I'm feeling much better now...

After ELEVEN hours of sleep. Wow.

I woke up about midnight, after sleeping nearly three hours... near as I can tell, that was my "nap" to catch up from the previous night. Then another eight hours... and I'm feeling pretty good (especially considering it's now only ten to 7:00 back home, and I've been awake for nearly two hours).

Oh, and our network connection didn't work this morning... we had been given three passwords to use between our two computers and no combination worked. I called the desk and was told I had to call the toll-free tech support for the company that runs their wi-fi. Now, I'm pretty sure the problem is that the passwords had gotten reset on their end, just from the testing we'd done, so I call tech support, sit on hold for about ten minutes, then decide to do something evil.

After hanging up, I walked down to the front desk with copies of our passwords and told the clerk that it looked like their passwords had been reset, phrasing everything in a way that indicated I'd gotten this info from my tech support call, but without actually, you know, saying that. The desk clerk (who was the one I'd spoken to on the phone earlier) then said, oh, well, it probably happened last night during the storm -- we lost our internet connection for a bit.

D'oh!! But, apparently, she didn't think of this when I'd called in earlier... So, she called the corporate support line, got the server reset and it's working fine now. Of course, the other tidbit of info I got out of the exchange is that they only change the passwords once a week. Even worse, she pulled out the "password" book and left it open on the counter right in front of me (with a caption advising them to not show the book to guests). Sometimes it's scarily easy to social engineer people into giving you info they shouldn't.

First Day in Cleveland

We started out the day with a visit to the Historic Johnson Farm -- a restored farmhouse from the mid-1800s. Very cool... especially since the lady of the house had filled the home with bright colors and brushwork painting on all the woodwork (they had examples of what was left of the orginal paintwork, and they'd gone to great lengths to analyze the paint and recreate it). The drive out and back was beautiful... off the beaten path, and through some lovely farm country, with trees everywhere.

Found the hotel with no problem, got checked in and did the Happy Dance when we saw the ethernet port ($9.95 a day, but broadband! On our own computer!). Registration for Vulkon was typically bad. An extremely long line of people waiting to get to a table manned by two people... one of whome looks up names on a list, the other pulls the pre-printed bag from a box after the name is cleared and puts it in a badgeholder to hand to the attendee, while Guy #1 crosses the name off the list. Pretty much THE most ineffecient way they could come up with to do it.

Then we headed out the White Castle to grab some dinner. The good news: rackham likes them as much as I do. The bad news: Rackham likes them as much as I do... and he almost never visits anywhere with a White Castle.

We had tickets for the Cocktail Party, which was fun, but sort of in spite of the way it was set up. We met up with sp23, Theresa B, acristleo and trainboydave and spent the evening sitting at a table chatting. The room was incredibly small for the event (enough so that I wondered if they were exceeding the maximum normally allowed), and until people started leaving, there was barely room to move.

Robia LaMorte always surprises me with how young she looks, and she's absolutely gorgeous in person. Mercedes McNab seemed a lot more at ease than she had at the Nashville Vulkon (and I still can't believe how tiny she is). George Hertzberg is an absolute doll... easy to chat with, likes to goof off, and is incredibly tall and thin.

And then there's ASH. Wow. That man is so unbelievably hot. I mean, seriously hot. I thought he was good-looking and bordering on hot on the show, but in person... whoa. He's got the cheekbone thing working for him and this personality that just sparkles through. He's fantastic with the fans and made sure to move around and chat with different people... though the best part was when Robia came over and he got this absolutely delighted expression on his face and gave her a huge hug and a kiss... then they chatted for a bit while people snapped photos.

Fun start to the convention, though I suspect the poor planning of things today may be a harbinger of things to come.