* The Road to Glory is Lit by Coherent Light *

This immense assemblage of text [I think Corwin referred to it as "thesis
grade quantity"] is a general review of the last few cons and overall chain of
events that have comprised the HitherTo of 1987.  It tracks the further
development of the floating laser show and general bunch of hackers known to
many as the Frob Mob.  In part this promises [threatens?] to be a bit of a
brag about crewing light shows ["We came, we set up, we lased"], but it's
appropriate in some way because we really *have* put a lot of time and energy
into this stuff.  An effort will be made here less toward chest-pounding and
and more toward entertainment.  This also is the last flame created on our
last surviving tops-20 system, red.rutgers.edu, may it either rest in peace or
supply lots of spare parts for someone else's 20, whatever DEC decides to do
with the thing.  Sigh.  A lot of us got somewhat emotionally attached to that
machine; I spent quite a bit of January 88 shoveling out 5 years' worth of old
dusty files and adapting all my cute hacks to work on the VMS box I'm now
mostly living on.  But back to the story...

We first encounter Evecon, which was actually *in* 1987 this year as opposed
to its usual scheduling right before NewYears.  Since the weekends were a bit
screwy it was scheduled to begin Jan 2 instead.  However, the month or so
before this was the usual frenzied Christmas rusharound, most of which I spent
bending hunks of brick strap into little handy positionable mirror mounts.  We
had learned at Philcon that "gooping" and duct-taping mirrors to the walls was
not really the correct way to run a laser show -- they soon suffered from
inevitable sag, and everything would drift out of alignment, especially as the
room became warm from being closed up and dark with a lot of people and lasers
in it.  No, the plan here was to vastly enhance the traditional EveCon light
show, hitherto the undertaking of Glenn, Spam, Chris and associates, with as
much laser light as we could crank out and splash around the room.  The idea
for this had started back at PhilCon in November or so, when Glenn wandered
into our room to see some laser things and we got to talking.  It was obvious
that the argon laser simply had to come to EveCon and be part of the show,
along with whatever else we could drag along.  Thus it was tentatively agreed
on, so as the end of December drew nearer, I kept realizing that I didn't have
this or the other bit of hardware and sitting down and building it.  No, I
didn't get a lot of "real work" done, either.

One important supply stop was the Rutgers surplus-property warehouse, where I
discovered a most wonderful building full of *history* -- most of it was full
of old desks and such, but in the "lab equipment" section I found some of the
most amazing old contraptions, most of which were completely useless for my
current purpose but held my attention for many minutes while I turned them
over and over and tried to figure out their functions.  I heartily recommend a
visit to anyone interested in blowing the dust off old vacuum tubes and
silk-wrapped hand-wound coils and realizing the painstaking work and attention
to detail that went into the construction of scientific equipment back then.
Armed with this inspiration and the pile of junk I'd culled from those
shelves, I went up front to the desk fully expecting to empty my wallet for it
all -- a piece of a projector of some sort containing more front-surface
mirror than I'd ever use, what was left of an *old* He-ne laser, a couple of
slow-rev motors, etc -- I handed the guy the *five dollars* he asked for and
walked out in complete amazement.  A week and a half before I'd been frantic
trying to determine where I'd get enough front-surface mirror to construct
about fifty of my little positionables, because Edmund Scientific was being
rather backward about shipment, and now I had *tons* of the stuff.  Breaking
it off the double-sticky tape in the old cabinet without cracking the glass,
however, was another matter entirely, but with a sharpened piece of brick
strap and perseverance I had soon junked the scrap metal and was happily
spreading little tiny shards of glass around my room.  There is something
sexually gratifying about glass cutting.  You make this tiny, almost
invisible line, across its surface, and apply pressure.  Bang!  It breaks
precisely along that line, defying everything your mind usually assumed about
glass, in that you could normally never tell which way it would break.  Many
times did I marvel at this phenomenon, until I had a large heap of little 1x1
inch squares of the stuff.  And as you might expect, the old stuff from
Surplus was better than the smaller, more expensive piece I'd ordered from
Edmund -- the silvering was denser, less flawed, and a lot more robust.  It
turns out that front-surface optics are really essential to this sort of
thing, because the thru-glass attenuation and beam spreading given by
rear-surface mirrors quickly becomes a problem if you have a lot of them.

Thus the majority of December, in between work and finding the Christmas
presents to fill the frighteningly miniscule demand I'd been informed of, was
spent procuring and building laser toys.  [My family never knows what it wants
for Christmas, within the limits of practical purchasing power, that is.]  In
a while I had a small army of completed mirror mounts lined up in ranks across
my desk; the slow motors received lubrication and brackets from which to hang
them at the proper angle.  I then went shopping for appropriate things to hang
from them; I already had a small version of those little round faceted glass
balls you hang in your windows, I needed more like it.  I holstered the
portable and headed down to the local flea-market type place, where I
purchased a larger ball and found an antique store that had skads of glass
frobs from crystal chandeliers.  Here I had the most trouble I ever
encountered in *buying* something.  I was shopping through the boxes of these
things using the portable, of course, and the large overbearing lady with a
thick Dutch accent or some such runs up and starts waving her arms and yelling
at me because she didn't understand what I was doing to her merchandise and
her dog, who seemed intensely interested in the little moving red light.
Luckily I had already picked out a reasonable selection of the things; I
informed her that she could choose to accept my money for the things or not,
but either way I was walking out of there with what I had come to obtain.  She
took my money, but when I tried to reassure her that there was nothing to be
afraid of, she started up again and making threats of calling security.  I
told her "Call who you like, I've done nothing to harm you or your store" and
walked out.  But at least I had my little glass frobs to hang from the motors.
One more stop for a roll of monofilament, and I was ready to make interesting
shapes walk across the walls.  One more idea-turned-reality, actually
completed at home on Chrismas Eve, was a sort of kludgey keyboard with which I
intended to quickly switch beams around to various places.  The idea was to
set up a bunch of interesting destinations for the switched beams, and in
effect "play" this keyboard in sync with a musical track.  This was
alpha-tested at my parents' house in the living room, where I took the argon
and Mom's laser and set up the first of a series of impromptu optics benches.
[Oh, I didn't mention Mom's laser?  Oh yeah -- one of the first things to do
that month was to throw together a power supply and a box for a spare He-Ne
tube I had sitting around, and present it to her for Christmas as a very late
birthday present.  Having seen what lasers could do with her collection of
miscellaneous crystals and such, she wanted her own and was promised same,
"someday", and since I missed her birthday, I managed to get this done for
Christmas.  Had a helluva time getting it to work, too, since this tube
apparently wanted through-the-glass triggering instead of through the
electrodes like a normal tube -- but finally I had a nice little compact
package that started reaonably reliably, and she was utterly delighted to
receive same, in a Vadic 3467 box yet.]  Anyway, I canvassed the house for the
sturdiest coffee table I could find, and set up what I envisioned to be a
reasonable testbed laser show in the living room.  Dad obligingly provided a
bit of smoke from his cigarettes, and with the lights out things were looking
pretty nifty in there with beams being switched into Mom's cabinet full of
rocks, through the spinning glass thingies, all accompanied with Jarre on the
tape drive.  It was here that I noticed the chief problem with the keyboard:
when the finger lifting the piece of brick strap holding the mirror was
slightly off-center, the beam would miss a faraway target.  I found I could
correct for this reasonably easily by rolling my finger under the key, but it
detracted from the "instant switching" effect I was looking for.  I wanted
beams to go blam, pow, zap instead of zap, fzz -- er, uh, fix, pow, well, I
meant *pow* really, oops, my finger moved again, etc.  Anticipating being
placed in a smallish function room at the hotel like the light show always had
before, I didn't worry about this too much because with practice I got better
at making the beams go where they were supposed to.

Sometime in here I received a message from Phil entitled "More blue sex!!",
which was a huge win because now we had *two* nice powerful and pretty argon
lasers.  Using the data I'd obtained from mine, he had gotten his working, and
in the same way I'd done back in August, shoveled a deskful of parts into a
box and brought them along.  Our total inventory now stood at two argons, a
pile of random He-Ne's, two deflection systems, a mess of my little mirror
mounts and crystals, and shitloads of duct tape.  We were ready to roll, we
thought.

And roll we did.  We all eventually arrived at MGrant's Luxury High-Rise, only
to find his position in it being lowered somewhat and the place in a state of
utter chaos.  Apparently the person who they were renting the original
apartment from had decided to sell or re-rent it, and they were in effect
being forced to move from the old unit to another one in the other tower of
the same complex.  Thus Mike and his brother and Bob, the other roomie, were
making frequent trips with hand trucks through the basement of the place.  The
building has a large number of really brain-dead rules, one being that the
"proper" way to move is between the hours of 8am and 5pm or some such, and you
have to hire "professional" movers to do the work for you.  Feh!!  All sixteen
tons of that stuff was schlepped down, across and up again by the cheap,
24-hours available, muscle power of the residents, and quite a bit of it
within the two days I was there and lending occasional help.  Another
brain-dead rule is that no waterbeds shall be owned by any resident.  Mike
drained his out the window, nineteen floors down the side of the building, and
the maintenance people thought a pipe had broken on the roof.  Luckily we
caught said maintenance person downstairs looking at the water raining down
outside the back door and told him what was going on.  He laughed and thought
it was funny and was glad of not having to go fix something, but the story got
back to the building association president lady with who I was currently
embroiled in a battle over their parking policy, which is even more brain-dead
than the rest of it all.  My association with the "offending" waterbed owner
blew this little fight right out of the water, and she refused to talk to any
of us anymore.  Oh well.

One of the last things to go was the snake tank.  This contained the boa,
which besides being in violation of the "no pets" rule and previously owned by
Vicka was very large, and when we were there was due up to be fed.  Six rats
were introduced one by one into the cage, and while Geoff Goodfellow, Mike,
Phil, I, and some other people stood around and offered comments, the food
chain continued inside.  The normally quite sluggish serpent would sort of
slowly drift its head toward the hapless rodent, and in a blinding flash of
speed would strike and roll itself over about three times headfirst, around
the rat, and exert a steady squeeze for a good five minutes until it was sure
the rat was dead [it could probably feel the rat's heartbeat through its
body].  Then the carcass would be released, and ingested whole, while the body
of the snake went through some amazing contortions to facilitate this.  It was
a surprisingly clean operation -- the only blood spilled was from the initial
holding bite, small punctures.  However, I think I'd prefer to continue eating
the same way I do now...

Anyway, the Thursday before the con rolled around, which was also very close
to their last day of residency in the old apartment.  Some more loads made
their way across, including the support structure for the now-empty waterbed
[that sucker was *heavy*!].  It wasn't really until midnight or so that we
actually got out of the place and headed down across DC to the hotel, which
was just across the Potomac in a place called Crystal City, which sounded
eminently appropriate as a place to go do a laser show.  We cruised down the
deserted street and finally found the thing.  It seemed appropriate to head
for the loading dock to unload all the stuff, for which we had to drive all
the way around the other end of the block and up this weird little service
road behind another building.  I got out of the car and immediately noticed a
*loud* high-pitched squeal, looked up and saw the business end of an
ultrasonic motion detector.  The loading dock was locked, so I danced around
in front of this frob until finally one of the security people came out to
find out what was triggering the detector, and was a bit nonplused to discover
a bunch of random people pulled into his loading dock, wanting to unload lots
of equipment at 2 in the morning.  However, they were eminently helpful once
they realized what we needed -- they provided a couple of big flatbed pallets,
which we loaded up and thus quickly filled our room with the stuff.  The first
thing we noticed was the *motion detector* on the wall of the *hotel room*.
This gross invasion of privacy was quickly investigated and found to be
powered off, but just to be sure we hung a sonalert on the power leads so that
if it ever did power up we'd know about it in short order.  The next thing we
found was that the room next to us had an open connecting door, and was a
magnificent suite.  We decided that moving into it would get the hotel upset,
and besides, it had two doors to the hall, and I didn't have enough extra Frob
Mob locks to fill the doors.  It also contained a motion detector which was
similarly powered off, so we considered ourselves safe moving around it to
investigate.  Then the beds in our room got moved up against the connecting
door, and we left it alone and empty.

