Pushing Westercon off the Sandbar
This morning, Westercon 74 published an announcement that there is a Utah in 2024 Write-in bid for Westercon 76, proposing to hold the convention at the Doubletree by Hilton SLC Airport. Go read it for the nitty-gritty details. As there are no other bids of which we're aware, it seems fairly likely that they have a good shot at being selected. Of course, we learned in 2011 that even being listed on the ballot is no guarantee of winning, but I rather think the conditions are different this year than they were a decade ago.
It's not quite too late to join Westercon 74 as a supporting member if you want to vote in the election, but the deadline for mail-in ballots to reach me in Fernley is tomorrow, so it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to vote by the traditional method. As Westercon 74 does not have electronic voting, anyone who wants to vote but who is not going to be in Tonopah next weekend will need to find a friend who is going to be there to both carry a ballot to Site Selection and pay for it. There is nothing wrong with doing so. I've carried people's ballots myself.
Having a site selected for Westercon 75, albeit almost a year late, and having a bid, albeit a write-in bid, for Westercon 76 means that some of the plans I had for this year's Westercon Business Meeting will not have to go into effect, and I'm happy to not have to come up with a plan for what to do when both of the following two year's Westercons have no takers. It simplifies the Business Meeting a great deal, and while there are still some difficulties ahead, it gets us off of what I'd been calling a "procedural sandbar" and allows us to look ahead for years after 2024 to see what develops.
Meanwhile, I've been printing the Westercon 74 Program Book.
Counting the cover (which is in the foreground; what you see is the inside front and back covers) that we printed a few days ago, there are a total of ten signatures of four 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages (printed on 11 x 17 paper double-sided) to print. It takes around 90 minutes to print each side of each signature. As of this morning, four of the ten signatures were complete.
This job uses a lot of ink. The projections of ink usage for the HP 7740 were wildly optimistic.
Around 11 AM, Lisa and I drove to Reno, where we went to both the Staples stores and bought a whole lot of HP 952 ink cartridges. Most were the XL extended-capacity cartridges, but a few ended up being standard capacity. It could have been worse, I guess. I was able to maximize the use of some Staples discounts, but it's still a lot of money.
Unfortunately, I couldn't leave things printing while we were in town. The printer can only hold about 125 sheets of paper (for some reason, it refuses to draw from the second paper tray, even though both can hold 11x17 paper), and you really need to have someone around to deal with adding paper, removing it from the output tray, and replacing ink periodically, not to mention dealing with the occasional paper jam.
As I write this, we are slightly over halfway done with the entire Program Book printing. With luck, we'll be able to start collating and stapling it on Saturday. Then we have a bunch of other printing projects to do, but fortunately none of them are quite as ambitious as printing 300 copies of a 40-page Program Book.
It's not quite too late to join Westercon 74 as a supporting member if you want to vote in the election, but the deadline for mail-in ballots to reach me in Fernley is tomorrow, so it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to vote by the traditional method. As Westercon 74 does not have electronic voting, anyone who wants to vote but who is not going to be in Tonopah next weekend will need to find a friend who is going to be there to both carry a ballot to Site Selection and pay for it. There is nothing wrong with doing so. I've carried people's ballots myself.
Having a site selected for Westercon 75, albeit almost a year late, and having a bid, albeit a write-in bid, for Westercon 76 means that some of the plans I had for this year's Westercon Business Meeting will not have to go into effect, and I'm happy to not have to come up with a plan for what to do when both of the following two year's Westercons have no takers. It simplifies the Business Meeting a great deal, and while there are still some difficulties ahead, it gets us off of what I'd been calling a "procedural sandbar" and allows us to look ahead for years after 2024 to see what develops.
Meanwhile, I've been printing the Westercon 74 Program Book.
Counting the cover (which is in the foreground; what you see is the inside front and back covers) that we printed a few days ago, there are a total of ten signatures of four 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages (printed on 11 x 17 paper double-sided) to print. It takes around 90 minutes to print each side of each signature. As of this morning, four of the ten signatures were complete.
This job uses a lot of ink. The projections of ink usage for the HP 7740 were wildly optimistic.
Around 11 AM, Lisa and I drove to Reno, where we went to both the Staples stores and bought a whole lot of HP 952 ink cartridges. Most were the XL extended-capacity cartridges, but a few ended up being standard capacity. It could have been worse, I guess. I was able to maximize the use of some Staples discounts, but it's still a lot of money.
Unfortunately, I couldn't leave things printing while we were in town. The printer can only hold about 125 sheets of paper (for some reason, it refuses to draw from the second paper tray, even though both can hold 11x17 paper), and you really need to have someone around to deal with adding paper, removing it from the output tray, and replacing ink periodically, not to mention dealing with the occasional paper jam.
As I write this, we are slightly over halfway done with the entire Program Book printing. With luck, we'll be able to start collating and stapling it on Saturday. Then we have a bunch of other printing projects to do, but fortunately none of them are quite as ambitious as printing 300 copies of a 40-page Program Book.