Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Unloading my Pennsic gear from the truck, I stacked it all in the front hall, my usual staging area for Piles O' Stuff being organized before or after a trip. I figured I'd slowly work through unpacking (and a whopping big bundle of laundry) over the next week, after resting up a bit.

But I just realized my error: I don't think I can get the double bass out of the dining room until I've found new locations for all those boxes and bags (I think I can maneuver it past the lumber if I get everything else out of the way). So if I'm taking the double bass to Three Left Feet rehearsal this week, I have a busy afternoon ahead of me.

I plan to start writing about the yet-unblogged portions of my War starting with the ride home and working backwards until I run out of steam ... or exceed my own attention span. Starting tonight or tomorrow.

"If there ever comes a point in time when you're not depressed by the ending of Pennsic, then it's time to stop coming." -- Val, of the Clan of the Burning Hand, (late 2005-08-20 or wee hours of 2005-08-21, by their campfire)

Sunday night I came home from Pennsic in a four hundred inch diesel deathtrap. Okay, I exaggerate slightly; the sticker on the visor said 32'3", but what's thirteen inches between friends? (I have a penis, so I'm legally required to exaggerate lengths anyhow.) The truck was loud, too loud for conversation, and it was old. The brake pressure warning light was stuck on -- allegedly the brakes were fine and a sensor was bad -- and the seat belts lacked shoulder straps. The knob for the headlights fell off when we tried to turn them on, and there were no high-beams (so I used the dimmer switch on the floor to flick the headlights off and on to signal other trucks they were clear to change lanes). The air conditioner blew everywhere except at the driver, and the instrument lights didn't work well (we had to turn on the dome light to check the fuel guage, and the spedometer was hard to read even when it wasn't bouncing wildly across a ten MPH range). At least the transmission was mostly just annoying rather than broken, though I did see it pop out of gear a couple of times while keith_m043 was driving. He compared it to a Chevette in that the first four gears were extremely "short", first being just enough to get the truck moving at all, followed by a race up to fifth, the only gear really useful for driving (though fourth came in handy occasionally on downslopes ... briefly). The clutch pedal was high enough that I kept bumping my shin on it.

I only drove a short stretch in the middle of the trip -- I'd felt pretty good when we started out, but by the time I took over a few hours in such a noisy cab had taken their toll on my energy level. When I started having trouble staying in my lane, I pulled over and we traded places again.

We were pretty late leaving Pennsic. I'd taken my time getting all my stuff packed (and took advantage of the time and sunshine to thoroughly dry my tent and tarps before folding them), fully expecting the truck not to be loaded until late, and I still had a few hours of sitting around and trying to nap after I finished. I wrote some of my thoughts about being on site that late as a diary entry, and will copy portions of that to an LJ entry later.

At the place where we stopped for dinner, on the PA Turnpike, a stranger stopped me to ask whether we were on our way to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and another who turned out to be an American Civil War re-enactor asked what period I was re-enacting. At a later stop in MD, to stretch my legs and use the toilet, other SCAdians spotted us and started a conversationa -- after first walking right past without even noticing my garb because after two weeks at Pennsic such things simply failed to register. (They were wearing mundane clothing). I think it wasn't until one of them recognized Keith's voice that they noticed who we were.

I finally did nod off in the passenger seat, about half an hour before I was needed to navigate into Baltimore. After getting my stuff off the truck, Keith decided he had enough energy to drive me up to Charles Village where I'd left my car (the first place I knew without weekly street-cleaning or daily rush hour parking restrictions that seemed reasonably safe) before heading on to his house. I'd been prepared to take a bus up there yesterday if he was too tired, but am grateful that I didn't have to. The car appeared unmolested and started right up. To my surprise, the leaky tire still had enough air in it to get to a gas station safely, so half an hour later I was checking mail, posting my "I got home safely" message, and falling into bed.

I guess the plywood, unlike the canvas, wasn't completely dry when I hauled it into the house. What had been a small obstacle in the front hall has turned into a near-total obstruction as the wood has adopted a more pronounced curve the more it dries out -- it now reaches the plastic bins stacked against the opposite wall. I'm not sure whether this is significant with respect to my ability to re-use the same wood for my floor next year; I need to borrow still more Carpentry Clue. But in any case, it represents a storage problem now.

Coming a little later: a little earlier.

