Tech Tribulations of a Con Chair

Aaaaaand the program book is at the printers.

I was really good this year, and did the cover design and most of the text & layout well in advance. Which meant I was only up until 2 am instead of all night when something inevitably went wrong.

The program book took some extra work to get some extremely long panel descriptions to fit, but the real problem was the pocket program. I do that one document in a nearly-prehistoric piece of software, because it has really powerful and easy-to-use typesetting controls -- far better than any modern word processor. But because it is nearly-prehistoric, it won't run on any of my newer computers. The elderly laptop runs it just fine, but when I go to make the PDF, if the document is complicated (which this is), the elderly laptop runs out of memory and the bottom of the PDF comes out blank. So I have to make the PDF on my ancient desktop machine, which does PDFs just fine, and works great 95% of the time -- the other 5% being late at night when I'm up against a deadline, which is when it crashes and crashes more and then won't even boot. Luckily this time it only needed an hour of unplugged rest time before it was willing to play again (it's taken much longer in the past). So then I was able to transfer the file again (by 3.5" floppy rather than USB, because loading a USB is one of the things that will sometimes set it off when it's having a bad day; luckily I have an external floppy drive for the elderly laptop), and readjust the bottom margin because the software automatically resets it for its default printer, and oh yes the font I had to convert from OTF to TTF (because the ancient desktop doesn't speak OTF) seemed to work fine, and then make a perfectly lovely PDF. Which I then took to the newest laptop and submitted to the library's remote print queue, because my color printer is RIP, and then went and picked up this morning. And then came home and did it all again, because I wanted to tweak some of the colors.

And now I get to wait for the proof copy, which is when I find out if I get to do it all again again, because printers are not standardized and the professional print-shop printer has historically produced darker, more muted colors than the home/small office printers I've had access to. Which I'm actually counting on this year, I want the darker/muted effect, but I'm having to guess based on previous years' files and printouts. Fun, whee.

On the other hand, the badges were easy to lay out and the merge worked first time without hiccups. That's unusual if not unprecedented, enough so that I keep checking the file to make sure I didn't put the wrong year or something.

I'd be annoyed with the person who told me they aren't coming just after I finished all the layout, except that going back and taking their name off panels was when I discovered a couple of spectacular cock-ups I'd made. So that actually saved me a probably much-later and more-stressful re-edit.

And now I get to drink a great deal of coffee and work on some of the other things I need to get ready before I leave in a week. Eek!

It was a dark and stormy cookie

Cookies have been made. And believe me, coming up with cookies that fit the theme of "a dark and stormy night" that aren't all gray-to-black was an interesting challenge.

For my future reference:

3 batches of dough: 2 hours
making all of it* into cookies: ~5 hours
  plus about half an hour of setup
decorating: 5.5+3.0+4.0+6.0+8.0+5.5 = 32 hours
photographing & packing: ~1.5 hours

So about 41 hours total.

I only ended up decorating about half the cookies; fortunately, largely by chance, I started with the most thematic ones, so when I ran out of me, I could stop without much loss of effect. The rest will wait until I get back, and get done for the household. (These cookies last just short of forever.) Since membership's low this year, I'm hoping:

44 lightning bolts (3 sizes)
~60 clouds (3 sizes)
12 moons
39 candles
15 creepy houses
23 ravens

will prove to be plenty.

*I always make more dough than I need, because when I first started doing these, I would invariably burn several trays, and depending on the shapes, also break quite a few. But I've been getting better; this time I didn't burn a single one, and broke very very few. So there's an awful damn lot of cookies around here.