plutherus

Merchandising! I love merchandising!

And look, now you can get all sorts of Geeks Without Borders merchandise!

http://www.cafeshops.com/cp/store.aspx?s=gwob

Gotta love that URL, huh? Anyway, if anyone buys anything from there,
part of the money goes to Geeks Without Borders. (Though most of it goes to cafepress. If you wanna give money directly to Geeks Without Borders, then go to http://www.gwob.org/makeadonation.htm . You won't get a cool coffee mug that way, but you'll get one Karma Point for every dollar you spend. Collect enough Karma Points, and you can come back in your next life as an Aardvark.)

OK, say you're planning on selling a bunch of stuff on Ebay to raise money for a charity. Under what category would you look to register and set up an auction?
A. Charity Auctions
B. Registration
C. Selling
D. Event Calendar

If you chose A, B, or C, you would not be whoever is responsible for E*Bay's site layout.

I finally finished that damn four-hour presentation for work. It went over quite well, actually, and generated all sorts of new work for me. I just have to write everything up as a formal set of requirements, than have development sign off (and the important people have already indicated they will once they see the formal docs), and then I get to start programming and testing like mad. Joy. At least, perl is more fun than powerpoint.

And I finally got the latest Geeks Without Borders status report finished. We're done with the IRS paperwork. Now all we have to do is get a bunch of computers together, figure out where of the many places discussed we'll go first, set everything up, and, oh yeah, get funding for all this. The status report, by the way, is here

I just finished a 90-minute "meeting" with C in Eugene about the GWoB bylaws she's writing. We went over everything point by point and got about halfway through them in preparation for posting to our mailing list so people can begin discussing/disecting them to be rewritten. All sorts of fun. Although, I gotta admit this was definitely the right way to attend a meeting - I sat in the hammock in the back yard, talking on the hands-free phone set and typing on my laptop computer, balanced on my lap and connected to the internet by wireless modem. Using the technology for the purpose it's marketed for. Imagine that.

I'm sitting in a hotel room in San Jose, taking a break from WorldCon. Spent last night at room parties and all day today at various panels. Learned the end of the DS1 saga, which I've been following at presentations at various SciFi cons since 1998, (some people follow Phish around, I follow NASA spokespeople :-)

Missed the "Who needs planets, anyway?" panel, as I had a major headache, came back to the hotel room to get some painkillers, lay down for a minute and suddenly an hour had gone by. Either I fell asleep or was kidnapped by aliens. Given the location, I wouldn't be too surprised at the latter. I've seen a lot more aliens than sleeping people around here.

First panel of the day was "When will my cave get cable", about techology in areas that aren't terribly technologically advanced. When someone mentioned that many countries simply don't have the infrastructure for widespread technology (computers, cell phones, gas stoves, etc.) I pointed out that in a few years they won't need to. You can recharge a laptop computer with solar panels, and soon connect it to the internet via Teledesic. After the panel, I hung around and talked to a few people, wowed them with my Geeks Without Borders stories and discussion of Iridium in Africa. (One of the major reasons Iridium failed was because nobody wanted to pay all that money for something that was, in the US, only marginally better than the cell phones that were already ubiquitous. A couple of months before bankruptcy, some smart guy in marketing discovered the existence of Africa - an entire continent that wasn't full of cell phone towers already, but by then it was too little, too late.)

Other panel was diversity in Science Fiction, where Star Trek was held up as the quintessential case of an ethnically diverse cast (kinda funny, given recent discussions on a certain mailing list I'm on). Someone brought up the "token Black man" and Steven Barnes commented that that's fine. It's gotta start somewhere. If a Black actor is just a token, at least that's one more person of colour in a visible role, and one more actor with a SAG card. It's not ideal, but it's a positive step toward true racial diversity. There were token gay characters on lots of shows for a while before producers felt comfortable enough to create Willow and whats-her-name on Buffy. I'd never thought of it that way before. After Bjo Trimble ("The Woman Who Save Star Trek") raised the issue of money, Barnes pointed out that once the makeup guys at Paramount discovered it was cheaper to make black people into Klingons than white people, they cast almost exclusively blacks, to the great boon of many struggling actors careers...

Talked a bit after the panel with one guy who still objected to Tuvok being a black vulcan, saying that there would unlikely be such a person. I pointed out that given what we know of Vulcan's climate, it's actually unlikely that there'd be any white Vulcans, and that Spock and his family were almost certainly genetic freaks who'd've died out if the Vulcans hadn't had advanced medical technology long before we did. I don't think I really convinced him, but he did change the subject after that :-)

Well, enough of this. Gonna go prepare for my game (Campus Crusade for Cthulhu 2: Shadows Over Babylon 5) for an hour or so, then off to room parties for the rest of the night!