Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

Dragon*con 2010 = Epic Win

My second Dragon*Con turned out to be an epic adventure full of awesome and win.

First there were epic lines for people that preregistered. When we got there, the outside line stretched all the way around the entire block where the Sheraton was. Once you got through that line, you got to wait in another line that zig-zagged back and forth through a large ballroom. A couple hours later, you get to the registration place under your last initial and then had to flip through a binder to find your name. Really? Flipping through a binder? So much for the digital age.

Fortunately that was the only really painful part of Dragon*Con. The fan panels were always packed. The only one I made it to was the B5 panel on Friday with Jason Carter and Claudia Christian, which was enough for me. Awesome.

Thursday I met up with my 2nd cousin, who I only found out about a couple of years ago even though my mom and her mom (both cousins) apparently talk to each other all the time. Very cool.

Saturday was the parade, then science and space track sessions and The Amazing Randi Q&A session. Again, awesome. Also got to meet Jewel Staite and got a picture signed. More awesome. Unfortunately I was too star struck to ask if I could get a picture taken with her, which would have been totally epic. Bought an Astronomy Cast CD and got both Dr Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain to sign it. Bought The Guild DVDs and got them both signed by Sandeep Pradikh and Jeff Lewis. Full of awesome.

The highlight of the day was walking up to Garrett Wang's table (Harry Kim from Star Trek: Voyager) and having him greet me with "Hello fellow Asian!". Epic, just epic.

Sunday turned out to be the most epic day of this year's Dragon*Con (at least for me anyway). Astronomy Cast podcast recording session where they were taking audience questions. One of my questions got asked (about radiation exposure in space, woot!). I also won the Galileoscope door prize! Can't wait to hear the episode. Then I got to meet and hang out with some coolfunamazing twitter people: @physicistlisa, @geeksoap, @fubbleskag, @capsteverogers and @geekleetist. Then it was BBQ at Fox Bros BBQ with my cousin and her husband (yum) followed by one of the most entertaining science track sessions I've been in (Strange and Unusual Research Strikes Back - The Workshop). People were given ice cream to test brain freeze, toilet preferences were discussed and a survey on nose picking was conducted.

Monday was wind down day with just one session on Ham Radio tricks. Almost makes me interested in getting into ham radio just for the antenna design aspects. Wandered through the exhibit hall picking up a few things, photo ops with my cousin (apparently the food pictures she kept taking weren't enough) and finally the road trip back home.

Many pictures to post soon. I have just under 500 pictures that I need to filter through.

Dragon*Con 2010 photos

A selection of photos from this year's Dragon*Con

The pre-registration line, once you get inside the building

Alien

The Captain

Touched by his(her) noodly goodness

I met people from the Internet!

See the rest of the photos here.

Charleston Eats: Duke's BBQ

The new James Island Duke's BBQ on Folly Rd opened up while I was away at Dragon*Con so I missed being one of the first to try it out.

Duke's occupies what used to be a Captain D's, so it's not very large inside. The first thing you see walking inside is the buffet line. $10 for the all you can eat buffet (including a drink). The selection is pretty standard: hash, rice, pulled pork, fried chicken, veggies, desserts.

The BBQ is pretty good here. Not quite as good as some of the other places I've been, but pretty darn tasty. I'm sure it will only improve over time. The fried chicken was also very tasty. I can also say that out of all the BBQ places I've been to in Charleston, this place has the best mac and cheese around.

There are 3 sauces to choose from: hot and mild mustard, and vinegar. The sauces are located above the buffet, so if you forget you'll have to go back to the line. I went for the vinegar sauce this trip and thought it was pretty good. Nicely tangy without having too much of that harsh vinegary taste you sometimes get with vinegar based sauces. Goes quite well with the pulled pork. A loaf of bread is provided on each table to go along with your BBQ.

Duke's already seems to have developed a following and was pretty busy inside when I stopped by for dinner on Tuesday. There was also a steady stream of cars driving around to the take-out window. It's walking distance (a longish walk) from my house and on the way home from work, so it will probably end up being a place I go to more often than I should.

Starry dice

My latest geeky acquisition is this spiffy dice bag from DragonChow.

Handmade by GeekyLyndsay (who happens to live in Calgary of all places), it's the perfect size to hold the mug-o-dice I picked up at Dragon*Con. I have more dice than I know what to do with now, but at least they're all contained in this great dice bag. I may have to get back into gaming because of this.

Stuff I used to know

Classes have been going on for about 3 weeks now, and it hasn't been too bad so far. BioE 846 (Biomedical Basis for Engineered Replacement) has turned out to be essentially an intro physiology course and BioE 820 (Biomechanics) has just been math review so far (all about tensors).

Basically I've been resurrecting a bunch of stuff I learned back in undergrad and grad school oh so many years ago.

Hopefully things will get more interesting soon.

Things that don't change

Keeping track of - signs has always been the bane of my attempts at math. Somehow I always manage to lose track of at least one - sign during the course of working out a problem.

On one notable occasion working on a homework assignment for a boundary value problems class (partial differential equations galore), one question evolved into 13 pages of math scribblings. Eventually I decided it was far too ugly to be any kind of correct, so I pitched it all and started over. I found my mistake in a single - sign on the second page and wrote the solution up in 4 pages.

20 years later, things haven't changed. Still making the same mistakes with - signs or other silly little math errors. On the BioE 846 quiz I got back today, one of the easier questions I ended up getting wrong because of an off-by-1 mistake.

