but they got better as the night went on and people got into the swing of it. A couple of people did comment that I had 'obviously done this before.' I particularly enjoyed a rather silly dance that involved the gents from each set linking hands and dashing around the room to meet the ladies from another randomly-chosen set, then the ladies doing the same, trying to end up with matched sets (as opposed to eg. eight men in one set and none in another) before the next step of the dance.

Poynton is a fair distance away from me (it's actually in Cheshire) and I think the shortest route unfortunately involves negotiating Stockport centre, but I reckon I will go again. While I was there I picked up a flyer for a "Grand Ceilidh" in Antrobus next month - that's even further away than Poynton but it's a decent run, nearly all motorways, so I might go to that one too. On the way back I was feeling rather too smug about the number of miles I've done recently without any problems other than the sticking speedometer needle, so Fenchurch decided to start misfiring and cutting out on the M60 (the Manchester ringroad) while the rev counter went haywire. The engine never quite died completely though and I managed to nurse her the thirty miles or so home. I had a look under the bonnet this morning and found the fault in a couple of minutes - one of the wires to the coil had broken inside the insulation just before the crimped connector so it would have been making intermittent contact as the engine vibrated. I was sure it would be something simple like that - there's no computerised engine management systems to go wrong on these old engines.

Speaking of electronics going wrong, I thought my new 500GB backup disk had died because first it kept freezing, then it wouldn't even spin up. I tried swapping it into a different Firewire enclosure and it worked fine again. Either the enclosure or its power supply has died. I have had it for several years and it always worked fine with the 120GB disk it came with but when I tried putting that one back in it would no longer spin up either. Perhaps the new disk put a greater load on the power supply or something.

Monday from about 9AM to 3:30PM was spent rushing around finishing things off in the workshop and getting prepared for the Great Crystal Cyberdrome Exhibition. SMS and Eira presented two guided tours while Cuil sabotaged the monorail, then suddenly it was 5PM and I had to rush off to the closing ceremony. watervole and the_magician thanked loads of people by name, then asked everyone who had helped in some way to run the con (including gophers and panellists) to stand up - that turned out to be roughly two thirds of us. Back down to Newbury where we spent the next couple of hours first shifting all the exhibits back to the workshop room, then sorting, packing, and clearing everything out of the room (the hotel wanted it back the next day).

When I came back to the dead dog party after dinner I staggered around for a few minutes in a bit of a daze thinking, "is it over already? what happened? I've only been to one panel item!" before twinfair nabbed me and sent me on a quest to remove the posters from the walls all over the hotel. After finishing that, Vince handed me a small fortune in spare groats! With only a few hours left to spend them, I bought a drink for myself and one for Bazooka, attempted to buy one for Mad Elf (the bar had run out of cider), then came to the conclusion that I was never going to get rid of them at that rate and it really wasn't worth stressing out about it, so I went and handed most of them to a poor student who no doubt was able to find a productive use for them.

I'm back home now and have unloaded Fenchurch. There was one incident of Lorry Rage[1] on the way home. I would like to know who the person in the Volvo estate was who waved at me as they passed, then did it again a couple of hundred miles later. I'm not sure if they were somebody from Eastercon or just a random Morris Minor enthusiast. ETA: That was feorag.

How to summarise Orbital? Having worked on it for over two years (since before I went to my first Eastercon!) I have so many different feelings that I don't think I can adequately articulate them. It seemed to go pretty well from the comments I've heard. We had possibly the biggest Eastercon programme ever, and the highest membership count for over twenty years. The highlights for me personally were the ceilidh, the Beer Hunt sketch in the cabaret, Mitch Benn's act, and directing the second episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. I really hope we can have ceilidhs again at future Eastercons - it's such a fun social thing to do, much more so than a disco in my opinion. I'm already planning to do more episodes of Torchwood Wobblevision and have some ideas for ways to make it run a bit smoother.

The post-con blues haven't hit yet (that will probably come tomorrow when I have to go back to work) but the post-con lurgy has already begun to attack my throat. I'll try to get Torchwood Wobblevision posted up within the next day or two. I have registered my interest in helping out with Odyssey 2010 - watch this space. Finally, I'd just like to say get well soon to multiclassgeek and tracey_jane!

[1] When I'm doing a long journey I tend to cruise along behind a lorry, keeping pace with it for long periods of time. It's less stressful and more economical than constantly overtaking. Often another lorry will creep up behind me at less than 1 MPH faster than the lorry in front, and the driver will decide to overtake. For some reason they expect me to slow down so as to open a gap for them instead of continuing to keep pace with the lorry in front. Sometimes they get quite pissed off when I don't, especially if the gap in front of me increases and I speed up to close it again. One of them today gave me a long blast on the horn and flashed his headlights several times when he realised his speed-limiter wouldn't allow him to go fast enough to overtake a Morris Minor.

The bid session took place first thing on Sunday morning so I headed there instead of the BC workshop. There was one bid - Odyssey 2010 - which consisted of gaspodia, watervole, Fiona Scarlett, and gaspodex. They explained they wanted to come back to the Radisson again in 2010, and that the hotel had offered them Orbital's contract as a starting point, including the same room and drinks rates. Starting membership rates would be £35. A vote was taken and it passed with an overwhelming majority. The main guests of honour so far are Alistair Reynolds, Liz Williams and Mike Carey, with frandowdsofa and johannes_d as the fan guests. Let's do it again in 2010!

I spent most of the day in the workshop again, escaping for a short while to look around the art show, then head down to the dealers' room to join Odyssey, Satellite 2, and Albacon 2010, which I don't know much amount about except cuddles_batcave appears to be involved. I also tried to buy a T shirt with SMS's Orbital artwork on it but they'd already sold out of my size so I had to place an order for them to post me one later.

In the evening I went to the play, then I stayed on for the Mitch Benn set, which was absolutely hilarious. He was still going strong when I had to duck out to go and run Torchwood Wobblevision. I was a bit nervous but not as badly as the first time I did it, at Year of the Teledu. We got enough main cast members despite most of the con still being at Mitch Benn, though a couple of the extras got used several times. I made one mistake in that I cast somebody as Rhys, then cut the one scene Rhys was in. Oops! That character should have been down as an extra in the script. Next time I do this I'm going to have to reformat the scripts to make them easier to use (eg. grouping the scenes by setting would reduce the amount of running back and forth). Everyone involved certainly seemed to have a lot of fun. I've had a quick look at the photos and they seem to have come out pretty well (for a Wobblevision). I'll get them edited and uploaded as soon as I have a chance.

Afterwards I hung around for a while then went to my first panel item of the con: "What is Sci-Fi?" I must admit I wasn't particularly interested in the topic of the panel, but it was interesting to see they had adopted the Redemption tradition of heavy panel/audience interaction (rather than the usual "questions at the end").