I’m now at Eric’s for dinner. Leisa will be home after a meeting. The kids are upstairs on their computers. It’s 1631 as I type this.
After my last entry, I headed out to Barrhaven to pick up mail at the Greenbank location. I had quite a bit waiting for me. The UPS Store staff are so good to me. They earn their money and I get very good value from it.
Having retrieved several cheques (yet to be processed) and the pens for both PGCon and BSDCan, I headed to the nearest Starbucks to get back on the net and start printing up badges. Sorry, Bell’s Hot Spot is not working. Lovely. So I eat my lunch and continue trying. No luck here. I head back to the other Starbucks on Coventry Road. That was working.
Sorry, no good here either. I phone Bell. Twenty minute later, after going through numerous configuration settings, they acknowledge *they* have a problem and are fixing it. Lovely. So not only have I wasted twenty minutes of air time, and driving from one location to another, your monitoring system isn’t good enough to recognize a problem and notify someone. I am not impressed.
By now, it’s about 1245 and I start processing badges and invoices. Each attendee needs a badge and an invoice. I could send out the invoice automatically via email. This would reduce the workload at conference and reduce paper consumed. Nice idea, but to do it right, it needs to be a PDF and I haven’t gotten that far yet. Patches welcome. No, please, do not make suggestions as to what I could do. I want *you* to do the work.
The badges were pretty straight forward. Over the past 5 years, I have documented the procedure rather well. I run the SQL, drop the data to a text file, and do a mail merge into a Word document. Yes. I do use Microsoft. Get over yourself.
After generating the word document, I make slight adjustments so the badges look good. Some people put very long organisation names, or none at all. These require manual adjustments so they don’t look like BSDCan has done a half-assed job.
On to the invoices. This is not so well documented. At least it wasn’t before this year. Now it is well documented. It took me about 30 minutes to figure it out. Now I have a bunch of HTML files that I will load up into my browser and send to my printer. I’ll probably do that tomorrrow. Or perhaps tonight, depending on what time I get home.
I no longer need to track down an ATX power supply. The speaker will be bringing one. I just need a power cable for him.
Another speaker told me he’s booked his own accommodation. Great. One less thing for me to do.
I contacted two speakers and asked if I could move them from Residence to Les Suites. They are arriving on the 15th. Les Suites are booked full on the 13th and 14th, and I have two speakers arriving on the 13th and could use the Residence room for them. I have yet to hear back from those two. Hopefully they will reply soon.
I also heard from a speaker who would like a Letter of Invitation. I sent him off a draft copy for him to fill in the blanks. When he returns it, I will create a PDF on BSDCan letterhead and ship it off to him. This will probably help him when he crosses the border. He’s right. He should have asked for this months ago. :)
I phoned my U of O conference contact and left a message. I’ve done the catering numbers and have totals for BSDCan. She’ll probably call me back on Thursday.
The amended proofs for the PGCon t-shirt arrived. I sent them off to the sponsor for approval. They made suggestions. I replied. We’ll see.
A speaker asked me if he could withdraw, in case we were overbooked. I said it would be nice if he wrote up his talk.
I processed a few more registrations that were cleared up by email replies.
I sent off an email to speakers telling them that if they haven’t already heard about a room for themselves, then I’ve not done it and they should contact me.
I refunded a BSDCan attendee who will not be able to attend.
And now it’s 1651 and Eric’s son Adam is playing Super Smash Bros. Lovely. Hopefully we can eat soon. I’m starving.