I had talked to Bruce Evry, the founding force and chief masochist behind
EveCon, about what and when, and it turned out that he had planned to put us
in the *main ballroom* on *Friday night*, as opposed to a small room on
Saturday like I'd expected.  Thus it was rather imperative that we arrive
early so we could spent the day Friday setting up, before the con really got
rolling at all.  When we arrived we found some other hard-core con folk
wandering around, one of which was Andy Kaufman who came by and deposited this
weird thing with two fresnel lenses at either end of a tube in our room.  We
did some cursory first-level exploring and found cameras all *over* the place
-- one of the most paranoid-seeming hotels we'd ever found ourselves in.  But
the important places, like the roof, were essentially completely unguarded by
anything.  When we arrived there was a *house* in the lobby constructed
entirely of sugar frobs -- but this was gone the next day.  Apparently the
hotel didn't trust the convention folks to leave such a thing alone.  But the
main thing to do now was sleep, so we could rise early and start dealing with
things down below.

We regained consciousness sometime around noon, actually, and wandered down to
survey what we had to deal with.  The ballroom they were going to give us was
at the moment split in two by one of the removable walls, and the stage was up
against another one which was going to remain closed the whole time.  So we
had two-thirds of a rather large ballroom to work with.  I convinced one of
the kitchen help that I had legitimate purpose in borrowing one of their room
service carts, which we used to haul the equipment down in a couple of trips.
My next task was to find a half-decent table to use as an optics bench.  I
would have thought that a hotel like the Stouffer's, which had lots of "old
wood" as one of the reservation people had told me, would have plenty of
really sturdy classic oak furniture and such.  They didn't.  The best thing
that two or three employees put together could find me was a relatively new
standard folding table which I opened up and found to be ridiculously rickety.
But having found nothing better, I decided to make do, and wrapped plenty of
duct tape around the legs and supports, and duct-taped it to the wall and
floor and got it reasonably steady.  However, there was a roomful of gamers on
the other side of the removable wall I was against, who kept knocking into it
and worse yet trying to come out the little door my argon was right in front
of.  I eventually walked around there and informed them unambiguously what the
situation was [read "yelled at"], and someone from the concom placed a large
fluorescent sign across the door, and that problem eventually ceased.

The setup was as follows:  Carl Zwanzig and his sound board were in the rear
right corner, or rather the side, when the other folding wall was opened, and
Phil and I were in the front right corner.  Glenn and Spam and crew showed up
with their ton-and-a-half of stuff, and set themselves up just left of the
stage.  We hung scrim behind the stage to project floor floods and beams into,
and the next hack was to hang the little positionables around the room so I
could hit them from my little corner.  Now, there was only one tall ladder
capable of reaching the ceiling, and it was in constant use, and there were
all those damn chairs in the way.  Consequently it took me a long time to
place the mirrors where I wanted them, and even then, with them stuck in the
moldings at the front of the room and under the fan housings in the middle, it
wasn't optimum placement.  But I didn't really know what optimum was going to
be, really, only having done this once before in a much smaller room.  But I
eventually figured out a few bounce paths that would look good through fog,
and hung them off the keyboard.  Oh yeah, I didn't mention the fog machine
yet.  Nick, who is originally from that area, arranged to rent us a genuine
theatrical fog machine from Kinetic Artistry which MGrant was suppose to pick
up while running errands during the day.  Through some foulup, Nick went there
and picked up a Rosco Fogger, and then MGrant went there to pick up the fog
machine and they without checking their records handed him a Martin Fogger,
which he lugged into the hotel and set down next to the Rosco, while we all
went "Oh, no!!".  MGrant was mightily pissed; it took me a long time to
convince him that the fault lay with Kinetic who should have told him that the
machine had already been picked up.  But all that aside, we now had genuine
fog machines to evaluate and learn about, as well as *infinite* amounts of fog
to throw beams through, or so we thought...

But as soon as we fired up the Rosco and filled it with juice and started
testing it, some clown from the hotel came running into the ballroom and told
us we couldn't use the fogger in there, because it would set off the smoke
detector.  We refused to believe him until a test was made; after the room was
absolutely thick with this wonderful long-duration smoke, the detector finally
realized that there was something akin to combustion products floating through
it and sounded off.  Our next suggestion was that we either take down that
particular detector or have the hotel ignore it for the rest of the night.
Apparently there was a human in the loop to the fire department; if a detector
went off it showed on the operator's board, and the operator would then call
the fire dept.  False alarms cost something like $5000, apparently.  Carl
Ginter went off to deal with the political end of things while we continued
our setup; he later came back with the good news that we could go ahead and
fog the room and the hotel would ignore alarms from that area until we were
done.  Hooray!  We did a lights-out check of things next, and discovered that
laser beams look really *wonderful* through that stuff especially when they're
switching around fast.  Things were starting to look really good, and it was
about time, too, since it was now around 8PM and we were on for 11PM or so and
still had more things to do.  By this time there were wires trailing
everywhere, Phil's argon wound up going into Mason's galvo pair to make nifty
blue Lissajous loops on the ceiling, I had aligned most of the errors out of
the keyboard switching, and in the meantime Spam and crew were frantically
banging assembly code into the TRaSh-80 that runs the sequential Christmas
light strings.  Meanwhile Larry was out in the hall with Rosethorn and some
other people trying to choreograph some dance routines for our Laser Dance
idea.  As Time 0 drew near we started to realize many things: We hadn't really
talked about the proposed soundtrack, I hadn't even thought about setting up
the slow-rev motors anywhere and there seemed to be nowhere near the ceiling
to get power for them anyway, and there were a zillion other things we wanted
to set up but were out of time.  In addition, everything went on hold for an
hour or so while there was a song-and-guitar recital by someone whose name I
forget.  However, it should be kept in mind that this was our first
"industrial-grade" stab at doing this.

Finally our hour of reckoning struck.  People started wandering into the room
and we powered everything up again, killed the house lights, started throwing
fog, put on some music or other, and basically sat there intending to play
with the toys for the next hour or so.  The time was right for the Big Oops:
Carl Ginter suddenly comes running over to our side of the room waving his
arms going "ixnay on the ogfay".  *What?!??*  Nothing much came out of our
corner of the room while we tried to find out what the fuck was going on, but
the upshot right then was that we couldn't use the fog machine anymore.  Thus
Karyn, who was at the switch of same, suddenly had nothing to do.  Very pissed
off and confused, we limped along without it for the rest of the hour or so.
The things I had set up suddenly looked like little colored dots on the
ceiling instead of the zapping beams I'd expected.  Spam's side of the room
was doing okay since his things were mostly the polarization projector and the
Christmas light strings, while we attempted to follow along from our side with
shapes on the ceiling and generic crystal beamspreads.  Meanwhile things were
slowly drifting out of alignment, so by the "end" of the show [i.e. when
everyone sort of got bored] I was relying mostly on holding things in a beam
right near me so the spread would go on the ceiling over the stage.  At the
back of the room, however, was a whole bunch of people running the beams from
all the "leftover" lasers around the room, so there were still things to look
at, I suppose.

We were told that those who were there for it generally thought it was
impressive.  This was indeed a surprise, becase the entire crew agreed among
themselves that we could have done a whole lot better with a little more
thought and coordination [and, of course, fog].  We all learned a lot from
this gig; many things about placement of equipment, arrangements with the
management, hints about how to streamline setup, etc.  At this point there
wasn't much left to do but take it all down again and ship it upstairs [which
was a lot easier!].  We spent the rest of the wee hours doing so, and having
absolutely no energy left after the completely hectic day, fell horizontally
comatose.

During the next day, what was left of it, we discovered that there was *no* hot
tub in the pool area but there were saunas whose heaters had been off long
enough to make the rocks manageable, so we played with those for a while.  The
weight room contained these strange machines that use air pressure for
resistance -- you dial your level of difficulty with a regular old valve.  The
pool itself was cold.  We therefore couldn't do the hot-tub-to-wintry- outdoors
hack.  When we eventually tired of this, there was some convention wandering,
more small bits of exploration which were stymied somewhat by the plentitude of
cameras and on-duty staff members, and retired to the room to set up the lasers
again in a more cozy and controlled environment.  Now we could do our own
*real* light show -- the smoke detector was disabled behind plastic bags and
tape, Phil's argon was over on the windowsill busily fogging up the window with
its output heat, and the rest of the lasers were down on the floor available
for people to idly play with through the fog.  We set up a round-the-room beam
spiderweb of sorts, using my newly conceived positionable mirrors.  I finally
got to use a spin motor; since there was nowhere convenient to hang it one of
the small switching tripods went up on the dresser and became a skyhook for a
revolving "crystal" ball.  [This is one of my favorite effects.  Running a
faceted glass ball through a beam gives sort of a "walking" hexagonal
distribution of dots; when you slowly revolve and x-y precess such a crystal
the dots drift lazily around like a swarm of bright insects.]  To run Phil's
argon we ran a power cord into the next room and disabled the fridge under the
bar so its compressor startup wouldn't blow the breaker.  Thus our room's power
feed was left to handle everything else.  Mark's galvos received an audio feed
from somewhere and there were suddenly lots of little red squiggly things on
the walls after the output was passed through a transmissive diffraction
grating.  We sat back, declared it Pretty; the miscellaneous electronic music
was popped on to the drive and we were in business.

However, this was Saturday Night at the Con, so we didn't want to just hide in
the room all night -- there were halls to be wandered and people to see.
Armed with entirely too much communications hardware we emerged into the noisy
hallways and stairwells.  The usual Topheavy Evecon Security Staff was doing
its thing; wandering around attempting to preserve some concept of Order and
yakking back and forth with their 49MHz headset radio toys.  On more than one
occasion I was called upon to relay messages between distant members of this
group, since my radio had the Muscular Modifications installed and everyone
could hear *me* but not each other.  This year I wound up not taking a shift
on the security staff, though, and neither did any of the rest of the Frobbers
-- we'd already put in enough of what we considered work and it was time to
essentially kick back.

Somewhere in here our room received a delivery from the K&K Food Service;
Karyn and Kelly found themselves in the kitchen at some point, and next thing
they knew they had found a *25-pound* box of chocolate chips, an enormous jar
of grapefruit slices, and a huge brick of white chocolate, all of which wound
up in our bathroom.  Don showed up after this with a hair dryer and proceeded
to try and make chocolate syrup out of the chips and some frozen strawberries.
The result was a small disaster area around the sink, but later we found all
this and the rest of the strawberries which were perfectly good and found it
exceedingly hilarious.  Karyn brought her radio-controlled tank which we found
out could be driven, after a fashion, with the 150MHz radios, but its actions
were fairly unpredictable.  We found the Dismal Depths -- at the bottom of a
stairwell there was a metal hatch that someone had puked right next to; but
being as this was the only thing nearly resembling a good vad we'd found all
night we opened it up anyway.  Below was a concrete pit with about a foot of
brownish water on the bottom and sump pump hardware.  It could generate rather
glorious echoes but little else that was exciting.  The AT&T card ferns in the
lobby had the usual timeout bug that allowed one to call anywhere; I placed
some random calls via Sprint to nowhere in particular just to generate some
billing weirdnesses between the two companies.  The elevator rooms and roof,
besides being *cold*, were fairly mundane as such things go.  We encountered
the first few instances of the Standard Elevator Bug which continues to plague
us to this very day -- we would pile into an elevator talking animatedly about
something or other, continue to do so while the doors closed and eventually
realize that nobody had pushed a floor button yet.  I drifted through the con
suite and found the bathroom there to be packed almost solid with cans of
Coors -- just after asking someone "Is there any beer left?"  Between
supervisory visits to the room to make sure that nothing was on fire yet, we
wound up in the second floor hallway where most of the people seemed to be
hanging out.  I had a radio in each hand; the scanner occasionally squawking
from "Them" and the other one keeping me in touch with "Us", and the headset
in my left ear providing a window to "Bruce's Bouncers".  It was sometimes
difficult to carry on a conversation with someone with all this extra
bandwidth going on.  At some point a boring twit started following us around
because we looked less bored than other people.  To ditch this person we first
tried splitting up and evasive maneuvers, until this person up and said
something to Phil about ripping his balls off if he ran away again, whereupon
we all basically told him to get the fuck lost.  [This was the same one who
tried to tell *me*, the on-paper owner of the room, to "not worry" about a
couple of large drunken randoms who barged in with all the attitude of
party-crashers.  What a twit.] I found myself briefly seated in a corner
talking with a somewhat intoxicated Gnome sitting in my lap, but she soon
headed off to crash.  The con-security was up to its usual overkill tactics; a
half-heard mention of some small situation over the radio would bring umpteen
"what was that?"s and eight or nine people descending on one place to find
absolutely nothing wrong.  The biggest "problem" all night was the people
playing the Assassin game and noisily wandering away from the designated play
floors.  Meanwhile the hotel security folks made themselves quite scarce,
which is the correct thing for them to do during such a shindig -- so scarce,
in fact, that we couldn't get any sort of rise out of them by running Karyn's
tank around on the parking garage floor in front of the camera.  Either that
or the camera was powered off or so burnt by passing headlights that they
couldn't see it.

