Doug's Home On The Web "Now monochrome monitor compatible!"

Well, this year's MFF came and went. And man, did it ever go well. This was one of those conventions for me where everything seemed to go right and fall into place. It was a rare moment at the con when I didn't have something to do or someone to chat with.

As is my tradition with attending conventions, I tend to work them too. This year, I worked in Operations for Puma and his staff. It was a different experience, and overall I enjoyed being in more of an attendee-facing role at this year's MFF.

As I mentioned in a previous comment, Raptor Red was there, in a new version of his fursuit. He was rather expressive, which is normal for him:

The fursuit parade had 574 fursuiters this year:

This year's Anthrocon went pretty well for me, at least from a staff/Operations standpoint! This being our 6th year in Pittsburgh, things went pretty well. Equipment arrived when it was supposed to, nothing went horribly wrong or got broken, and set up and teardown went fairly well. In that aspect, the con was somewhat "boring" for me, which is actually fantastic.

During my slow days (Friday and Saturday), I actually got to spend some time out enjoying the con, dropped in on a couple of panels, and got some facetime with some folks. My socializing was to such an extent that I didn't even drink all that much, which my wallet had no issues with.

Total stats for this year's Anthrocon were 4,400 furries from 39 countries, 854 fursuits in the fursuit parade, and $11,522 raised for The Toonseum.

Here's a picture of the Toonseum folks (except for the chef, which was Chiaroscuro):

There's not much else for me to add, because the con was more of the same awesomeness that I'm used to experiencing.

Naturally, I have many more photos than are show on in this post The full collection can be found here, with my "main" pictures found here.

Enjoy!

Having missed last year's FCN due to injury, I had to use this con to make up for 2 years' worth of FCN and well, it worked! Here's how I felt:

I had an enormous amount of fun at this year's FCN. Highlights include:

- Making lots of sushi (sushi-grade fish was ordered for this)

- Watching the "Will It Blend" panel, wherein the presenters proceeded to both blend and freeze various items

- Making sushi for the second day in a row

- Getting to see/socialize with people I don't normally get to talk to because we're both busy at other cons

- Working security again, and doing badge check in higher traffic areas, so I got to chat with people who came by

What else was there to like? Ah yes, the bartenders! They absolutely loved us this year, and one of them even remembered me from 2 years ago. (and gave me grief about not making it last year, haha)

I have many more pictures that I can't post here, so instead I'll give the link, as usual: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157626479309537/

Next con for me is Anthrocon! I'll see you all there. Stay safe.

FurFright was a fun convention this year! It started off with a bang in my first security shift on Friday afternoon. I got a call for "first aid in the parking lot", which Cliff Husky and I responded to. Turned out that "first aid" was an understatement. We arrived on the scene of an (MVA) motor vehicle accident at the entrance of the parking lot, with one person injured pretty badly. We attended to him, with Cliff taking his vitals and history and me holding his neck in the c-spine position for a good 10 minutes until an ambulance arrived and EMTs relieved us.

That was the first ever auto accident that I worked. Was a little nervous afterward, but not nearly as shaken up as I thought I'd be. And what did I learn from this? Get first aid training. You never know when you'll need it.

The rest of the shift was uneventful, other than trying to figure out the hotel's weird layout. Apparently it was added onto twice, and had been rebuilt after a fire at least once, so the layout was very... unplanned. Hallways that had multiple ramps on them, stairways that only went up 1 floor or even skipped a floor, and ramps that went in circles. It was like M.C. Escher himself designed the hotel!

Saturday afternoon had me killing time with P-Kitty and other folks, and somewhere along the line it was suggested that I borrow a fur named Manik's fursuit. He was cool with this, so I put on the head, paws, and my overcoat, and walked around the con for about half an hour. I went up to several folks I knew in personal and said hi. Poor Protocollie... I think I broke his brain!

That's right: it was the first time I ever fursuited. And in a cheetah fursuit, at that. Draw your own conclusions.

On a related note, I went and registered the domain cheopard.com. Be afraid.

