Personal Dork Assistant

Origins Pre-Show Notes

Was bored at work in Taiwan one day and found out that Mike was still looking for a roommate at Origins. I was going to be in the States for the show, and I just got paid, so I said what-the-hell and booked myself a flight to Columbus, Ohio. Last-minute ticket price was a bit painful, but not totally out of line and I could swing it. Mike saved a hundred bucks on American, but he had to get to Columbus through Dallas. I paid extra and went UAL through Chicago.

Paying full fare has its good points, as I got an Economy Plus seat on the redeye to Chicago with no one in the next seat. Still couldn't really sleep, though, since I couldn't turn my head to the side without pushing on the Etymotic headphones, and I can't bear to fly without them in. For the first time I saw someone else wearing Etys on a plane, he had the ER-4P, with the green pod. Didn't try to greet my headphone brother-in-arms, as the Way of the Ety is all about blocking out external stimuli. Got into Chicago at about 6am local time, had 1.5 hrs before my connecting flight, so I could wander the massive concourse foraging for breakfast. Man, putting out fresh Cinnabons just as the redeyes come in is like a license to print money. Decided to skip the hyper-sweet treat, though, and kept going in search of coffee. So there was this one place with a long line, with a big sign proclaiming "Award Winning Coffee!" So I get my cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. The muffin was the usual sweet, cakey stuff, about what I expected out of cheapie airport food. The coffee was pure swill, though. Even the Oakland Airport's brew is better. Sure, they don't really do justice to the Peets they purpose to use, but at least they make it strong enough to taste. Woulda loved to have a blueberry-millet muffin from The Cheeseboard with a latte from the real Peets Store #1.

Spent most of Wednesday looking through Magic cards. My goal for the convention was to not play Magic at all, but there were enough artists present at the show to make it worthwhile to sort through my entire collection picking out signable cards. Holy crap has Mark Poole done a ton of Magic cards, including some big-money ones. Debated with Sam whether to get my Alpha/Beta/Unlimited set of Ancestral Recalls signed. We'll see. In the end it's all about collectability rather than resale value for me anyway.

Got into Columbus and I'm killing an hour by writing this up while waiting for Mike to get in. Decided to bring the iBook along instead of the Powerbook. It's lighter and more durable, plus it's old enough so that it won't be a hideous loss if something happened to it, but it's still good enough to run MacOS X and the basics. Plus now that I have my array of USB-charging cables it's not that big a weight trade-off between the iBook and the two or three bricks that I would've had to bring without the computer. Hopefully there will be some sort of access at the Con so I can upload this.