By this time it was well toward dawn, and time to look for something to build
structures out of.  We could find *nothing* for a while -- briefly considered
some random metal posts in a cage in the garage, but there weren't enough of
them and it was watched by a camera anyway.  Chocolate chips weren't really
quite versatile enough, although a small "VAD" spelled out with them appeared
on the bathroom counter.  We wandered downstairs and found a couple of boxes
full of "Isaac Asimov Science Fiction" subscription postcards, which Phil
grabbed and I suddenly got the idea he looked like Lazlo from Real Genius
standing there with armloads of little yellow cards.  So we hauled these down
to the now-empty Ballroom and started cutting slots into them and sticking
them together.  I formed a concept of a strange sort of starship, while Phil
got bored with these and started examining the chairs instead.  While the rest
of us ripped and tore and sliced and giggled, Phil was sliding the chairs
around on the floor and trying to stick them together in various non-standard
ways.  Suddenly he straightened up, looked around and ran off into the
kitchen, soon returning with an armload of plastic bags.  He soon had
constructed a "basic building block" of four chairs with their legs interlaced
and four lashings holding them together.  Leaving the postcards spread all
over the stage we pitched in and started putting together more of these
things, until there were about ten of these units spread around the floor.
The next problem was to do something with them.  They would sit on the tips of
two chair backs and lean against something; but then I noticed that when one
was standing vertically on the tip of one back that the two seats at the sides
were sort of  parallel at a slight angle.  The next thing that fell out of
considering this was that if the next unit was standing at right angles to the
first one, the legs sticking out could be interlaced, which led to the idea
that four such units would be able to hold themselves up by being interlaced.
This wasn't quite true since each basic unit was lashed only on one side, but
with enough people holding them up, Phil almost getting stuck in the middle
while lashing the four of them together, and almost losing it all more than
once, we finally had the assemblage of sixteen chairs reasonably stable.  The
next obvious thing was to take another building block and nest it neatly into
the space on top, with its chair backs in between the ones sticking up.

And then the structure was done -- the entire crew, which was rather large at
that point, agreed that additions to what we had so far probably wouldn't be
particularly elegant and would be downright dangerous to construct since
things were starting to sag in what appeared a dangerous manner.  So the next
thing to do was to see how many people it could hold up and event-log the
results.  Vicka was immediately selected, being the lightest person there, and
we lifted her atop this thing where she stood for a picture.  It didn't move
although she was ready to jump for her life at the first sign of collapsing.
Okay, Phil figured, how about someone heavier -- he was soon seated sort of
astride the thing bemoaning the possible fate of the family jewels; I was
seated there next and realized that since so many people were sitting on top
of this thing that its proper name was the Throne of Evecon.  Karyn and Kelly
next went back to back and still it held fast, although a couple of the side
building blocks seemed to be leaning odd ways by now.

It was well into the morning by now, and who should walk in but Bruce Evry
himself, who found the goings-on highly amusing.  He had participated in the
large artistic hack of the previous year, which was a 7-foot-tall humanoid
figure constructed out of about 200 of those skinny balloons.  He pointed out
that the convention would soon need the ballroom intact and we assured him
that the whole thing could come down and go back into neat audience-oriented
rows in ten minutes.  But we had more than ten minutes -- we had another
couple of hours in fact, so Phil came up with the idea that we should take it
apart very slowly by playing roulette with the plastic lashings.  The Swiss
Army knives were brought forth and everyone took a turn cutting and completely
removing *one* lashing of choice.  He upon who the structure fell apart would
lose.  Soon there were little crumpled bits of plastic film scattered all
around it, but it was still quite upright although starting to make dangerous
saggy noises.  Finally, appropriately enough, Phil removed one more lashing
which seemed to have no effect, but then the creaking became more pronounced
as one side, i.e. one building block, slowly leaned away from the whole, and
although it took about a minute to do so, finally fell away from the Throne,
leaving the remainder still more or less upright but now on three points of
contact.  These three points soon became four again as one unit sagged far
enough over to touch a chair seat to the floor.  But it was still standing,
with the only remaining lashings being my strange ones in which I'd addressed
all four tie points of the building blocks with one long lashing instead of
four little ones.  And to our complete amazement, even after these were
removed, the remaining four units refused to fall over but remained firmly
interlaced in their lopsided way.  And before it was all over this ungainly
heap supported *three* people at once without losing it.  It would not die and
finally had to be explicitly disassembled.

By now it was 10 Sunday morning, checkout was at noon or some oddball time
like that, and we returned to the room and beheld the incredible *mess* in the
morning light.  There were lasers and clothing and radios and chocolate chips
and bodies everywhere.  We really wanted to sleep at that point -- this is
another Standard Con Bug, that of staying up far too long on Saturday and
having to tear down and leave on Sunday afternoon on no sleep.  Fortunately we
only had to get back to MGrant's place and not go all the way home, but still
it took a long time to take apart and pack away all that equipment.  We were
able to employ the same large pallet trucks we'd used to bring it all in, and
after a while the cars were sitting in the loading dock loaded to the scuppers
once again, while the desk accepted our checkout a full hour late, handing me
that reassuring piece of paper containing a zero balance on it.  But the con
wasn't over yet!  In lieu of the traditional mass run to Pizza Slut that
usually finishes off EveCons, the concom had some place deliver about a
hundred pizzas to the hotel instead.  The entire con's attendance was there in
the ballroom, which now had tables set up in it.  The Frob Mob was sitting up
front near the stage, and we all started playing around with the dry ice that
mysteriously appeared somewhere along the line.  Mark piled some into a
pitcher and went around the room "dosing" the water pitchers on the table so
they'd start bubbling and sending forth steam.  The pizza eventually arrived
and there was much crunching and slurping.  And only then did some of those
long skinny balloons we had wanted all this time make their appearance.  More
building materials!  We took a few of them up to the stage and started
inflating them, but found that they really *are* a bitch to initially blow up,
so the volume of construction here was rather low.  But then Phil and I
remembered the helium tank we'd seen somewhere in the bowels of the hotel, and
the fact that he still had a 5-foot weather balloon stashed somewhere in the
car.  We slipped out to retrieve and combine these things; wound up muscling
that damn helium tank down about five flights of stairs to find a relatively
isolated and camera-free place to inflate the rubber goods without the entire
staff hearing the hissing.  We got the thing about half-inflated and realized
that any more would prevent our getting it back through the stairwells to the
ballroom, so we guided this big brown Thing, which now had a rather strange
consistency, through the halls and presented it to the con at large [Now
here's a *serious* balloon].  It turned out to be just barely bouyant, after
we sliced off part of the heavy nozzle.  By now the room was *full* of
balloons -- some of the long ones had escaped into the light fixtures, and
people were firing those weird ones designed as propulsion units all over the
place.  Between this, piles of pizza crust, and the remaining people sitting
around diddling with the dwindling little bits of dry ice, EveCon ended in a
glorious orgy of Play, topped off by the announcement that the hotel was
already working out the contract for next year.  Yow!!  By now we were
*extremely* tired, however.  After bidding random goodbyes, with little
further ado we adjourned to MGrant's house for some very welcome sleep.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

The next go-round down the line was two short weeks later: Esotericon.  This
isn't really a typical *SF con* so much as a gathering of people into various
areas of magic, spirituality, wiccan, and other esoterica, thus the name.  In
addition, for *me* this one represented a departure from the con "norm" of the
past 8 months or so.  In the mail that flew around beforehand it turned out
that none of the Boston people could make it, and none of the DC people said
*anything* indicative.  My usual urge to have things relatively organized was
completely defeated in this case, but I decided to not worry about it too
much, especially since the con was right over in New Brunswick, almost within
walking distance of Suite Pea, which is no longer my residence.  Thus, I
simply packed my gear into the shitbox, strapped on the full hacking rig [to
the amusement of my roomie who hadn't seen it before], and took off for the
hotel.

This is the same Hyatt that NyClone was in last summer; the place looked
exactly the same except there was snow on the roof and a couple of floors had
all the wallpaper in the halls stripped off for renovations.  The fire exit
alarm switches I'd taken care of six months ago were *still* disabled.  I
entered via the same old route from the parking deck I'd used last time, which
was theoretically impossible, and headed down to the lobby to figure out if the
con was there.  Well, Lissanne was there, firmly parked in the art show, and
Gary was hunched over his pad creating the Saga of Schwaa, which began with a
big schwaa [one of those upside-down "e"'s] and a most gloriously conceived
train of complete non-sequiturs.  "Head butts of cosmic awareness -- the Schwaa
will save you all..."  People were filtering in and starting to drag stuff in
for the dealers' room; I ran into Carolyn Whitney, one of the driving forces
behind the con, who immediately set me to creating little signs for the dealer
tables so the incoming dealers could find their spots.  This provided for some
experimentation with those flat-pointed calligraphy markers, so the little
signs received cute lettering.  I noticed a couple of people wondering how the
hell they were going to get a carful of merchandise upstairs to the room, so to
help them out I applied our standard algorithm and went downstairs to browbeat
the security people into giving us pallets or carts or whatever they had.  I
first had to convince the guy that he should leave the loading dock *open*
because there were a lot of people bringing things in, even if it *was* after
5, and while he was puzzling this out I found a cart and helped the dealer
folks pile their stuff on it and take it upstairs.  I had to inform at least
two officious hotel people what we were trying to accomplish, so they'd leave
us the fuck *alone* for being in the employee areas and using the service
elevator.  These people seemed to have no function except to stand around
neatly dressed and yell at guests for what they considered infractions.  The
ultimate insult came when I found myself wandering through the lobby, and found
someone I knew and stopped to talk.  Out of the corner of my eye I could see
into the executive office lobby through a small window in the door next to the
lobby desk.  I noticed a woman walk past this window, do a double-take, and
come *flying* out the door toward me, whereupon she proceeded to interrupt the
conversation I was in to dress me down for a> being barefoot and b> carrying a
bottle of soda.  Incorrectly claiming "health department regulations" as basis
for the former, she went on to inform me that nobody was allowed to bring in
their own beverages and such; they had to buy same from the hotel.

Now think about this once.  Such a policy is completely unenforceable, but
exists because most people are gullible enough to be told this "rule" and go
"oh, okay" and go ahead and get raped paying hotel marked-up charges for
drinkables.  This sort of taking advantage of people really pisses me off, and
the general attitude of the place which assumed right off the top that any
guest was incapable of thinking for itself irked everyone present before it was
all over.  To keep this bitch happy -- I do not use the word lightly, either,
it describes her perfectly -- I found my shoes and hid the Jolt in the dealers'
room and continued being useful.  As soon as I matched her trivial little
specifications, she completely ignored me.  Unfortunately this person was also
the convention liaison.  I noticed along the way that they had upgraded their
security staff -- instead of the blind, deaf, and dumb ex-police-officer-
retiree type from last time they had a couple of younger goons who were
obviously kicked out of police school for being too hot-headed, but were
ideally suited to work for the current management of the place.