On Saturday night, I dropped by the Gun Furs panel, hosted by Cliff Husky. It was pretty informative, and I learned quite a bit about all the different details that surround guns, and the legal aspects of them.

On Friday and Saturday nights, I went to the dances, and played around with the ISO and shutter speed settings on my camera. I got some pretty interesting pictures:

The whole set of dance photos can be found here.

My birthday was also on Halloween, and the first time I celebrated it. Shortwave, Ferian, and others bought me drinks at the bar, an acceptable birthday present! Chiaroscuro also got me a bottle of cider called "Lucky Lion", that I hope to enjoy with some friends soon.

As the con came to a close, I realized what an awesome time I had. Between the health issues I've had the last several months, and some other personal issues I had to deal with over the summer (which I now call "the lost summer"), I'd say that FurFright was a high point over the last 6 months or so. And I hope that this uphill trend in my mood and life in general continues.

Extra special thanks to Athy for the repeated doses of coffee. The stuff I had at 2:30 on Saturday morning was a huge help. It kept me up through 8 AM when my shift ended.

For the rest of my pictures, they can be found here.

Total attendance for the con was 1,284 attendees, as announced at closing ceremonies. The count for fursuiters in the parade was 287 coming out the ballroom, though the official count of fursuiters who actually made it to the end of the parade was about 40 lower. (don't have that number handy)

Finally, there were a few folks I was hoping to get contact info for:

- P-Kitty
- The guy I did first aid on (anyone know if he was okay?)
- Manik (the gentleman who let me borrow his fursuit)
- Clementine (the fox with the super bright glow sticks)

If anyone knows of online contact info for these people, please let me know in the comments!

Next con for me will be Midwest FurFest. See you all then.

I drove out to Pittsburgh this past weekend for the Western PA Furry Weekend, a small gathering of furs from the Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. Despite being in existence for 10 years, I never attended before, and since I missed a few cons last spring, I decided to change things up a little and visit this one. I'm glad I did!

I spent most of Friday evening helping out Firefox at registration. It was quite a change to work reg at a con where 116 attendees in total is less than the number of folks waiting in the on-site registration line at Anthrocon. In other words, it was rather relaxing and a pleasant change of pace.

Saturday afternoon was the picnic at Fireman's park. I got to spend several hours hanging out and socializing with friends, taking lots of pictures. I ended up bumping into Dobie and chatting about photography. He showed me how to use a flash in outdoor photography to "fill in" shadows cast by the sun, as well as how to tweak my camera settings to properly meter pictures. Here's a picture taken without flash fill and the same picture taken with flash fill. The second picture looks much closer to how the scene looked in person.

After dinner, the charity auction was held, and I ended up winning the pile of feline-related things:

One innovative thing that I saw WPAFW do was to put their all of their programming, plus their sponsor art onto a 2 GB USB stick and include it with their sponsorships. That was a pretty neat idea, and with 1.99 GB left on the USB stick, I now have something that I can use in the future.

Healthwise, my feet held up fine most of the weekend. They started to hurt after being on my feet for about 6 hours straight on Saturday, at which point I sat down for about 10 minutes, then was able to walk around some more. In other words: better than they've been in months!

Naturally, I took lots of pictures. The full archive can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157625097235542/

Overall, I had a rather good time this weekend. I'm going to try and make WPAFW next year. You should, too!

Looking back after this morning's stampede, I thought I'd share with folks how the webserver held up, since I know I am not the only geek out there. And, truth be told, I was a bit nervous myself, since I wasn't quite sure just how much traffic we would get and if the webserver would survive, or turn into a smoking crater.

Well, here's what we got:

The first hump is a manual backup I did last night. The second is the automatic backup that runs every morning, where the database and files are rsynced to a machine at another data center. The third hump at 9 AM was when we opened hotel reservations. 1.4 Megabits/sec doesn't look too bad, until you look at:

The 336 simultaneous connections a second was far more interesting. That's about 16 times the normal number of connections to the webserver.

So, what were the effects? Let's look at MySQL first:

Since folks keep asking me what conventions I work and whether I'm a staff member at such and such convention, I figured it was about time I made a list.

