August 2006

minutiae : logistics

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?

all tags: 
dragon*con
techops
lists

the random delicatessen

"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:

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cats
coding
dragon*con
techops
friendship
birthdaybash
shoes

venous chasing

"Honey, I knew you was gonna be trouble the moment you walked in and told us your veins rolled.""But they do."

"Mmm-hmm. You were right about that."

* * * * *

I've been out of the habit of giving blood lately. I was a regular back in college, but the life changes involved in graduating, getting married, and moving to a new state upset a lot of my habits, giving blood among them. Not a real excuse, but it happened.

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nurses
storytelling
donating blood
red cross
platelets

Shift grid release day

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.

all tags: 
coding
dragon*con
techops

catversation

He is a strange cat, difficult to predict, sometimes surprisingly intelligent, but often his intelligence is masked by his petulance. Tenzing is six, nearly seven; an age in which humans have begun to move toward full comprehension and conversational ability. I joke about my 'eternal toddlers' but there is truth in that statement, more truth than some people realize.While very much alike in appearance, Edmund and Tenzing are very different in temperament.

all tags: 
cats
books
reading
tenzing
edmund

the lipstick librarian

"If there's ever been a good time for this, it's now…"

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librarians
quotations
uncertainty
job
library
life
change

Zero hour

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.

all tags: 
coding
dragon*con
worry