Eventually the con actually *started*, with opening ceremonies consisting of
a circle and chant and miscellaneous blessings.
    {
	while (!bored) sing ("Frost and fire, wind and sea;\
	earth and moon, star and sky");
    }
Then the only convention-provided food made its appearance: a catered pile of
munchies that quickly vanished since it was dinnertime.  There was no food in
the con suite due to the brain-dead hotel policy and the concom's fear of
"breaching their contract" by bringing in their own food.  Feh, who the fuck
cares, especially since it's generally been decided by any convention that's
tried to hold one there that the New Brunswick Hyatt is *evil* and to be
avoided.  NyClone has since moved, as has Esotericon.

Don Hopkins showed up after all, as did Karyn, and after being *cussed out* by
yet another wandering stuffed suit for coming down the service elevators, we
wound up sitting around near the art show door playing with Rubik's Magic toys.
These seemed to be the current favorite playtoy, and the subject of some
subsequent research culminating in a failed attempt to get Matchbox to listen
to some ideas for improvement.  I had left mine in the art show room and
someone pulled on it too hard the wrong way, and one of the little squares
jumped out of its bindings.  This led to our tearing it apart slightly further
and winding up with a long single-wide string of squares which illustrated just
how each one could move with respect to its neighbors.  We then managed to get
it back together, sort of, in a flat ring and then try to compact it again,
which simply doesn't work.  We played with it quite a bit during the con, but
afterward I seemed to wind up with all the pieces.  Further research told me
that the things are really rather easy to get apart and together, and by
combining two of them into larger units you can make ones bigger than 8 pieces
which are much more versatile than the original model.  After working out some
of the more subtle moves you could do with, say, a 10-piece model, I contacted
Matchbox to see if they'd figured this out yet, and was told that the "next
version" would have more pieces in it...

The hotel was completely sold out of rooms for that Friday night due to a lot
of *other* things going on as well, which from what I could see was a meeting
of some "get rich quick" marketing group, which was running around with a lot
of dumb-looking sales charts and drinking a lot.  So later that evening we
dispersed to our various residences.  However, I had managed to grab a room for
Saturday, so I'd have a place to set up the argon.  There's a reason a blue
laser is appropriate at a con like this: Darkover.  If you haven't read any of
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, you won't know that they involve a
concept called "matrix mechanics", which is basically psi-magic involving
telepathy and crystals -- a "matrix" is a certain type of crystal which on the
Darkover world serve as amplifiers and focuing devices for mental energy,
allowing people to do nifty and sometimes destructive things.  A side effect of
this, as described, is lots of blue fire dancing in and around the matrix
workers, the crystals, and the room where they are.  Well, the argon can
generate plenty of blue fire in crystals, so given a certain attendance of
Darkover fans, it was an entirely appropriate thing to bring to the con.
Saturday I pulled into my usual spot in the parking deck again, claimed a room
and schlepped the hardware up the fire stairs and down the hall to it.  The
next task, since nobody else was around to help, was to singlehandedly reduce
an ordinary hotel room into something reasonable where I could put the laser
stuff safely out of the way and have people come in and sit roughly in a circle
with a piece of beam in their laps and play with crystals.  Most of the
furniture got stashed outside on the balcony so it was out of the way; the beds
got piled double high in one corner, the stereo against one wall and the rest
of the floor was bare except for a small table in the middle from which the
argon beam was distributed around.  The tripod switched between a spin-motored
glass ball near the door and a bunch of diffraction gratings which can split up
the beam a bunch of different ways.  These latter parts were further routed
from the tabletop down away toward the floor near the walls, so that when a
person sat facing the table the beam would be right there to hold a crystal in.

Once this was all set up, the next thing to do was go distribute propaganda
pointing at the room, so that people would know where to find it.  This
consisted of the Avian signs with "Laser crystal working" scribbled down one
side -- all the activities at the con seemed to be called "workings", so this
was in keeping with it.  One of my first customers was Mom, who had decided to
come down for the con and see what it was all about.  She of course produced
some of the best rocks at the con; everyone else had some pretty small wimpy
ones, but quite a few people actually did show up to wield the magic blue
matrix fire, and thought it was lots of fun.  At some points there were quite a
few people sitting around in the room playing with crystals and my bits of
glass and dropping tapes into the drive and talking about hypnosis and
witchcraft and magic and, of course, lasers.  ["It's all magic; lasers don't
exist."]  As things went on and people started drifting off to bed, there were
only a few people left in the room, including a woman who was holding forth to
a couple of others how she'd gotten really annoyed one day and had completely
trashed the room she was in without moving from where she was sitting.  Her
given justification was that she'd been mentally "screwing around with things
she shouldn't have".  A rather wimpy claim, I thought; every time I hear of
such claims I really wish I could have been there to objectively evaluate
exactly what was going on.  If you're going to summon a demon and expect me to
believe it, I at least want to ask it a couple of questions...

Eventually came the time to shut down and go to sleep; all the visitors were
gone, Don reappeared, Gary came stumbling in at some point, and we shoved the
tiny table to one side and crashed.  Checkout was at something fascist like
11AM, so I had to get up and start packing the equipment and dragging the
furniture back inside.  By this time it was *snowing* outside -- sort of a
heavy wet gooey snow, not really that much fun, but I got the tables and such
back in the room before they got completely soaked.  Leaving the room in
something like a reasonable condition [although I hope they had strong
housekeeping personnel] we schlepped our stuff back outside, down the now-
slippery fire stairs, packed it away into the car and went back in to see the
rest of the con, i.e. closing ceremonies.  This was actually rather long and
involved, with everyone in attendance in a couple of concentric circles in the
main ballroom.  There were more chants, Om's, a ceremony involving planting all
the seeds we'd been given at the beginning in a large pot of dirt, and a long
session of awarding gifts to the GOH's.  These took the form of crystals, tarot
decks, fancy cloth bags, and other wiccan support hardware.  An announcement
was made that the committee was going to try and get Marion Zimmer Bradley as
GOH for next year, and Clam Chowder to supply music.  A late update indicated
that these two entities were going to be at *Darkover Council* in November, a
con that's even *more* Darkover-oriented and to which the argons should indeed
travel.

I next headed up toward the Gripe Session.  This was packed out.  Everyone had
beefs and bitches against the hotel, and a few complaints about how the con
itself was run.  The committee members behind the table were trying to be
somewhat reasonable and calming toward those complaining, but through it all
and the subsequent wind-down party in the con suite I saw a general milieu of
highhanded arrogance running through all the concom members, who by now were
tired and even more jumpy than before.  Why, I don't quite understand --
tiredness and some irritation yes, the overall attitude, no.  At least everyone
agreed that the hotel was evil and not to be used for such activities again if
*anyone* present was intending to have any fun.  The hotel people probably knew
this by the time it was all over, too, but I'm sure they didn't care.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

Even before Esotericon happened, things were already in the works for Boskone,
the huge yearly second-only-to-Worldcon bash in Boston.  The pre-registration
flyers for same had come out in the mail, containing all the details for
interfacing one's self to the con.  Included in this was the Weapons Policy,
which contained the usual "Massachusetts law provides that..." stuff, leading
into how pistol replicas, edged steel, shurikens and other martial arts stuff,
and a host of other things were forbidden ... and then one word jumped off the
page and bit me: LASERS ... in a sentence that ended "... and anything else
which in the judgement of the committee presents a hazard to other attendees."
Wrong-*O*, guys! -- I typed this in and sent it, with a slew of relevant
comments, to the rest of the laser heads on the net, and the flamage started to
fly.  It was clear to us that if certain parties hadn't been bringing lasers to
conventions in the past, nobody on the committee would ever have thought to
include the concept.  It was obviously then a purely political thing, but we
couldn't figure out why someone in NESFA [the SF association behind Boskone]
would arbitrarily try and screw us.  The intermediate result was a carefully
worded letter to NESFA pointing out the "error" in their weapons policy, which
brought a reply from Mr. Chip Hitchcock [bless his soul and retinas with
coherent wavefronts] suggesting that I "address the committee in writing".  In
a reply caused by the fact that I had just done exactly that.  Now, can you
blame me for being "rather annoyed" [to put it mildly] by all this??  The
exchange further supported the idea that the policy was purely political and
that the committee was going to hide behind its petty authority for as long as
it could until the convention actually happened.  I have since figured out that
NESFA is based heavily from MIT, which loves to dump arbitrary political
horsepatties on selected people and be flamingly arrogant about it, so NESFA
was basically doing what it had been taught to do from its infancy.  The
misconception that small handheld lasers were dangerous allowed them to touch
off what they hoped would be a political bonfire.

Our eventual solution?  To lug all our hardware to the convention anyway, and
have fun despite their stupid rules.  Politics, in the minds of the hard-logic
advoctes, were made to be bypassed.  They are a waste of time.  Without further
ado I addressed the rest of the preparations for my northward journey.  Lois
Steinberg seemed to find it odd that I called but all this was quickly
straightened out as she graciously provided crash space and optional company
for the couple of days before the con.  As in previous years, the idea was to
stay in Boston as long as possible, to see people and vad buildings and maybe
build some last-minute toys and hack at the Holy Land.  In the meantime, a
couple of new toys were added to the collection and my argon received a
significant cooling upgrade in the form of two boxer fans mounted on the side
instead of one on the top.  This allows a much higher volume of air to move
through the box, and in the thermally correct direction such that the hot air
blows out the top of the box, not down into the rest of the works.  Thus the
box stays nice and cool even at high output power levels, which I discovered I
could now get out of it by messing about with more big studly ceramic POwEr
resistors in the path of the tube current.  The next thing to fix was the
pulsing problem, which was caused by the tiny little filter capacitor I was
using.  I frantically combed the storage places of Hill Center looking through
lots of old dead equipment for big caps of the right voltage rating.  The
highest I could find was 70 volts or so; useless for my 150 feed.  I still
hadn't found anything when came the time to pack it all into boxes and take
off, and then it started snowing with a vengeance the day before I was actually
going to go.

But this didn't matter.  Said snowstorm passed through by morning and the sun
and plows and salt trucks came out and by evening all the major roads were dry
again.  I was able to stick to original scheduling, and loaded all the toys
into the car and headed forth to Boston.  Now, this here snowstorm had passed
to our northeast, so I wasn't *too* surprised when I was just going by the
Gr1me Computer plant on the Mass Pike and watching the radar detector go nuts,
and it started snowing again.  As I drew nearer to Boston the snow got heavier,
until when I finally got off in Watertown it had become a very pretty snowy
night with a couple of inches already on the roads.  I had effectively chased
and caught up with the same storm, which was now once again dumping the white
stuff all over me.  I found Lois's house and pounded the bell, and wound up
surprising her just coming out of the shower.  She hadn't expected me to
actually drive up in "all this foul weather", whereupon I explained about
chasing the storm.  Residual confusion having thus been laid to rest, we spent
the rest of a rather mellow evening sitting in her cute rebuilt-attic apartment
talking about life and MIT and puzzles and toys and paganism and eating yogurt.
Lois owns two small birds which continually make rather obnoxious squeaky
noises, even after you cover the cage and shove them off into the kitchen; but
it didn't take long for me to get used to these.  There were other things more
worthy of being bitched about, for instance having to get up at 7AM to shuffle
cars around in the driveway because a> Watertown has the stupid "no overnight
street parking" rule, and b> most of the car owners had to get up early and
leave for work.  By that time of the AM, of course, the cars could go back out
on the street.  However, the first morning I was there everyone was outside
*shoveling* all the cars out, and everything around was under a very pretty
blanket of new white stuff.  After all the 9-to-5ers took off I spent the next
half hour cheek by jowl with the owner of the house, finishing off the rest of
the driveway, after which I went back inside and crashed for another few hours
[which felt wonderful].  I didn't want to climb buildings yet; I was on
*vacation* and figured I could be lazy for a day or two.  I found some things
to do such as fix Lois' answering machine so the tape transports didn't squeak
so loudly you couldn't hear any of the messages.  I went off to the Heartland
Food Warehouse, an interesting bulk-food emporium, and bought some supplies for
myself, Lois, and the con; that subsequent evening we hacked up some strange
but delicious stir-fry and then went over to Leor Zolman's place to do the hot
tub.  Leor is Lois' ex, although you'd wonder sometimes due to how frequently
his name was mentioned... anyway, he was off in California or something,
leaving his palacial 4-story condo unoccupied.  The condo is part of a complex
that has an indoor pool and hot tub, which is a really great place to spend an
hour or two when it's tinkly-cold outside.  We left all this behind before too
many old memories could impinge on Lois' happiness, and headed back to
Watertown.

