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Aug. 1st, 2009 05:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterSitting awake, waiting for the parents to wake up, listening to the tail end of Meat Loaf's live rendition of "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" from VH1 Storytellers. I like the first half of that song better than the last half, but have to admit Meat Loaf is a consummate showman and his banter with his singing partner at the end really amused me.
In a little while, Mom & Dad will get up, fix breakfast, and we'll be on the road again back down to Springfield. If you read the twitter post that was shipped to these journals a few hours ago you have a pretty good idea of how yesterday went. (Though I have to wonder who actually does read those things; I mainly just put them here so that they get archived and stored whenever I run my LiveJournal update app.) I'll just fill in a few general impressions I remember here.
The pamphleteering for SpringfieldGAME went really well. All the places I dropped pamphlets off were willing to at least consider them (for the libraries, it helped that we're a nonprofit). The gaming/hobby shops I talked to were interested to hear about the event even if they weren't able to offer any commitment to coming. Even if they don't show up this year, they'll remember we asked them when next year comes around. The key now is to making sure that SpringfieldGAME is the best event it's possible for us to make it so they'll hear good things about us when next year comes around.
We only really had two major misfires: I couldn't find one of the Jeff City stores at all and finally just gave up on it (I'll phone them from home instead), and when trying to find one of the Columbia places they gave us the most confusing directions. (Really, we didn't need to try to get directions at all, once we knew the street numbers, but I figured at the time that it might help.) I also had a pretty big success at University of Missouri, my parents' old alma mater, where I was able to leave 28 fliers to be posted around campus and got instructions for getting them wider exposure in dorms and wider distribution with campus org sponsorship.
In other visit news, we had been considering getting together with all the relatives for dinner, but schedules were too hard to mesh and Dad quailed at the idea of paying $10 per head for a buffet dinner at Golden Corral. We opted instead to visit the relatives separately. Mom and her sister Aunt Robbie went in Robbie's car to visit their other sister Cammy and her husband Jim while Dad and I hit four flier targets within downtown Columbia then went out to meet them at Cammy's.
In the end, we had a good time visiting the various family members up here. One of the more amusing events was when I had Aunt Robbie leave me a voicemail so as to demonstrate Google Voice's voicemail transcription function to people. Given that Robbie had polio when she was younger which left her face partly paralyzed, she slurs her speech very slightly—which doesn't exactly make her voice easier to parse, especially when she's just saying a little random nonsense to fill voice space. (And weirdly enough, when I played the voicemail back on her computer, her voice sounded sped-up, like she'd had a lungful of helium. Either I clicked a speed control accidentally, or it was something to do with her being on dial-up.)
At Cammy and Jim's, I tried to get on their wifi but they couldn't remember the password. (It's a hazard of wifi set up by people who aren't computer geeks first and foremost, I guess; the wifi password isn't important enough to them to remember.) But with Cammy's blessing, I went into their computer and dug it out of their router's configuration screen for them. Then I demonstrated Google Voice to Uncle Jim, followed by Pandora.com when he mentioned using AccuRadio. Uncle Jim and my Dad had a lot of fun suggesting artists for me to plug into the site to see what songs were produced—George Strait, Willie Nelson, and Slim Whitman were the ones they asked about. It reminded me of how much I enjoyed Pandora, myself, which I suppose is why I'm listening to it right now.
After we left their place, we swung by Wal-Mart to pick up some stuff for dinner: frozen lasagna, salad, garlic bread, and other odds and ends. We took them down to Ashland, where my Dad's brother Uncle John lives. He wasn't home, having been on vacation in Florida, but he had given us permission to use his place. So we had dinner here—and as I tweeted yesterday, I'm not generally much of a "lasagna hog" but any food is really good when you're halfway starving. (I hadn't been able to do much justice to lunch at the Chinese place, and hadn't had much since then save for a cafe mocha at the Cherry Street Artisan.)
Got to bed about 9:30, woke up about 1:30. Checked the net, watched the latest episode of Burn Notice that I'd sync'd to my iPod Touch the night before, but was too hungry to get back to sleep. Finally got up, grabbed the laptop, did some surfing and wrote a couple of pieces for TeleRead, and ended up here listening to Pandora through my noise-cancelling headphones plugged into the laptop.
Dad just got up and expressed surprise at finding me up. "You sure get up early," he says. Heh. I suppose you could say that. I got up earlier than I've been going to bed lately.
