Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[Florence Ambrose is a genetically-engineered "Bowman's Wolf", and a spaceship engineer. Sam Starfall, a squidlike alien in a humanoid environment suit, is her captain. Varroa Jacobsoni is a psychologist working for the corporation that created Florence's species, testing the "don't hurt humans" safeguards designed into her brain.]

-- from "Freefall" by Mark Stanley, 2008-06-02 and 2008-06-04 (quoted strips are part of a story arc that started 2008-03-17)

[Florence Ambrose is a genetically-engineered "Bowman's Wolf", and a spaceship engineer. Sam Starfall, a squidlike alien in a humanoid environment suit, is her captain. Varroa Jacobsoni is a psychologist working for the corporation that created Florence's species, testing the "don't hurt humans" safeguards designed into her brain.]

-- from "Freefall" by Mark Stanley, 2008-06-02 and 2008-06-04 (quoted strips are part of a story arc that started 2008-03-17)

Okay, so I'm mostly back from Pennsic ... I got in yesterday, pulled all my stuff out of the truck, made a brief stab at organizing things a little (barely enough to count, really), rested a little, then started getting ready to go to 3LF rehearsal ... failed to get everything together in time (I spent too long figuring out how to bungee the bass in place in the back of the truck without enough of my other stuff around it to keep it from sliding around on the sheet of plywood that was the top of the pile), skipped rehearsal, delivered the truck to the merchant who paid me to drive it to Pennsic and back, and proceeded to the home of anniemal and syntonic-comma to finish burning to CD the photos that I'd copied off of CF cards during Pennsic, and to borrow their lawn to rinse and dry my tent's groundcloth. So I feel like I'm not quite completely home from Pennsic yet. Almost ...

Also not yet caught up on electronic (or any other) communication.

I feel like babbling a bit about photographic and technological aspects of my trip; I'll write a more rounded trip report a little later.

The final photographic tally for Pennsic, including the drive up and the drive home: three rolls of film (one roll of 135 and two rolls of 120), six gigabytes worth of CF cards (spread over fourteen cards because I started off with the small cards in order to be using the 1G cards at the end when I expected to be shooting more) that have been copied to nine CDs, two thousand three hundred and one digital photos (not counting the ones I deleted before removing the card from the camera, of course), and a metric crapload of editing to do over the next few weeksmonths. I got a number of adorable shots of children with and without their parents, which need to get emailed to the right parents as I sort and edit them. And I sold one photo on site the day I shot it (I delivered it on a CD).

I took a RV/marine battery with me, and an inverter, hoping to be able to run the Vaio. That didn't work. The battery didn't have enough juice to power the laptop when I got there, though it did run the chargers for my cell phone, PDA, and iPod. Hooking it up to solar panels (two different rigs) only got it as far as 11.6V, never enough to run a computer. :-( I did borrow anniemal's iBook once she arrived (and recharged it from syntonic-comma's battery while his solar panel tried to recharge my battery), but I never got around to plugging the Vaio into a working battery, so I never got the addresses off it for some folks I'd planned to send SMS messages to but whose email addresses weren't already in my phone; I also never connected to the Internet from Mystic Mail (the on-site ISP) or through anybody else's portable connection. At the moment my battery is hooked to a car-battery-charger and is fully charged, but loses about a hundredth of a volt every ten seconds when the charger is disconnected.

On the last day, my cell phone charger stopped working reliably. I thought it was a problem with the power it was getting from the inverter, but now I've got it plugged into house current and it's still not doing much. Eek! (I never see the phone say it's charging, but the battery indicator does read halfway now, as opposed to dead last night. So the charger must be doing something some of the time.)

The drive home got off to a rocky start, what with loading my gear into the truck in heavy rain, then having to get the truck pulled out of the campsite by a backhoe because the ground softened under it during loading. (They tried using a tractor first, but just spun the tractor's wheels. So plan B was to move it a few feet at a time with the backhoe. I'd never fully realized what an impressive piece of equipment a backhoe is, until now.)

Next year, I must make sure that all the email addresses I'll want are copied to my phone and/or PDA before I leave, instead of counting on being able to access them on the laptop. And find out whether there's any cure for a lead-acid battery that self-discharges at a rate of a millivolt per second.

I'll write up more of what my Pennsic was like, as opposed to how my electronics worked or didn't, after I get back to Baltimore again and have a proper tire on my minivan where the toy spare is currently mounted. And then I've got twenty three hundred photos to sift through and edit.

Okay, so I'm mostly back from Pennsic ... I got in yesterday, pulled all my stuff out of the truck, made a brief stab at organizing things a little (barely enough to count, really), rested a little, then started getting ready to go to 3LF rehearsal ... failed to get everything together in time (I spent too long figuring out how to bungee the bass in place in the back of the truck without enough of my other stuff around it to keep it from sliding around on the sheet of plywood that was the top of the pile), skipped rehearsal, delivered the truck to the merchant who paid me to drive it to Pennsic and back, and proceeded to the home of anniemal and syntonic-comma to finish burning to CD the photos that I'd copied off of CF cards during Pennsic, and to borrow their lawn to rinse and dry my tent's groundcloth. So I feel like I'm not quite completely home from Pennsic yet. Almost ...