One more go-round with the cars and the fact that the week was continuing to
pass by convinced me that it was time to move on and bury myself in the
tech-square-hacking-buildings-and-computers-and-talking-shop context.  Lois
doesn't really do computers; although we found plenty to talk about I began to
miss my usual lifestyle's props.  Not to mention that Phil had finally dug up
Lois' number and called up saying basically "where the fuck *are* you".  I
packed up all my stuff and headed off to MIT to meet up with the rest of the
gang.  It wasn't a couple of hours later Phil and I were walking down a hall in
the Patrol building when we came across a big heap of large electrolytic
capacitors that someone had chucked out.  Imagine my amazement when I picked
one rack of them up and found that they were rated at over 300 volts?!?!?
Here, only at MIT and there for me to *stumble* over, were the argon filter
components I'd been so frantically searching for down home.  We collected and
left with two tied-together bunches of them, and headed back to Lexington to
rebuild the template door lock left over from last year so we could replace the
Sheraton's hardware with some kind of our own magic.  We went through a few
ideas and finally wound up with a simple touch switch mounted near a small slot
that could be hit by a piece of metal bent just so -- quite secure against
randoms and hotel goons simply by being obscure.  [I just *wish* we had the
appropriate chip-blowing facility at our disposal so we could just drop a whole
new rom in the puppy.]  But given that the 9-volt could hold out, this kludge
would last the entire con.

We turned our attention toward other features of the Lexington house, like
dealing with the large piece of marinated meat that was about to become dinner,
and the carcass of the CO2 laser sitting in the living room, and the parts for
Mark's plasma sphere, and Pete's recumbent still in the making downstarirs [not
to mention the Honda box with its engine in pieces all over the garage].  That
house had an incredible amount of *stuff* contained in it, including the old
27-watt argon laser tube downstairs, Pete's harpsichord, various dead computers
of varying ages, and lots of other nifty stuff that could be rebuilt into
something really winning given time and initiative.  Not to mention Nick's
black Caddy sitting out in the driveway collecting snow.  Later that evening
Pete finalized a way to mount the seat on the recumbent and 'long about 4 in
the morning we all took it outside for some test runs.  Such a machine feels
really wonderful because you can transfer so *much* of your leg power into
forward motion; air resistance is reduced because you're close to the ground,
and the forces are all different since you can push from your butt instead of
trying to use your weight downward to generate pedal force.  They had come up
with steering geometry that made cornering very quick [as we all watched the
frame flex with some degree of horror...].  Eventually Pete and Mark went down
around the next bend of Mass Ave and didn't return for a long time, and the
rest of us realized we were freezing and went back in.  They returned some time
later, glowing and very happy after turning about ten miles and not even
noticing.  It was then about time to check out the spare bedding and use it for
the next few hours.

Everyone sort of split off in random directions the next day; Mark and a large
amount of laundry headed down the road, Larry was off at work or something and
Pete disappeared into Harvard Square with the recumbent to go to the Human
Powered Vehicle meeting.  Nick and I dithered around a bit trying to decide on
something else to do and finally wound up ourselves in HSQ at the Bicycle
Exchange, hereafter referred to as BiEx.  This establishment is the epitome of
expressing many Bostonians' love of the Most Elegant Way to Get Around.  The
building contains three large floors packed end to end with a complete bicycle
parts orgasm -- box after box of threaded shafts, bearing races, struts, tools,
brakes, sprockets, you name it, just about *any* part for the most obscure
machine they either have or can build.  The bottom floor where the HPV meeting
was is mostly dedicated to sales and has lots of new bikes sitting around, but
you go upstairs and that's where all the real magic happens -- the repair shops
and stashes of parts.  Here you can break old frames apart and re-weld them
into completely new machines, fit on wheels and pedals and chains and
experimental shifing mechanisms and wind up with a machine that while it may
look really odd transfers an ever-higher amount of human muscular output to the
road.  This love for innovation in maximally using this unfortunately scarce
resource for propulsion is what drives the members of the Human Powered Vehicle
club to give a lot of their time to the projects.  Pete was in the limelight
this evening; he'd come up with a simple, stable design which while having some
room for improvement was significantly *different* from a standard bicycle, and
everyone was standing around in the sales shop talking animatedly about design
improvements, poking and prodding at the works and noting stress points here,
oddly-fit parts there, and just generally having a wonderful time.  There seems
to be this strong sense of elegance and pride in such accomplishments in and
around Boston; I really don't think you'd see a bunch of hacker-types deriving
so much enjoyment from riding their own machines to a place and clustering
around an odd collection or two of scrap metal down here in Piss That-a-way NJ.
I haven't seen anything remotely resembling a recumbent in this state, period.
If they're around they are well-hidden for some odd reason -- if I had the time
and shop resources I would definitely go for one of my own.  Someday I *will*
own one and with it attempt to train all those yuppies out there on Hoes Lane
that there is Another Way which uses less gas than their Nissan Turbo ZKX
Euro-tour Luxury Sport Sedan.  Perhaps the oddest part about their prevalence
in Boston is that it goes on in a town with some of the crappiest possible road
surfaces extant.  I am hoping that the recumbent market will eventually reach
some sort of stability in design, like ten-speeds did, and I'll be able to go
out and *buy* a good one for under a grand.

But all this devolved into the usual retiring to MIT to hack.  We decided that
we needed some kind of logo that would really emphasize the idea of lasers and
not-so-subtly say "Fuck NESFA".  I'd previously come up with the only Stupid
Yellow Diamond that I will actually put in my car -- "Laser on board!" with the
appropriate star-and-beam-coming-out symbol through the middle of it.  We hit
the 5th floor, convinced the person hacking the microvax there to make the
laserwriter work, and then work it did as we dove in and had some sex with the
PostScript engine.  We printed off a few random logo-ish things and squinted at
them critically.  I am not exactly sure wherefrom the idea sprung but the
phrase "Coherent Central" had a nice ring to it.  Done: we blew the laser-beam
symbol up larger and put in the appropriate text, and ran off a bunch of them.
Okay, we now had things to hang on the door and around the hotel so people
could find us.  Phil then started playing with reduction on the copier
downstairs and came up with the idea of reducing the whole thing, via iterative
copying or PostScript or whatever, to the size of a button.  Between bashing
the copier against the wall to make it work right and hunting up a stash of
obnoxious yellow paper, we soon turned out a bunch of little Coherent Centrals
that were just the right size to be made into buttons.  Which, as it was
getting on toward dawn, was the next task.  The button equipment, which I
hadn't known about, was in EECS, so while I cut the circles out Phil figured
out which little aluminum ring had to be mashed into what other little aluminum
ring at the right time, and after a while we had a small pile of official
Coherent Central buttons, including a couple with our own logos included.  We
packed up the button stuff and headed back to Lexington, found the crew
watching Real Genius [the only appropriate movie for what we were thinking
about!!], walked in and handed out buttons.  We sat around and talked about
designs for the "spirograph generator" using two little motors with mirrors on
their shafts, and watched the laserdisk until it started to completely lose on
its tracking, and then went to sleep, for the next day was Friday when the con
started.

The actual details of getting there involved a lot of driving.  First we went
deep into the depths of Somverville to visit the Wizard.  He is an old guy who
runs a gloriously antiquated theatrical supply shop; this place would be the
parallel of BiEx for amounts of history leaning up against the walls, I
suppose.  But he was fresh out of Rosco fog fluid, which was what we were
looking for.  We found one other place run by a bunch of good ole boys who a>
didn't seem to really want to deal with us and b> didn't have fog fluid either
unless we wanted something like 5 gallons of it, so we punted, stopped off at
MIT for the alternative -- 25 pounds of dry ice -- and headed for the hotel.
And just like last year, we temporarily parked right outside but this time just
out of sight around the pillar so that the defective doormen from last year
couldn't have anything to yell at us about.  After obtaining a room, no mean
task in itself since the entire lobby was packed with back-and-forth queues of
people waiting to check in, we moved around under the building to the loading
dock.  We scribbled "Loading" on a couple of the Coherent signs and stuck them
in the car windows, and then threw the stuff on the nearest hefty cart we could
find such that the personnel didn't object to our taking.  This was further
proof of what is now our standard in/out shipment algorithm.  Hotel kitchen/
housekeeper/security personnel are generally perfectly content to lend out
wheeled carts and such.  It's the bellhops out front that get all paranoid
about *their* carts, the nice ones with carpets and large pneumatic wheels --
but not only does the loading dock generally open right into the service vator
area, the people down there either don't care or are so completely nonplused by
our appearance, mannerisms, or whatever that they just give and assume they'll
get their carts back sometime.  If one of them raises an objection of some sort
the answer is a simple "we're the lightshow crew, and we need to get these
lasers upstairs" -- with the unspoken but quite evident implication "this
equipment is worth more than you make in a year, son; one side", and they melt
harmlessly into the corner.  This always works as long as we're careful to park
where we won't be in the way, because trucks do still come in on Friday
afternoon to deliver weekend supplies.

Okay, so we got it all upstairs and in this case via a rather circuitous route
since the South Tower was on the *other* goddamn end of the building from the
loading dock.  It turned out that this was a *large corner room*, at the
regular old price!!  Winnage.  First thing to go was the door lock, but there
were some parts incompatibilities and in the resultant furious adapting of
parts my small phillips-head vanished for the entire rest of the weekend, but
we got our kludge convincingly mounted, tested, and approved.  The next thing
to do was rescue the cars from imminent danger of someone realizing what we
were up to and having them towed, so we took them over to MIT and parked quite
legally on Vassar Street and rather than take the T back to the hotel, decided
to take the "Stud Test" and walked back across the Smoot Bridge in the
freezingass cold wind off the Charles.  At the other end we helped a bunch of
guys lift someone's car off the wooden construction barriers it had somehow
become caught up on.  Phil got one or two incredulous comments about his
wearing shorts in subfreezing weather, but he's used to that by now.  Anyway,
we got back to the hotel and by now it was past dark.

Now, this being Boskone, there were soon people milling around all over the
hotel making merry and meeting and greeting, and it seemed a lot of this was
centered in our room which by now had the appropriate documentation stuck to
the outside of the door.  Even with the size of the room, it seemed that there
were soon multitudes sitting around on the floor, which made it difficult to
start seriously setting up the laser toys because for a standard hotel-room
configuration, we have to bounce all over the room to tack up mirrors and
hanger ropes and in this case, strings of Christmas lights to serve as our
"police line" behind which all the delicate stuff sat.  The room didn't have
nice strong moldings to hang things from, so I had to bend up a bunch of S-
hooks and stick them in behind the wallboard, which was not as strong as I
would have liked but between them and a hole Phil drilled into the steel
ceiling panel and Bob Mende's strange blue twine [which I still have somewhere]
we got the spinmotors hung up.  Phil stuck his argon and the 30 mil HeNe on the
windowsill and fired them up; I eventually got my argon tucked as neatly back
in the corner as I could, started it on low power and began aligning the optics
bench, in this case a fairly sturdy table that came with the room.  But then we
thought about power considerations, and lo and behold, when I tried to bring
mine up to normal power, *POP* went the breaker.  We went out into the hall and
opened up the breaker panel and scratched our heads at it for a while and
figured out that the bathroom lights and GFI was on a different 20-amp puppy,
so the obvious thing to do was run the long extender cord from there under the
bed where it wouldn't get tripped over to power my side of things.  The
addition of some duct tape holding it to the carpet completed our electrical
connections.

