Had a great time this past weekend, starting with the Rifftrax: Night of the Shorts 5 on Thursday. I got to the Castro Ttheatre about twenty minutes early, had to park about six blocks up the hill, and found a seat just before the show started. Great show, lots of fun. My favorite short was definitely "Live and Learn", a 50's era PSA about childhood accidents. After the show I got Paul F Tompkins’ signature in my Thrilling Adventure Hour graphic novel, and then I had to walk six blocks back up the hill to get to the car. That last block was a killer.
Tag: san francisco
Protected: Yesterday (all my troubles seemed so far away)
Protected: First post from the iPad
BayCon
I spent all day Friday at BayCon, the Bay Area’s largest sci-fi & fantasy convention. It’s been about fifteen years since my last con (and the last one was a small college-sized affair) so this was all pretty new to me. I mostly went so that I could meet the artist Guest of Honor Ursula Vernon and her husband Kevin Sonney (
It was a lot of fun. I drove, parked, wandered the wrong way around the parking structure/hotel/convention center, registered, and ended up in the throngs of people. I checked out the dealer’s room (where I picked up an anthology of sci-fi mysteries (a hard genre to pull off), and a couple of mid-sixties Peanuts and Charles Addams collections) and the art show (excellent leather masks by this one lady whose card I lost and some impressive work from the Bay Area Lego Club.) I attended a few panels throughout the day (one on costuming, one on how Doctor Who has endured all these years, and one about clockpunk, steampunk, & cyberpunk. I also poked my head around the entire con to see what else was going on. I found a nice Indian place a couple blocks away from the hotel for dinner and I got back in time to watch the presentation of the Guests of Honor. The author GOH, David Weber, is a great storyteller. After that I stuck around for charaoke (charity karaoke), but I was feeling some heartburn from the biryani for dinner so I never did turn in my slip to perform “Mahna Mahna.”
The big highlight of the day was meeting Kevin & Ursula at their table in the dealer’s room. As their unofficial segueographer I felt it my duty to bring them a nice snack so I brought some honey sticks from Buzzbee’s Honey, and I apologized for the box of food that I sent a couple months back. I browsed through Ursula’s selection of prints and chatted with her and Kevin while I picked out a few.
And the best part? I got a wombat sketch in my new notebook!
Other memorable moments:
* David Weber’s amalgamation of the worst con he’d ever been to – no schedule, no con staff, had to pay own expenses, con committee ended up in jail on fraud charges.
* “Sherp is a verb, isn’t it? It should be.”
* “Lots of planets have a Vancouver.”
* “Located next to the memorial Gorn.”
I spent most of yesterday napping off an on. I’m kind of glad I went on Friday when it was a little more sedate.
Joy, Inc.
So last night’s excursion was actually pretty fun. It turned out that we were going to see Rich Sheridan (menloprez), president of Menlo Innovations. He was talking about his book (Joy, Inc.) and how to build a culture of joy in the workplace. Not, as Gill was hoping, creating a culture. When you build a culture, you get to start from scratch, but often when you’re creating a culture you have to fight against the old culture.
So the presentation was at the Adobe building in SF but was actually presented by the Bay Area Agile Leadership Network. I think it was Gill’s first time at one of their meetups but she did recognize a few people from other meetups in the area. I got to introduce myself as her “plus one” and I finally came up with a good way to describe my work: 60% sitting around researching & planning and 60% climbing ladders & cutting lumber & painting. I don’t know where they got the pizzas that they provided, but I had a slice of a fig and bacon pizza, with balsamic vinaigrette and goat cheese that was just heavenly.
So the crux of Rich’s philosophy was that by creating an atmosphere of joy, where employees and customers came together to actually enjoy the work they were doing, that they could create better work. I was particularly impressed by his description of the technology anthropologists that his teams employ to study how the users work in the real world. And any culture that allows and encourages parents to bring in newborn children must be doing something right. I’m doing a bad job explaining it, but I was far more interested in what he had to say than I thought I would be when I got there. The entire presentation was recorded for later broadcast, but for now Rich put together a little page with some brief introductory materials.