• Anime Central
  • IRT (Security) in 2009
• Anthrocon
  • Operations Director and Board of Directors from 2004 to present
  • Sysadmin and webmaster from 2006 to present
  • Operations staff in 2002 and 2003
  • Internet Room staff in 2000 and 2001
• Camp Feral
  • Staff member and workshop instructor in 2001
  • Past webmaster (2001 or so)
• Confluence
  • Security in 2011
  • Security from 2007 to 2009
• FurFright
  • Security from 2007 to present
  • Assistant Operations Director in 2006
• Furry Connection North
  • Webmaster and sysadmin from 2009 to present
  • Security in 2011
  • Security from 2008 to 2009
• MagFest
  • Security from 2007 to 2009
• MarCon
  • Art Show Security in 2007 and 2008
• MidWest FurFest
  • Operations staff in 2011
  • Artshow staff from 2008 to 2010
  • Artshow staff in 2003

Wow, this took a long time to write. :-) It was something I had been procrastinating on for awhile, mostly on account of me not uploading my pictures. Now that all of my pictures are up on Flickr, I can get down to writing about the con.

Anthrocon 2009 started for me on the Tuesday evening before the con. I met up with Whitefeet, Ethan Staghorne, and Pinky in Philadelphia. I picked up a rental car, and we headed out to Pittsburgh. Ethan brought along an iTrip and we took turns listening to each others' iPods.

Wednesday was a pretty calm day for me. I got Ops set up and running, and then got the Registration computers set up later in the evening. This year was a change, as I was tasked with writing the convention's registration software. So I made sure I had extra time to get everything set up and tested well in advance.

Come Thursday, I was starting to get the pre-launch jitters. People were lining up for onsite registrations, and I wanted to be sure that my software would work properly. Nik Vulper even remarked to me once that I had my "game face" on. When Registration did finally open around 3, I was please to see that my code did actually run properly. Other than making periodic backups and checking that the slave database server was staying in sync, I didn't have any serious work to do in Registration the rest of the weekend.

On Friday, I danced a bit in DJ Protocollie's dance that night, then swung by my room. I found waiting for me a 10-pack of small bottles of different Swedish liquors, courtesy of Ethan, and a printing out drinking songs to sing with them. Ethan explained that you were supposed to sing between shots. I just stared at incomprehensible Swedish between shots. (Swedish is almost as difficult to understand as Danish is, I might add :-)

Saturday was the quietst day for Con Ops. I spent a fair amount of time out and about the con that day. It was also the day we held the fursuiter parade, where a total of 640 fursuiters marched in it. I remember when the number was announced over the radio, I had to ask that it be repeated, because I wasn't sure I heard it right the first time.

Sunday was the "let's wrap things up day". Registration and Ops were winding down. All I had to do in reg was run final stats, make a final backup of the data, and pack up the computers. The total number of attendees at Anthrocon 2009? 3,776 attendees

Looking back after the con, there were a number of things that made it really fun:

Okay, I uploaded all of my pictures form Midwest FurFest. Okay, let's get the link to all of the pics out of the way: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157622889526042/. And now, pictures that I found especially interesting!

First picture is from the Method 1 Live show. Since the hosts couldn't have beer in con space, they instead reviewed Drank Beverage. Along the way, they also decided it would be a good idea to drink Brawndo, and even mix them in the same glass and drink the olive oil-colored concoction. That didn't end so well, as this picture tries to illustrate:

One Standard Issue Furpile that happened Sunday night outside of the dance:

And some actual huskies, who were part of last year's charity, came by to be trained for working with large crowds:

The first Steampunk fursuit that I recall seeing at a furry convention:

This Beast fursuit--or combination of fursuit and face paint, rather, was pretty cool. The first time I've seen someone do something like that, too:

Poor Raptor Red!

Want the rest of my pictures? They're at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157622889526042/. Have fun!

A picture of November and myself at Midwest FurFest.

Yes, I often wear a shirt and tie to furry conventions. The picture was his idea. :-)