We took a break to go down to what was billed as the "Weapons Policy Gripe
Session", only to find that it consisted of one guy flaming his guts out about
nothing in particular to an assembled group and not letting anyone else get a
word in edgewise, and then we discovered that *none of the people in that room
were NESFA* to begin with, but some *other* politically-motivated-to-dictate-
to-others group, so we fled in disgust back to the room to continue setting up.
In a while things started to look fairly pretty: some crystals and such were
hung off the spin motors and other places, and some beams were getting out
there and hitting them, making red and blue spreads, splotches and dots on the
walls.  We were still a ways from done, but by this time someone had nuked the
lights and we were working on further setup in the dark.  I suddenly realized
that I hadn't planned for any red in the switcher-tripod setup and carefully
kludged in a second mirror, so that the one tripod would switch both blue and
red feeds to places at the same time.  I wound up with about 5 meaningful
positions that would light up things in the room, but by this time it was over
6 hours later.  We were beginning to learn that this was the standard drawback
to doing any laser gig: the inevitable result was that we'd spend all our time
hiding in the room babysitting the equipment, and not seeing much of the con.
One reason for this is that we're always pushing the fine line between pretty
lights and bonfires, so someone technically aware should always be on hand
in case something *does* decide to thermally eat itself.  The other problem is
that since setup does take a certain amount of time, people tend to show up in
the middle of it all and stick around because there's *something* to look at,
but all they really do is get in the *way* until everything's really ready to
go.  But neither Phil or I, who were the ones trying to step around and over
everybody scattered around on the floor, had the heart or initiative to say
"Everybody *out* until we're finished", especially since we were conversing
with them all while tweaking mirrors and twisting wires and ripping duct tape.
It's all for fun, though, even if roadying and partying don't always fit into
the same space-time.  We discovered that we could manage even if we had to
occasionally get someone to temporarily move over.

By the time we were happy with what we had it was sometime after midnight.  I
had set up a mirror farm on the table in the middle of our little tech area,
which looked like a duct-tape disaster but served quite well to fire beams
around and get them out to the correct places in the room.  The open window and
blower circulating incoming wintry air provided enough cooling for the argons
once the silly curtains were duct-taped to the window so they'd be closed and
out of the way at the same time.  Phil's lissajous generator was doing its
thing on the ceiling, and later on we kludged in Mark's set for a flat scan.
Basically the whole setup was a few crystal-on-spinmotor spreads, the punch cup
over in the corner, and the lissajous; all fairly simple in theory but it still
looked interesting.

The evening rolled along with all this and occasional wanderings forth into the
rest of the con and bumping into countless people I knew or should have known.
There were a couple of the expected fire alarms -- the kind where the siren
frobs go off a few times and the voice comes on to inform the general populace
where the alarm was.  As long as it wasn't "12 south", we ignored it.  The
hotel, however, did not, since each false alarm in theory was costing them
fairly serious money.  The Event Logger eventually has me telling someone
"We're going to the con suite, we've been stringing mirrors all night", which
is what we did -- after shutting down the room, and after that went off to vad
the upper reaches.  The top floor turned out to hold a lot of the HVAC stuff;
all the roof doors and elevator control rooms were wide open almost like
someone was working on them, but at that hour the entire thing was deserted.
This place provided the loan of a couple more extension cords which we needed,
and a quite wonderful view of Boston and Cambridge.  While digging more soft
goods out of the closets we discussed some ideas for the morrow, and near
dawn, as usual, headed back to the room to rest up.

There was more convention wandering the next day, but I should emphasize that I
spent a lot of time in the room and if you were looking for a good general
overview of Boskone, this isn't it.  Phil and I decided to get serious about
setting up a room that people could come visit without getting stepped on, so
we *did* essentially kick everyone out this time [or they left on their own in
most cases] and we set to and realigned everything correctly and cleaned up the
already large amount of trash lying about.  I tackled the problem of everyone's
*stuff* thrown haphazardly around on the floor, and decided that the best way
to sort it all was not by ownership, since those who could claim such were
gone, but by type.  Shoes wound up in a heap by the door.  Bedding got stuffed
into the little alcove near the closet.  Packs and such got stacked up in the
closet where they'd be out of the way and incoming randoms wouldn't be tempted
to lift things.  All loose items of value were collected into a place where
people could pick them out and stash them elsewhere lest they be lifted in the
dark.  All of this was quite necessary because it seemed that we had much more
than one room's worth of *stuff* that people had brought to the con -- there
weren't *that* many people officially staying in the room, it seemed, but there
was an almost unmanageable pile of *posessions* there anyway.  Eventually we
had a half-decent setup: the tech stuff behind the police line, and a lot of
open bed and floor area for all comers to occupy.  Having to tell the residents
where their stuff had gone was easier than the potentially deleterious
alternative.

The con suite provided a lot of food throughout this; it was the usual
wonderful Boskone con suite with real cheese, vegs, and other good solid stuff
that one could subsist on.  Between this and the survival rations we'd brought
along [lots of tuna fish] we actually ate quite well without leaving the hotel.
This place apparently didn't have the silly "no food or drink" sort of rule; in
Boston I'd expect people running a hotel to be intelligent enough to realize
that such a policy was inane.  However, there are still limits -- Kelly
reported that the Dork Suits, i.e.  official-looking uniforms, had a lot of
people confused as to whether she and Karyn worked for the hotel or not.  All
the employees of the hotel wear suits that say "Sheraton Boston" on the
sleeves, but they didn't think to look for this...

Night fell, and it was time to start utilizing our space.  By this time all the
other parties were starting: the Generic Fandom folks were going strong, the
Tanstaafl suite was fired up, and there were numerous other things going on all
over.  Those who weren't running parties were party-hopping; those doing
neither were nonexistent as far as I could tell.  It seemed like a couple of
the Coherent Central signs on the party board weren't quite enough; I took a
bunch of them and a roll of tape and went off on a mad zing through the hotel,
deploying them in high-traffic areas and on the walls at other parties.  We'd
worked hard on our setup, and we now wanted to show it off.  I got them all out
around 9pm; we intended to basically kick the randoms *out* around midnight and
limit occupancy to "just us" and known folks after that.  [But there are an
awful lot of "known folks", it seems.]  As time went on there was a good in/out
flux through the door, while I jumped around explaining how things worked to
people and switching beams back and forth with the tripod.  We were attempting
to generate enough miasma with incense sticks, but Nick realized that this
wasn't really doing a whole lot so he sat down and constructed a glorious
kludge from a soda bottle, some tubing, duct tape and the dry ice.  The idea
was to run a hot water feed from the bathroom, via the tubing, over a bed of
dry ice, which usually generates large amounts of vapor.  And best of all this
thing actually *worked* -- it was installed near the window with the tail water
from the chamber dribbling out and down 12 floors of everyone else's windows.
It generated fairly copious amounts of fog, which wanted to just stay in that
part of the room, but some of it mixed with the incense smoke and kept the room
somewhat foggy anyway; enough to see beams fairly well in.  Now we had two
weird things coming out from under the bathroom door -- the extension cord for
my argon, and this crazy tube kludged up to the faucet somehow.

And it all turned out to be *worth every minute* we'd spent on it.  It seemed
that some NESFA concom people were party-hopping along with everyone else, and
they stuck their heads into our room.  "No lasers" indeed -- they were
*immediately* very impressed by what we'd done.  Unfortunately Phil at this
moment was out wandering around somewhere, so I talked to them and showed them
the setup and relayed the subsequent "We win *huge*!!" to Phil when he came
back.  I made sure to tell them to change their silly policy next year, and
that lasers were not weapons but fun toys, etc, etc, with them *agreeing* with
me.  Essentially, right at that moment, I got to laugh in their faces and have
the last word, and wow, did it feel wonderful.  [Although I *was* polite about
it since they now seemed willing to treat us like human beings.]

So, to celebrate this turn of events, we finally *did* kick out the randoms
around 1AM, and although the room was still fairly full, it was now all
trusted, known people we could party hearty with.  Down in one corner, I
dragged out my pile of pictures and Phil and I detailed the construction and
eventual death of the Throne of Evecon, using my flashlight for limited
illumination that wouldn't interfere with the laser stuff.  As the description
went on and my batteries got weaker, this all became very amusing.  There was
lots of nifty context warpage; basking in the recent winnage I had nothing
against jumping up every few minutes to lean over the optics bench and play
wizard.  Phil decided that our usual procedure was shaping up to be "push the
envelope until we lose, and then subtract epsilon and record the point".  I
realized that what was holding this wholes mess together was duct tape and
brick strap, from which it seems one can build anything.  Part of the gathering
spilled out into the hall where there was relative quiet and mundane light; my
attention was called there a couple of times to evaulate things, but I really
wanted to be in the room because things were so much more fun in there.  Don
showed up with his gorilla mask on the usual way -- backwards, with his long
tail of red hair sticking out through the mouth of same.  This configuration
took a lot of people at the con completely by surprise until they figured out
what it was.  Lois correctly pointed out that there was a lot of "intense shit"
going on in the room.  There was.  It was sort of a tribal gathering of All of
Us, and there was a warm comfortable feeling through the whole place that
wasn't just draft from the argons.  Lots of hugs and fuzzies were going around.
I kept feeling the cord from the bathroom which was rather warm but it didn't
increase beyond a certain point.  It was just another couple-of-load-ohms for
the laser, dissipating its share of watts, but that didn't prevent my having to
explain numerous times that was fine.  Eventually I decided that it was an
artery, supplying us with the electrical lifeblood that made the room so much
fun, and it should be accepted, warm or not, as part of the organism that our
room had turned into.  I noticed that the tripod handle could sort of be
equated to a ship's tiller; where this ship was going with all of I wasn't sure
of but it was a happy place.  Then I found a bag of some really crusty-looking
granola stuff under the bed, couldn't figure out for a while what it was in the
dark, and used it as an excuse for a good long laugh fit.

Between all this and runs to the con suite for more food and to see who was
still alive the night passed and dawn came, but we were still quite awake and
decided that it would be a win to stay up until the hot tub opened and move the
entire silly lot of us down there.  To pass the time in between I dug out the
write rings and we tried building things out of them.  The process of notching
enough of them so they'd stick together at the edges proved much too arduous to
deal with, so we tried various ways of just twisting them together.  Kelly took
this to extremes and wound up with a big weird tangle of them which I believe
still exists and has been named as a "diagram of VMS internals".  I sort of
crocheted a bunch of them together into a chain; the rest were cut up, stacked,
bent, unbent, and thrown around until they became boring and we went to check
out the hot tub.  But it was *closed*!!  The bloody bastards had rendered bogus
our reason to stay up that long.  We were not amused but there wasn't much we
could do about it, so we settled for showers [in the pool facility since the
available degreasing bandwidth was much higher there] and crashed.

And as one might expect, most of us slept until close to dinnertime on Sunday.
Four-day conventions are a *moby* win, because the norm for most cons is that
everything has to be shipped out Sunday afternoon, while the help is standing
around wondering if we'll ever vacate the place.  But we got up in time to head
out into the connected underground mall thingy and visit a Brigham's for some
"real" food.  Phil and Mikki got sidetracked by a small vad under where the
pool was; I had the other radio which kept crackling things about "lots of
pipes".  After absorbing what Brig's had to offer and completely freaking out
most of the help in the process, we went back to the con because it was time
for Punday Night.  A pile of us filtered into the ballroom they'd allocated for
same, and sat over on the floor in front near an exit door that kept blowing
cold air on everyone's butts.  The contestants filed in, including Gub who so
gloriously walked away with it last year, and the contest was on.  It was
somewhat less than we expected; it was less organized it seemed, felt more like
a shouting match at some points, and was generally fairly wimpy.  Possibly the
best one was on the subject of computers, where someone threw the "old geezer
to wife" line "Looks like we should trade in our SX-11, Em..."  If enough
people *really* insist I can transcribe the bits I actually logged.  Gub got
gonged about halfway through it, but the interest level in general seemed to be
sagging around then anyway.  Chip walked over for some of it and manned the
gong, which was right near our little clutch, and studiously avoided looking at
any of us the whole time.  Most of the punsters seemed more interested in the
large tub of cold beer next to the stage than in punning.  Eventually someone
was left, won, got applauded, etc, and we all filed out.  We went back upstairs
and powered up all the toys again, but things were much more subdued this time.
Some additional visitors who hadn't shown up yet did so, including Cindy Gold
who'd been down in the con suite all weekend busting her butt cutting up
vegetables, but at this point as the night went on the expenditure of energy
and lack of sleep began to seek us out, and we died rather early that night.
Besides, we had a lot of work to do the next day...

