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Update July 2009: I’ve got a newer, longer list of Comic-Con Tips over at Speed Force.

Based on experience from the last few San Diego Comic-Cons, here are a few recommendations:

  1. Pre-register, as early as possible! Not only will it save you money, but the line to pick up badges is always much shorter than the line to sign up. (If you’ve ever stood in line to register, you know what I mean. If you haven’t — well, let’s just say you might not get in until afternoon.)
  2. Go for at least two days. One day is no longer enough time to see everything.
  3. Do not set foot on the convention floor on Saturday. Go to panels instead.
  4. Stay somewhere nearby, preferably with convenient trolley, bus, or shuttle access. Barring that, leave really early so you can find parking.
  5. If you’re getting a hotel, reserve your room early. Perhaps as much as six months early. Otherwise you’ll end up paying way too much to stay at the Super 8.
  6. Get a Day Tripper bus/trolley pass. You can get one for 1-4 days, and you can even order it online and have it mailed to you. There are two trolley stops in front of the convention center (yes, it’s that big): Convention Center (of course) and Gaslamp Quarter. In downtown San Diego, trolleys run every 15 minutes during the day, every 30 minutes in the evening, and run until around midnight (later on weekends).
  7. If you’ve got a good costume, this is the place to wear it.
  8. Don’t forget to bring a camera and lots of film/memory!
  9. Bring a change of clothes so that you can wear your T-shirt or costume at the con and then go to a nice downtown San Diego restaurant for dinner.
  10. Speaking of dinner, make reservations! This is A) downtown in a major city, B) a weekend, and C) during a convention with 100,000 people, most of whom will be looking for a restaurant. Alternatively, look for dinner as far away from the convention center as possible.
  11. Pre-register for next year, if you plan to come back. We saved $25 each.

(Note: the target audience for this list is the type of person who has already mastered the concepts in Aubrey’s Guide to Con Hygiene.)

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I accidentally hit ctrl-H in our computer system today…..and it acted like backspace. I have never before run into a modern, GUI-based program where that would happen. Then again, I don’t recall ever trying it, either.

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Now here’s a prep time I’d like to see someone achieve:

MELON, PINEAPPLE AND GRAPE COCKTAIL

(can be prepared in 6 minutes from start to finish)

1 melon
1 fresh pineapple
1 c seedless green grapes, halved
3/4 c white grape juice
fresh mint leaves for garnish

Remove seeds from melon. Use a melon baller to scoop out melon. Remove skin from pineapple; core and cut into bite-size pieces. Combine fruits in serving bowl and pour white grape juice over all. Serve immediately or cover and chill until ready to serve. Garnish with mint leaves. Serves 4-6.

**********

Now, if you were to start counting from the time you finish slicing grapes, an Iron Chef (or the French guy who can debone a whole chicken in 60 seconds) might be able to do this in 6 minutes. But unless you’ve got the world’s smallest melon (what kind, anyway?), even I, trained by a mom who trained with Hawaiians in the art of butchering pineapple, would be hard pressed to make it in even 10. I’ve also noticed that this calendar seems to think it impossible to make fruit salad without some kind of juice marinade, which is a foreign concept to me. Is it a function of California versus the Midwest again? Something to do with having better and juicier fruit here? Or do some people just think all salad has to have dressing?

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Well, I signed up with Gravatar, mainly so I could test the plugin.

Basically the idea is that you can define an avatar that will follow you around the Internet, anywhere you post. All that’s necessary is for the site you’re commenting on to be Gravatar-enabled at the time someone visits.

The one thing I’m not entirely thrilled about is that it uses your email address as the basis for your ID. They really didn’t have many options to choose from, since most blog comment forms only have space for your name (not always unique), email address, and website (not everyone has one). To avoid publishing addresses accidentally, they one-way encrypt it using MD5. (MD5 is a hash function, so while you can have two systems generate an MD5 signature from the same data to see if it matches, you can’t restore the original from the signature.)

If you’re interested in Gravatars, head over to their site, see if you agree with their policies, and if you enter your email address when commenting (don’t worry, current and future WordPress versions never display it outside of the admin area), your avatar will show up next to your comments.

Anyway, once I had gravatars showing up, I had to find a layout that (a) looked good and (b) worked in IE. (Yes, that again.) Continue reading →

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When I worked at a computer lab in college, the main security focus was preventing lab visitors from screwing around too much with the computers. We just ran Windows NT and locked it down as hard as possible. The worst network-based threat I remember facing was WinNuke, and that was just as likely to be another lab tech. Some of the early email viruses started circulating while I was there, but since it was a public lab, we didn’t provide any email programs; people would telnet into the mail server and use Pine. (This was pre-Hotmail, too.)

In my wired-for-ethernet campus housing, however, all bets were off. I watched people remotely controlling each others’ computers as pranks, or discovering hackers had gotten onto their systems from halfway across the planet, and figured it was safer to use Linux most of the time. This actually got me in trouble with the network admin at one point, who decided I must be running a server and shut off my port. It did at least teach me to disable services that were turned on by default, though I saw no indication that anything on there was actually being abused.*

Firewalled

Then there were firewalled environments. Still back in college, we rigged up my parents’ house for a home network. My brother put together a Linux box to dial into the Internet and act as a gateway, and effectively everything inside the network was safe from direct attacks. No point in internal firewalls, and since everyone was savvy enough to avoid the really nasty stuff (which was easier at the time), virus scanners were only a precaution, rather than a necessity.

For the past few years I’ve mainly worked with Continue reading →

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I’ve been thinking about adding memory to the PowerBook for a while now, and for various other reasons we ended up at Fry’s last night. I figured, we’re here anyway, why not at least price the RAM?

Well, here’s a big fragging “Why Not:” I couldn’t remember the exact specs required. There was, however, a chart listing various laptop models, and the employees could look up requirements by model in the computer. The problem there was that I knew it as “the new 12″ PowerBook G4,” not as “Model A1010,” so they ended up (as near as I can tell) pulling up the specs for last year’s PowerBook (the 1 GHz instead of the 1.33 GHz). Naturally, the two models use different kinds of RAM.

When we got home last night, I cracked open the manual to compare the specs. Tonight, I waded through the Fry’s return line, and this time I brought the manual along — as I’d intended to do in the first place.

Everything went smoothly except for one glitch. The memory slot is covered by a panel with four size #0 Phillips head screws. I do have a size #0 screwdriver, and three of the screws came out easily. One of them refused to move, and the head ended up getting stripped somewhat. Eventually I was able to get it.

So, now the laptop has gone from having the smallest amount of memory at 256 MB (barring the ancient Mac clone in the closet) to having the most memory of all our computers at 1.25 GB.

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Today’s Studio Foglio newsletter explains:

We often receive phone calls of this nature on the steam-powered studio telephone:

Steve Jackson: “Phil. Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls. Are you in?”

Phil Foglio: “Okay.”

The result, it seems, is a Foglio-illustraded game called Spanc. (Work warning: “features PG-rated cheesecake photo of a pirate catgirl-in-bikini.” ) I haven’t checked it out yet, but it sounds appropriately bizarre.

In related news, the latest Girl Genius is out!