Also not yet caught up on electronic (or any other) communication.

I feel like babbling a bit about photographic and technological aspects of my trip; I'll write a more rounded trip report a little later.

The final photographic tally for Pennsic, including the drive up and the drive home: three rolls of film (one roll of 135 and two rolls of 120), six gigabytes worth of CF cards (spread over fourteen cards because I started off with the small cards in order to be using the 1G cards at the end when I expected to be shooting more) that have been copied to nine CDs, two thousand three hundred and one digital photos (not counting the ones I deleted before removing the card from the camera, of course), and a metric crapload of editing to do over the next few weeksmonths. I got a number of adorable shots of children with and without their parents, which need to get emailed to the right parents as I sort and edit them. And I sold one photo on site the day I shot it (I delivered it on a CD).

I took a RV/marine battery with me, and an inverter, hoping to be able to run the Vaio. That didn't work. The battery didn't have enough juice to power the laptop when I got there, though it did run the chargers for my cell phone, PDA, and iPod. Hooking it up to solar panels (two different rigs) only got it as far as 11.6V, never enough to run a computer. :-( I did borrow anniemal's iBook once she arrived (and recharged it from syntonic-comma's battery while his solar panel tried to recharge my battery), but I never got around to plugging the Vaio into a working battery, so I never got the addresses off it for some folks I'd planned to send SMS messages to but whose email addresses weren't already in my phone; I also never connected to the Internet from Mystic Mail (the on-site ISP) or through anybody else's portable connection. At the moment my battery is hooked to a car-battery-charger and is fully charged, but loses about a hundredth of a volt every ten seconds when the charger is disconnected.

On the last day, my cell phone charger stopped working reliably. I thought it was a problem with the power it was getting from the inverter, but now I've got it plugged into house current and it's still not doing much. Eek! (I never see the phone say it's charging, but the battery indicator does read halfway now, as opposed to dead last night. So the charger must be doing something some of the time.)

The drive home got off to a rocky start, what with loading my gear into the truck in heavy rain, then having to get the truck pulled out of the campsite by a backhoe because the ground softened under it during loading. (They tried using a tractor first, but just spun the tractor's wheels. So plan B was to move it a few feet at a time with the backhoe. I'd never fully realized what an impressive piece of equipment a backhoe is, until now.)

Next year, I must make sure that all the email addresses I'll want are copied to my phone and/or PDA before I leave, instead of counting on being able to access them on the laptop. And find out whether there's any cure for a lead-acid battery that self-discharges at a rate of a millivolt per second.

I'll write up more of what my Pennsic was like, as opposed to how my electronics worked or didn't, after I get back to Baltimore again and have a proper tire on my minivan where the toy spare is currently mounted. And then I've got twenty three hundred photos to sift through and edit.

Although there's nothing particularly Pennsic-ish about this photo, I did shoot it at Pennsic. (I was showing off my macro skillz for some of my camp-mates after they'd watched me photograph an insect.) And I like it enough that I couldn't wait to post it. I'm especially pleased by the reflection of the salt.

Er, yeah, that thing that folks keep saying looks like an ice cube is a grain of table salt. :-) And the blobby, round thing on the left is neither a meatball nor falafel, but a single grain of ground black pepper. They're resting on the screen of my PDA, lit from the side by a flash.

No conventional microscope involved, though the question of whether the combination of lenses I cobbled together constitutes an improvised microscope or just a scary-looking macro lens is left as an exercise for my readers. From the camera out, it was a 2x teleconverter, a 200mm lens, then a 50mm lens backwards (attached to the 200mm lens by gaffing their lens hoods together). I set the flash on 1/16th power and adjusted its brightness by sliding it slightly closer or farther away.

Although there's nothing particularly Pennsic-ish about this photo, I did shoot it at Pennsic. (I was showing off my macro skillz for some of my camp-mates after they'd watched me photograph an insect.) And I like it enough that I couldn't wait to post it. I'm especially pleased by the reflection of the salt.

Er, yeah, that thing that folks keep saying looks like an ice cube is a grain of table salt. :-) And the blobby, round thing on the left is neither a meatball nor falafel, but a single grain of ground black pepper. They're resting on the screen of my PDA, lit from the side by a flash.

No conventional microscope involved, though the question of whether the combination of lenses I cobbled together constitutes an improvised microscope or just a scary-looking macro lens is left as an exercise for my readers. From the camera out, it was a 2x teleconverter, a 200mm lens, then a 50mm lens backwards (attached to the 200mm lens by gaffing their lens hoods together). I set the flash on 1/16th power and adjusted its brightness by sliding it slightly closer or farther away.