And work we did.  The Sheraton didn't *think* to give the convention a
reasonable checkout time like 4PM, so we had to lean on it a bit to get out at
some sane hour.  First thing to do was recover the cars from MIT, and then we
got kicked out of the loading dock we'd originally used.  The hotel people
realized that the convention was over and were starting to become their usual
militaristic selves.  One of the guard types pointed us at the *other* loading
dock which was actually better because it was under the South Tower.  However,
while we were in the process of shipping things down, the security desk whose
office overlooked this dock called us *twice* to move things because other
delivery trucks were coming in.  On what was supposed to be a holiday, yet.
Well, at least they did us that favor instead of calling the tow trucks.  We
eventually worked out with them places to park where we'd *definitely* be out
of the way, and the problem vanished for the time.  That wasn't the least of
the small pains as we sorted the tremendous heap of stuff in the room, and
*then* packed up the tech toys and fixed the lock.  It took a good 3 hours with
two carts and everyone helping to get it all down, and then it was time to hit
the hot tub.

Since they'd screwed us for Sunday morning, we took our shot at the tub
on Sunday afternoon.  Someone had left a bottle of champagne in our room --
I have no idea who, but it was there.  There was the box of write rings.
There were the bathing suits that didn't get packed into the cars.  *After*
checking out of the room, we descended en masse on the pool and took the hot
tub by storm.  The remaining weather balloon was inflated and tossed around.
Most of what was left of the write rings got dumped into the hot tub.  We
popped the bubbly and passed it around.  And just like last year, the damn
tub was too cold -- a decidedly inferior heater, apparently... Phil went
around behind the wall to the pump room to try and rectify this, but didn't
realize that my frantic feeping from the tub was a warning that the lifeguard
was on the way, so he got yelled at [but that's all].  Naturally the lifeguard
type couldn't do anything about the heat either.  We annoyed her further by
playing with the "life cycles", the ones whose little processors are powered
by pedaling a generator, and if you pedal very slowly they crash and do all
kinds of crazy things with the blinkylights.

After what must have been two hours of this everyone cycled through the showers
and made ready to leave.  Changed and much refreshed, we headed out to the
lobby to regroup, and wound up in the little bar enclosure out front.  This
wasn't open yet but there was a piano there, so Larry started banging out a
theme from some play and doing quite a good job of it.  Soon a couple of
flatheads came over and insisted that Larry quit; we all questioned this since
he obviously wasn't hurting anything.  The response was less than tolerant, let
alone friendly: one of the flatheads mumbled something about us, or Larry, or
whoever, having a "mental problem" and "being intoxicated".  Realizing that
this guy was already way out of line, we questioned his evaluation of Larry's
state of mind since he was obviously cold sober; but they insisted loudly and
rudely that Larry cease with the piano and that we all leave the bar area.
Next thing I knew the two of them had slammed Mason up against the wall and
were probably getting ready to rough him up -- I have no idea what Mark said to
provoke this but we all converged post-haste on these two clowns.  Nick
demanded some identification from both of them.  The more vocal one refused,
while his fat oily cohort vanished into some back room or other.   The first
excuse they came up with for molesting Mark was something about "He was falling
over, and I caught him" -- an obvious lie since most of us saw the two of them
forcibly dragging Mark over to the wall.  We were incensed at all of this, and
took the matter immediately to the desk and demanded to see the highest manager
they could find.  This took about 15 minutes, for them to raise some guy who
was probably sitting no more than 50 feet from the front desk.  Then to
"resolve" the matter they insisted that Mark go, alone, into the nether regions
of office space to make his statement about how he was treated, leaving the
rest of us milling around like a disturbed nest of hornets.  Another person
from the security staff emerged and we asked him for the desired information on
the other two.  They had apparently sent him forward because he was the smooth
talker of the bunch; he launched into this spiel about how their names weren't
public information and that they were special police from somewhere -- more
lies, as they were clearly trying desperately to dig themselves out of a nasty
situation that one of their trigger-happy members had caused.  Then they tried
to kick us out before Mark returned, which we refused to comply with.  We
finally did get a couple of names out of them; the oily cohort showed up again
but wouldn't talk to anyone, and the other hotel people had obviously decided
that this was the last straw, they had irreversably embarrassed themselves and
the best hope they had was to try and get rid of us asap.  Unfortunately they
more or less got their way because we were now an hour late for dinner.
Scraping together what remained of our dignity we left in disgust and headed to
Lexington.

The next thing on the agenda was to char-burn lots of chicken and eat it.  To
accomplish this we first had to go shopping, but soon everyone was happily
stuffing themselves while Phil was outside performing packing algorithms to get
as much chicken as possible on the grill at once.  Mark and I were working on
vanishing the rest of the Monastery Gold.  Soon enough after all this an
overpowering lethargy set in, and despite the winning company that I could
normally have spent until dawn talking to, I was soon completely out of it on
the living room floor.

Karyn in the meantime had headed over to Lois's house to crash, and the next
afternoon Phil and I and they met at MIT to go vad around some buildings.  Phil
took us over a couple of rooftops and into an HVAC room above some offices that
contained not only the usual chair [which we've theorized is someone's sign-in,
because there are chairs in many odd places around the Tute], but a *shower*
stall only accessible now through a small crawl-hole.  Evidently there was a
full bathroom there once, whose space had been reclaimed at some point for
additional HVAC space.  We signed in here and in a couple of other places, and
then Phil went home and I went with Karyn and Lois back to Lois' house.  There
we talked about many things, including hair -- both of them seemed to think
that I didn't buy the right products for mine for some reason.  [I have often
wondered how I can lose so much every time I shower and still *have* so much.]
Anyway, Karyn was at the moment unemployed and perfectly willing to extend
*her* stay in Boston by this extra couple of days, so she had punted going home
early with the people she'd come up with in favor of riding home with me.  The
idea was to leave that night but we had a long discussion about it and didn't
leave until the next afternoon...

		-*-		-*-		-*-

After our triumph at Boskone Phil and I essentially agreed to take a vacation
from the laser business for the duration of Lunacon.  First, Lunacon is sort of
a small con and I remembered from the previous year that the rooms were sort of
small.  I had therefore proposed our first "off" con in quite a while, to which
we could bring *other*, possibly lighter and less bulky, toys.  The ride was a
milk run up to Tarrytown from here; I went and picked up Charles McGrew who
also wanted to go and whose projected timeframes seemed concurrent with mine.
We got there early Friday afternoon and got to watch everyone else filter in.

A lot of people I knew did appear, however; I must have heard "Where are the
lasers?" about fifty times and had to say "this is our vacation" in reply.  For
alternative room lighting we simply hung up christmas light strings.  The most
fun toy was the molecular modeling kit that Phil had found around MIT
somewhere, consisting of lots of wooden balls about 2 inches in diameter and
skads of aluminum rods to stick them together with.  Each ball has holes at
various 90-degree spaced points around it; some have all six and some have
less.  Holes at different angles can be added with a hand drill, although this
is somewhat tedious.  It's easier to bend some of the rods to obtain strange
angles.  Essentially it's like a big limited-axis tinkertoy set.  We began
sticking the parts of this together and quickly came up with some of your basic
90-degree lattices, and some odd sprawly things with random balls sticking off
at odd angles.  Phil started trying to balance them on the carpet, which was a
rather strange carpet itself.  Some of it went into dumb-looking headgear,
complete with parts that could spin.  When combined with the Green Frobs, which
were also present, the molecular kit could take on hinges and some different
angles and other modifications.  Unfortunately two of the rods would *just
barely* fit through the center holes of the Green Frobs, and a few of them
broke under the strain.  At one point we took a bunch of the stuff downstairs
to the hallway where everyone was hanging out, to entertain the populace at
large with the modeling-kit concept.

I sat down and started building the flat lattice I'd envisioned a while back,
and somehow this became the final outcome and Group Project with everyone
pitching in and working on it.  The result was this large heavy square thing
constructed basically like

	  O---O---O---
	@-+-@-+-@-+-@-
	| O-+-O-+-O-+   ... etc ...   where
	@-+-@-+-@-+-@-  O = yellow ball
	| O-+-O-+-O-+   @ = red ball
	@-+-@-+-@-+-@-  + = green frob
	| O-+-O-+-O-    -,| = aluminum connecting rods

and all interlaced correctly so it would hold together.  And once this thing
was finished, we took it out and carried it around the rest of the con just to
be weird.  The easiest way to hold it was by the middle, with the lattice
horizontal; since it was about the size and coloration of a very large pizza,
the phrase "Domino's Molecules" suddenly popped into my mind and immediately
the thing was obviously a Pizza Molecule, showing the basic crystalline
structure of pizza and how the dough atoms and pepperoni atoms and oregano
atoms all fit together.  This concept was well-received at the subsequent
Saturday night parties since everyone was fairly twisted anyway.

Later on I wandered into the Sound Room, where someone had set up a fairly
studly stereo and was playing SF soundtrack CDs.  He had on some Tangerine
Dream album, very loud, and it sounded absolutely marvelous.  He had a delay
box going to a pair of back speakers so the room sounded much larger.  All it
needed was darkness and lasers firing around all over; I told him this and we
got to talking a bit.  It turned out that just for bringing all his equipment
and volunteering to babysit the room for a certain number of hours during the
con, the con had not only found him a function room but had bought his
membership for him as well.  Phil had earlier mentioned someting about coming
up with an audience-contributed means of financing all the laser stuff, and I
realized that this fellow was getting floated by the concom for doing exactly
what *we* were doing, and he didn't have to work nearly as hard to set up.  I
went back to the room and we discussed this a bit, and didn't come up with a
reasonable-sounding way of making it work.  For one thing, cons are funded
primarily in terms of lots of work supplied by the people who run it.  Charging
any sort of admission to our shows, especially at a con, still seemed out of
the question, especially since they weren't really *shows* per se, just laser
playrooms we did mostly for our own fun and amusement.

MGrant and Swa meanwhile spent most of the evening in the pool splashing around
and talking to some random nympho or other and playing with her mind.  I later
found them downstairs, and Mike decided to use the AT&T Card Fone Bug to talk
to his buddy across the Pacific for some time, while Swa and I sat around and
watched the late-night hotel employees walk by and give us strange looks.  Swa
was on another comic purchase kick; he picked up some more Freak Brothers
stuff, which contains some really incredible and painstaking detail in some of
the full-page "oh wow" scenes.  We tried to determine the original purpose of
the Green Frobs; they'd come from the Boston Museum of Science, but their
original purpose still escapes us.  I thought they'd make appropriate trade-
show giveaways or something, but you really can't do that much with them unless
there are *lots* of them, sort of like Legos.  They still exist, having even
remained for a time at Level Zero, but their number seems to be steadily
decreasing.

I ran into Rathmere later on who had been harassed by the local police in
connection with drunk mundanes in the bar.  The usual hotel bug here is that a
lot of mundanes who know nothing of the con often come into the bar on Saturday
night and while the bar is usually fairly-well separated from where the fans
hang out, there is some interaction.  Usually it's Mundane: "What is all this?"
Fan: "A science fiction convention, where a lot of people come to be weird and
party together." Mundane: "Oh."  Well, perhaps they learn something, but
usually the mundanes are quite happy to hang with their own kind and drink.
Apparently things got a bit ugly in this particular bar and police were called,
but simply by being within 50 feet of it Rathmere somehow got involved, when
all he'd done was drifted down the hallway leading to the bar at just the wrong
time.  Apparently this happens to him often.

I took to porting my flute around and wound up in the con suite for a while,
where I ran into someone who remembered all the high obnoxious fingerings I'd
forgotten.  Chip Hitchcock wandered through and simply shrugged when I asked
him how *his* con was going.  None the better for my presence, I suspected, not
that this was going to affect *my* lifestyle any.  And then the high point of
the evening came around 4 in the morning, after most of the people had gone to
bed.  We decided to do a little elevator riding, since there were about 12
floors to work with and nice tame elevators.  We lassoed one of the user vators
[as opposed to the service vators] and Phil transferred to the other one in the
same shaft, and we were just getting ready to rat race for a while when the
fire alarms went off.