I poked at my Clié earlier, to see whether I could do anything with the cracked glass that made its touch-screen stop working during Pennsic. After removing the case, I found that I could make the digitizer function briefly by wedging a thumbnail under the corner of it. I was able to perform a HotSync, and to beam a little more information over to the Visor (which I'd been meaning to give away, but I'm now glad I hadn't gotten around to doing so yet), but I was not able to accomplish the same thing with a shim, and the longer I worked the more difficult/less effective the thumbnail trick was. So I haven't copied over most of my calendar items or to-do list yet, nor any of my addressbook. My normal shopping list (in HandyShopper) didn't get copied over either. I'll try again later, and then look at how well the Sony software and Handspring software cooperate on my Windows box -- if I can convince either of those that the Visor is the Clié and just update it as though it had merely forgotten some stuff, great -- likewise if the two desktop apps play nicely side-by-side and I can just copy/paste between them -- but I don't want it to decide that I meant to delete the desktop copies of things or make any other sort of mess. I'd recently installed the backup software that justgus37 told me to, so if I had another PDA that used Memory Sticks I could just restore onto the spare device; alas the Visor doesn't use those.

I'm hoping I can score a dead Clié cheaply off eBay that has a working digitizer, and do a transplant, but since broken displays/digitizers seem to be the most common cause of PDA failure ... well, wish me luck.

In the meantime, I still need to install a compatible version of the MobiPocket ebook reader on the Visor -- at Pennsic I tried beaming over the copy from the Clié but that version requires the 320x320 screen and the Visor only has a 160x160 display.

Sometime before next Pennsic I want to write -- and distribute -- a PalmOS app that imports the Pennsic University class schedule and lets the user select items to copy into the DateBook app as appointments/reminders. (Just being able to read the list requires an HTML reader or ... either Word doc reader or PDF reader, I forget which ... but I want more than just a copy of the schedule to scroll through. I want a more convenient small-screen interface, and to be able to limit the view to the list of classes I'm thinking about attending. Getting the description by tapping on a class title would also be useful.) Y'all may need to remind me of this every few months.

The last few days of Pennsic I was carrying around a "medieval PDA" -- a wax-tablet book that hung from my belt. I'd wanted one for a couple years. My idea was that each night I'd copy the day's notes from the wax tablets to my electronic PDA in my tent before I went to bed, and copy the next day's schedule onto the wax tablets. (I got a three-leaf book, which has four writing surfaces.) In practice ... well I've still got checks and debit-card purchases from Friday to copy over to the Visor. But I've not had to erase anything for lack of space yet. Unfortunately the wax is even harder to read in dim light (dusk or candlelight) than the Visor's screen, and considerably harder to read by flashlight. But I still like my belt book.

The merchant from whom I bought the book told of another customer, who had bought one a year or two ago. He came into her shop and asked whether he could buy just a center leaf. She wasn't thrilled at the idea of taking another book apart to give him just a center leaf, but when he pleaded, "I need more memory," she decided his phrasing was too cute to deny.

I can just see myself asking to buy "more memory" in a couple years, but let me see how well I can live with just three leaves for a while first. I write small. And as I said, a few days worth of records haven't filled it up (two surfaces haven't even been touched yet) and I don't plan on keeping large amounts of long term data in it.

Hmm. I wonder how well/easily my notes scratched in wax can be scanned or photocopied ...

One more thought before I go get ready for rehearsal: I think the reason there were so many tunes on that Top 100 meme list that I couldn't remember, is that it's a "pop" (that is, "Top-40") list, and at that time I had already switched from "Top-40" radio to "Album Rock" format stations. Obviously there is some overlap between the two playlists, but the last time I can rebmember being able to enjoy more than a few minutes of Top-40 format at a time (or stand more than three quarters of an hour of it) was around eighth grade. I think the prevailing aesthetic of pop music changed more than my own tastes did, at first, but once I had been listening to album-rock stations a while, my tastes did shift a little more away from even the Top-40 I'd liked earlier. (Not that I ever outgrew ABBA, mind you!)

Eventually even mainstream album-rock radio became tiresome -- I wonder how much of that was that it changed away from what I liked, or simply stagnated, and how much was my having learned how much else is out there -- but that happened much later.

Okay, I'm off to go hum "Tiger", "Dancing Queen", and "Dum Dum Diddle" in the shower. Then to figure out how I'm getting the double bass out of the house.

Made it to part of 3LF. Made it home. Felt well enough to be playing (except for coughing into the bass recorder) but only marginal for driving. Was annoyed that the grocery store convenient to my route with the BIG SIGN that says "Open 24 hours" (except Sunday) was closed. Wasn't sure why the security guard who told me they were closed seemed surprised that I was surprised. After all, there's that big ol' sign up there saying they're open, and people inside.

Something I forgot to mention in my entry about the trip home from Pennsic: After driving a large, overloaded truck, not driving anything for two weeks, then driving an even bigger truck (still overloaded), getting into my own car felt interesting. It felt nimble, powerful. It felt like it was a living thing. A living thing that wanted to dance. But I didn't dance with it, I just drove it home. I was too tired to do stupid stuff and think I'd get away with it. Still, it was a cool feeling even if I didn't give in to it. (Perhaps even more so for not actually testing it -- if 'twas an illusion, I left the illusion intact and let my imagination flesh it out.)