One positive: with the additional years of experience, I'm at least catching most of my stupid little mistakes earlier.

Random Charleston memory: Not what I thought

Just a few days after moving to Charleston, I was in an oddly named grocery store called Publix (at the time I thought it was an odd name).

Walking to the checkout lines, I saw this girl wearing shorts. A fairly ordinary pair of shorts, except printed in great big letters was the word "COCKS". Right on her butt. Pretty hard to miss.

"Wow, that's pretty bold advertising" I thought. I mean really, it said "COCKS" in great big letters right on her ass. What else was a guy supposed to think?

It wasn't until a few of weeks later, after getting a little more settled in and a little more familiar with the local vernacular that I realized her shorts must have referred to the USC Gamecock, and not the other thing I originally thought of.

Tour de Q

For my second Gowalla trip, I created the Lowcountry BBQ trip.

Most of the destinations are drawn from previous Lowcountry BBQ meatups so with the exception of a couple of places, I've sampled the BBQ fare at all of them. It's probably not a definitive tour, but all the places on it are what I would consider trip-worthy.

Go take the tour. I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy every bite of it.

Playing with filters

In my Cabinet-o-Gear at work, I found a couple of old darkroom safelight filters. One of them is an amber/brown Kodak #6B filter, and the other is a green one.

According to this Kodak document, the brown 6B filter is used for blue-sensitive x-ray film with transmission bands between 560-660 nm (a fairly wide band covering green to orange) and > 740 nm (getting into the infra-red).

The green one (it's not marked but I'm guessing it could be a Kodak 7B) has a transmission band between 500-580 nm (covering most of the green band of the spectrum). It transmits the light from my green laser pointer (532 nm) pretty well, but completely blocks my red laser pointer (625-680 nm).

I thought it would be interesting to see what my camera saw through the filters. They're pretty old and a little beat up so they don't exactly have the best optical qualities but they still created some interesting photos.

The images with the green safelight filter look pretty neat

The brown filter produces a neat look

The green filter images turned out a lot brighter than I expected for a band pass filter. Most digital camera sensors use RGB Bayer filters to produce colour images which explains the higher than expected sensitivity with the green filter.

I'll have to see if I can clean and polish up these filters and play with them some more.

Sleeping Nala

The positions I sometimes find the dogs sleeping always amuse me

Unboxing an Old One

In the mail today there was a package. A smallish package, but a highly anticipated one (by some).

Removing a page torn from a volume of the California Law Review revealed Orange Cthulu from @cthuluchick!

Orange Cthulu rose out of his box to survey his new domain

and meet two of his new subjects

One of them had other ideas though

BarcampCHS 2011

This isn't the final version, but it's pretty close. Thanks to Seth Deitch for creating it for us!

BarcampCHS is still looking for sponsors and volunteers, so if you're interested in helping out contact us.

Yes, TheDigitel is spelled wrong. I told you it wasn't finished yet.

Gronk

Go read it. Be amused.

Star Trek: Of Gods and Men

I must be more out of touch with the Star Trek community than I though. Somehow I managed to completely miss hearing anything at all about Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. I only found out about it earlier this evening when I was looking up Garret Wang in IMDB for editing a previous post.

Apparently ST:OGAM was made three years ago in 2007 as a 3 part web miniseries tribute for the 40th anniversary of Star Trek. It takes plot elements from at least 5 episodes (I stopped counting), actors from each series and spins it all into 3 episodes and just over 90 minutes of viewing. I'm pretty sure everybody who appeared in the show had some connection with at least one Star Trek series.

I really enjoyed watching it, and thought it was well done. This Trek fan approves, even though I'm probably the last one to find out about it.

BarcampCHS tickets available now!

Tickets for this year's BarCamp Charleston are now available through Eventbrite!

Tickets this year are $10 to help cover some of the costs associated with Barcamp. That gets you breakfast, lunch, a t-shirt and the awesomeness that is BarcampCHS. There's also an individual sponsor option ($25) which includes the above plus parking and the knowledge that you're helping to make the awesomeness that is BarcampCHS possible.

The new website is also up and running so go propose your sessions!

Cthulu in the office

Orange Cthulu arrived at my office today and promptly started into discussions with Cylon Snowbot

"This is of no concern to you, mortal". Uh oh.

Then he floated over to meet with Dogbert and Tux, using the Mug of VI as his platform

More hushed whispering. It wasn't long before Brain and Snowbot joined them

I think I should be afraid.

Mug o Dice

At Dragon*Con, the dice booths are always chronically busy. There you can find all manner of dice for gaming. There's also the large tanks full of dice where you can buy a cup, container or pitcher of dice, either randomly scooping it out or picking them out yourself (which costs more).

I've always been a sucker for dice, so I picked up a random mug scoop-o-dice to play with and also to fill the dice bag I was expecting to receive.

I figured it was time I went through and looked at what I got out of the random mug.

• 17d20
• 12d10
• 4d8
• 15d6
• 2d4

A total of 50 dice. Not a single d12 in the entire mug though. A little disappointed. d12s are one of my favourites.

I'm not sure why, but I've always enjoyed just picking up a handful of dice and rolling them. Most times I don't even bother looking at the numbers. Feeling a handful of dice rolling around in your hand, hearing them clatter on the table. Rinse and repeat. It's got kind of zen quality to it.