I've never actually mentioned the WhatTheCast podcast, which is done by several of my friends.

It is worth noting that they did an episode live at dragon*con. This is notable for multiple reasons:

1. All four of these men are my friends.
2. They make me look positively un-nerdy.
3. They're telling stories of what it's like to work on tech staff, and I can vouch that these stories, no matter how outrageous, are true.
4. I'm heckling in the audience.
5. I also get shot down by the panelists. (You'll hear the exchange in the podcast.)
6. I even took play-by-play photos, which are available on my flickr account and Brian's flickr account.

My actions were characteristic of me, this post less so.

We neither of us are really sure of how, exactly, the friendship got started, but it did center around music and graduated to code and phone calls. That was years ago, and my clearest memory of them was walking outside on a lazy summer night, sitting outside in the driveway, bare feet on concrete, eyes to sky, and watching the stars circle as we talked.

Here we are. The clock on my computer says we have exactly a week to go, and the scary thing is, I think we're more ready than we've been in years past. Jeff brought the Ops server up last night, and I started testing it to make sure the basic functions were ready to go.

I've found a few oddities, and it's not fully functional yet, but I've got a list of fixes and tweaks, and everything looks manageable.

Hard to believe it's that time of year already. I've had my head in other things for almost a year now, and it shows. From reading the boards, I'm one of the last people to get into "con mode." Everyone else on tech seems to be frothing at the bit to get back to work, and me, I'm a bit hesitant.

There is nothing left to do, and little left to say. Three years' worth of work culminates in this, a five-day span in which I will work harder at something than most people would ever dream of calling 'fun.'This database has grown beyond what any of our predictive abilities believed it might become. We expected a flat, two-dimensional set of data: names, addresses, phone numbers. What it became, though, was a central point around which everything else revolved. A repository.

There.As of a few minutes ago, the 2006 shift signup grid was just distributed to tech. Thus ends phase 1 of the Busy Season, and begins the mad rush of Phase 2. Today—the shift grid release day—is the day that I work for months toward, knowing that the moment these grids are released, I am not likely to have time to work on anything else.

"I'll have a little from Column A and a little from Column B, please."

Short, cryptic, and marginally observational snippets from life in the past week:

Someone asked me recently to define what I do for dragon*con tech staff. I thought about a lot of answers, all of which encompassed part of the job, but eventually I hit on a word that I think nails the entire thing in one: "logistics."

My job is to know tech staff, inside and out, from the moment they sign up. Their biographical and geographical info goes in the database, but the rest goes inside my head. What are they like? Who do they work well with? Who brought them on staff? What skills do they have? What other departments do they like to work with?

The hallmarks of change have been there for some time: the favicon switching to an inexplicable light blue, the folder marked 'domesticat idea' in the 'design work' folder. Those of you using feedreaders this weekend might've noticed cat.net posts appearing multiple times in your feedreader as I re-jiggered the feeds to pass through some very basic markup that I've been using for months now.Add to that the sudden uptick in posts recently, and you might begin to suspect that something's up. You'd be right.

The tickets are booked. I will disappear for a little while in late July, and I would be lying if I did not say that the nighttime pathways of my mind have taken me more than once down the thought of sand between my toes. It's peace and quiet I'm after, both for myself and for the friend who is kind enough to host me, but there is yet much work to do before I can board that plane without undone tasks.I am the sort that is good for crusades; when it comes to code I am more stolid than gifted, as Gareth and several other true coders, whom I count among my friends, can attest.