Pandora's playing "I Melt With You" by Modern English. I guess I'll wait 'til the song ends, post this, and pull the earphones off and go be sociable while breakfast is cooking.
This whole journal-writing thing is kinda neat. Should try to do it more often.
In a little while, Mom & Dad will get up, fix breakfast, and we'll be on the road again back down to Springfield. If you read the twitter post that was shipped to these journals a few hours ago you have a pretty good idea of how yesterday went. (Though I have to wonder who actually does read those things; I mainly just put them here so that they get archived and stored whenever I run my LiveJournal update app.) I'll just fill in a few general impressions I remember here.
The pamphleteering for SpringfieldGAME went really well. All the places I dropped pamphlets off were willing to at least consider them (for the libraries, it helped that we're a nonprofit). The gaming/hobby shops I talked to were interested to hear about the event even if they weren't able to offer any commitment to coming. Even if they don't show up this year, they'll remember we asked them when next year comes around. The key now is to making sure that SpringfieldGAME is the best event it's possible for us to make it so they'll hear good things about us when next year comes around.
We only really had two major misfires: I couldn't find one of the Jeff City stores at all and finally just gave up on it (I'll phone them from home instead), and when trying to find one of the Columbia places they gave us the most confusing directions. (Really, we didn't need to try to get directions at all, once we knew the street numbers, but I figured at the time that it might help.) I also had a pretty big success at University of Missouri, my parents' old alma mater, where I was able to leave 28 fliers to be posted around campus and got instructions for getting them wider exposure in dorms and wider distribution with campus org sponsorship.
In other visit news, we had been considering getting together with all the relatives for dinner, but schedules were too hard to mesh and Dad quailed at the idea of paying $10 per head for a buffet dinner at Golden Corral. We opted instead to visit the relatives separately. Mom and her sister Aunt Robbie went in Robbie's car to visit their other sister Cammy and her husband Jim while Dad and I hit four flier targets within downtown Columbia then went out to meet them at Cammy's.
In the end, we had a good time visiting the various family members up here. One of the more amusing events was when I had Aunt Robbie leave me a voicemail so as to demonstrate Google Voice's voicemail transcription function to people. Given that Robbie had polio when she was younger which left her face partly paralyzed, she slurs her speech very slightly—which doesn't exactly make her voice easier to parse, especially when she's just saying a little random nonsense to fill voice space. (And weirdly enough, when I played the voicemail back on her computer, her voice sounded sped-up, like she'd had a lungful of helium. Either I clicked a speed control accidentally, or it was something to do with her being on dial-up.)
At Cammy and Jim's, I tried to get on their wifi but they couldn't remember the password. (It's a hazard of wifi set up by people who aren't computer geeks first and foremost, I guess; the wifi password isn't important enough to them to remember.) But with Cammy's blessing, I went into their computer and dug it out of their router's configuration screen for them. Then I demonstrated Google Voice to Uncle Jim, followed by Pandora.com when he mentioned using AccuRadio. Uncle Jim and my Dad had a lot of fun suggesting artists for me to plug into the site to see what songs were produced—George Strait, Willie Nelson, and Slim Whitman were the ones they asked about. It reminded me of how much I enjoyed Pandora, myself, which I suppose is why I'm listening to it right now.
After we left their place, we swung by Wal-Mart to pick up some stuff for dinner: frozen lasagna, salad, garlic bread, and other odds and ends. We took them down to Ashland, where my Dad's brother Uncle John lives. He wasn't home, having been on vacation in Florida, but he had given us permission to use his place. So we had dinner here—and as I tweeted yesterday, I'm not generally much of a "lasagna hog" but any food is really good when you're halfway starving. (I hadn't been able to do much justice to lunch at the Chinese place, and hadn't had much since then save for a cafe mocha at the Cherry Street Artisan.)
Got to bed about 9:30, woke up about 1:30. Checked the net, watched the latest episode of Burn Notice that I'd sync'd to my iPod Touch the night before, but was too hungry to get back to sleep. Finally got up, grabbed the laptop, did some surfing and wrote a couple of pieces for TeleRead, and ended up here listening to Pandora through my noise-cancelling headphones plugged into the laptop.
Dad just got up and expressed surprise at finding me up. "You sure get up early," he says. Heh. I suppose you could say that. I got up earlier than I've been going to bed lately.
Pandora's playing "I Melt With You" by Modern English. I guess I'll wait 'til the song ends, post this, and pull the earphones off and go be sociable while breakfast is cooking.
This whole journal-writing thing is kinda neat. Should try to do it more often.