The first thing I did was look up the shaft at the smoke detector on the
ceiling to see if it had triggered for some ungodly reason.  I saw that it was
still blinking, which usually means it's okay, but I had the more immediate
problem that my elevator was homing to the first floor like they usually do
when there's an alarm, and I had to get *out* of there.  Phil's was already
stopped somewhere above me, and there was no time for conversation to figure
out if we'd done anything to trigger the alarm or not.  I heard elevator doors
banging and for a sickening instant thought someone knew we were in there and
half-expected to see some security flathead sticking his face into the shaft up
above me.  It was still closed up, but now the car was on the first floor and I
cracked the doors in front of me, found the coast clear on the second floor and
exited.  Not ten seconds later two flatheads went pounding past me in the other
direction, their radios crackling in unison with my scanner, which had been on
their frequency all this time.  People were starting to congregate downstairs,
MGrant showed up with the other HT and I finally found out where Phil had gone
-- back to the room to make sure none of our stuff was out of order [more than
usual, that is].  And then we learned that the flatheads were scanning floor by
floor telling people to get out of their rooms [at 4 in the morning, mind you]
and go to the lobby until the alarm had been cleared, which was why there were
so many people down there.  Phil returned and told me that one of the flatheads
had come running along the hall and told Phil to "go get the people out of 8
and 9" or some such -- here's Phil in shorts and tie-dye, but the flathead saw
a small box with a rubber dickie antenna and took him for someone official
anyway.  [This has since happened again to one or more of our crowd, with
frequency that refutes coincidence.  People apparently just see radio, think
"official".]  So anyway, all this time the flatheads were frantically looking
all along the second floor or something for the offending fire detector -- the
alarm panel only shows them which *area* has triggered, not which exact
detector.  They couldn't find it, and they couldn't reset the alarm with it
still triggered, so they were still poking into rooms and closets and telling
the desk, and us, of their efforts the entire time.  By now most of the con was
downstairs in the lobby waiting for them to get done so they could go back to
sleep, and Phil and I and the rest of us were standing over by the window with
the scanners, and suddenly everyone got quiet and was looking at us, since we
were holding Progress Reports in our hands.  We turned them up and toward the
rest of the lobby so everyone could hear what was going on, which I found
highly amusing because apparently because nobody else thinks to bring scanners
to cons, suddenly there was a context in which they were worth having.  And
when a flathead keyed up and said "Tell them the alarm has been cleared", a
great cheer went up.  Everyone then went back to bed, except Isaac Asimov who
apparently checked out and left in disgust on the spot.

I spent the rest of the night sitting around in the same second-floor mezzanine
where I'd spent a good deal of last year's Lunacon getting deb-trapped, but
this time Vicka and I were just shooting the breeze about nothing in particular
and wandering in and out of the little balconies over the pool.  We both tried
to stay up all night and were doing just fine until about 9AM when I simply
*had* to get some sleep, but we were all up soon after this to clean up and get
out.  The Bostonians and the Molecule loaded into Donna's car and headed for
home, MGrant headed out fairly early and all who were left were Vicka and me
and a box of coffee stirrers from which we created lots of cute little shapes.
Charles McGrew, who I'd come up with, was still busy with something downstairs
and was in no hurry to leave, but eventually we decided it was time to go home.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

I mentioned that the laser stuff wasn't really a *show* per se yet, but the
next "gig" certainly came close.  At Lunacon and even Boskone we'd spent a lot
of time with the Generic Fandom folks, a loose organization based out of
RPI/Troy NY where Genericon is held every year.  I believe I've been to every
one of these, since this was only their third one, and it's been massive fun
every time [see previous flamage about it].  It's traditionally held in this
wonderful old academic building called Sage Hall, which clings precariously to
a hillside just above the campus boiler plant.  Its basement is full of strange
twisted bits of metal that people have designed as art, the inside of the place
has been sort of re-done with new coats of paint and trim and good carpets, and
it's got lots of little hidey-holes and crannies where fans can go crash when
they need to.  There's plenty of undisturbed parking out back, although it's a
long uphill toil from the lot to the first floor of the place.  During the last
few cons the Generic folks had asked us to "do a show" for Genericon because
they liked it so much, and how could we refuse, indeed.  So it was agreed that
we'd port all our stuff to Troy and try and give them a good one.

As is also traditional I picked up Lissanne and her artwork and we trucked
merrily off up the Thruway, arriving at RPI in the afternoon.  Since we were
essentially going to live in Sage for the next two days I went shopping; it
turned out that all one had to do was go north a few blocks and there was a
large mall.  Radio Shack provided some insight as to the frequencies used by
the RPI peacekeeping force, and I went back to my car with large amounts of
groceries from the food store, and sat there eating a yogurt and watching this
sad old retiree parking lot guard try and slim-jim open a car for a lady who'd
locked her keys inside it.  He eventually popped it but I was finished with my
yogurt by then; I left, made an illegal left off the highway to get back to RPI
[there was no other obvious way], and showed up to discover that Phil and Donna
had arrived.  We headed down toward the registration desk where we used their
button maker to construct more Coherent Central buttons.  Someone from ConOps
was liberated to find us a room to store all our stuff in, which was right down
the hall from the con suite on the 5th floor.  We swapped in our own door lock,
rearranged all the furniture, trucked in the toys, and called it home.  The
first thing to do was hack up something resembling dinner out of tuna fish and
ramen noodles; Karyn had brought a hot plate along that facilitated this.
Frodo in the meantime was thinning down pieces of his new pick set.  Phil's
latest addition to his tool kit was a small round room deodorizer ["This is a
good place for a stick-up"].  He'd been talking to Paul Earls, a guy from
Boston who owns some largish lasers and does an occasional show.  Paul gets
trailed around by the CDRH, the federal organization that deals with
"radiological safety" and makes volumes of paranoid rules about lasers and what
you can and cannot do with them if you're going to run a laser show.  I have
often considered it fortunate that so far, all our stuff is of a low enough
power that nobody would really worry about this.  However, even the smallish
HeNes are considered "class IIIb" and thus "dangerous" by the governmental
paranoids, although even the upwards-of 100 milliwatts one of the argons can
crank out is pretty tame as far as "radiation" goes.  Earls, however, is
pushing a couple of watts, at which point it's easy to burn holes in target
objects including eyeballs.  He was complaining about having to fill out large
piles of paperwork for *each* *show*, not just in general.  The upshot, as
usual, is that we're just slightly "in violation", but not enough that anyone
would worry about it and enough that we and those around us.  If and when we
acquire some bigger lasers will perhaps be a different story, but at this point
the informality of it all is part of the charm, and gives us the freedom to do
development work without burdens of bureaucratic worry.  Apparently getting an
official variance for a given state isn't that difficult anyway.

We'd been scheduled for midnight Saturday, which is sort of the high point of
any con, *in* the con suite.  Yes, that huge wonderful room with all the nice
strong mouldings to stick mirrors in, and all the good heavy tables to use as
benches.  We thus had Friday essentially free, so after eating and reviewing
the pictures of the recent Boston Tie-dye Party [where a lot of people went
colorfully overboard] we went to wander about and familiarize ourselves once
again with some of the nifty features of RPI and discover some more.  We first
went up to that fun little greenhouse thing on the roof of Sage, this time with
*real flashlights* instead of a couple of Bic lighters and in the daytime so we
could see what things looked like from up there.  I found myself in the attic
at one point and since it was there, I removed and examined one of the smoke
detector modules and found that they were all easy bayonet-mounts.  The reason
behind this interest was that it was pretty clear that we *would* have a Rosco
fogger for the show.  Some guys playing keyboards had set up a small concert
thing down in the lecture hall, and were busily attempting to emulate Tangerine
Dream.  We briefly enhanced their gig by hanging a glass ball on a mike stand
and hitting it with the portables, which looked even better than expected
because they were the people who had originally wangled the Rosco out of the
RPI theatrical group, and we threw some fog into the room to make beams more
visible.  The guy doing their sound, who went by the name of Crash, seemed in
charge of all the equipment and claimed we'd have the fogger for our stuff
Saturday.  Wow!  There is nothing that makes a laser show magnitudes better
than some miasma in the room to show where the beams are going.  With enough
fog they look almost like luminous solid bars criscrossing the air.  Once this
idea became known we realized that the fogger was *essential* to make an
impressive show, and having one available would be a huge win.

We realized that there was a lot of work ahead of us to get this thing set up
for Saturday, so sometime toward dawn we went back to the con suite and started
initial planning for where we were going to put things.  The room is enormous
with a high ceiling but one side of it is taken up by this half-height office
suite where some dean or other hangs out.  The roof of this is still only about
halfway up to the real ceiling and consists of unfinished plywood and a couple
of funny skylights.  On the other side of the room is something similar but
much smaller, which houses a small kitchen in one end and soda machines in the
other.  The two halves are separated by sort of a peaked roof thing in the
middle, but there are small level places on either side of this.  It quickly
became obvious that this was what we wanted to do the show from; beams would
already be well overhead, and the equipment would be out of harm's way, and
initial tests showed that these little risers were quite strong.  There were
outlets nearby that appeared to be on separate circuits, and given the
generally robust nature of construction in the building we anticipated no power
problems.  I placed a random table up next to the riser and hauled myself up on
it to survey the situation.  It looked like we wanted to suspend two spinmotors
about five feet in front of these things and fire beams through hanging frobs
at the bare walls in the corners, and downward on to the front of the riser.
The first thing I needed, of course, was an optics bench up there, so we
grabbed one of the low tables around the room with the intent of handing it up
there for this purpose.  It didn't move.  We pulled harder and finally it rose
up, but we examined it more closely and realized that the top was made of solid
steel or something and weighed about 150 pounds!!  I should have known, this
being a college -- this was standard dorm-grade stuff that wouldn't be easy for
students to steal.  It took four of us to actually lever the damn thing up
there on top of the riser, but it got up there and was soon set firmly in place
at the edge mouldings with a book under the fourth leg.  It didn't move a
micron for the rest of the weekend -- a truly wonderful table to work on, and
well-worth the effort getting it placed.  While people slept on the floor
underneath, Phil and I ascended into the high reaches of the beams across the
ceiling and strung the ropes for the motors and removed the smoke detectors.
The access path to these beams involved hopping up on one of the funny little
pillar struts at the ends of the room, grabbing a steam pipe holder and pulling
up that to the beams, a good 20 feet up.  By the time the con was over there
was an indistinct trail of footprints up the wall where the pipe hanger was,
but not so's you'd really notice.  This arrangement was only on one wall, so to
reach the far end of the strutwork I had to monkey along the beams to the other
end, fix the rope, and walk back [the rope was probably strong enough to hold
my weight but I wasn't about to try coming down on it].  The final
configuration was a three-point suspension for each motor, one in front of each
riser, and once they stopped swinging everything was nice and stable.  By this
time it was past dawn, so we went back to our little room and crashed.

Soon after we awoke, MGrant arrived, dragging Spam's old Spectra-Physics HeNe
and a new toy concept we'd talked about -- a Spirograph generator.  This is
simply two [or three in this case] small DC motors with mirrors mounted on the
shaft ends at a slight angle from perpendicular.  An incident beam bounces back
off one of these at a continually varying angle, and the result describes a
circle.  If this circle next hits another mirror spinning at a different speed,
the circles modulate each other and you get rosette patterns.  Mike's prototype
was done with mirrors from compacts epoxied to Rat Shack motors, all strapped
down to a hunk of wood.  And it worked just fine, throwing strange loopy
figures all over the ceiling.  Two motors seemed to give the most symmetrical
patterns, while three seemed to deliver spaghetti and didn't look quite as
interesting.  For someone who'd been feeling somewhat peripheral with regard
to the laser toy business he certainly came through First with a Working
Concept, and then followed up by putting a lot of work into the show, so his
theory about being "left out" must have been wrong to begin with.  This all
increased the psychedness of everyone considerably.  We opened up Spam's laser
and diked out the silly beam polarizer and put a paper wad in under the sidearm
tube so it would be in proper alignment, but it could still only kick out about
2 mW.  *Where the fuck was Larry with the 30mW HeNe?!?!* we were asking at this
point.  We even went as far as to call Lexington and find out, and the upshot
was that nobody else was coming to Troy as far as they knew.  We had to do
without it, so my red side was destined to be pretty wimpy.

We went off to explore around some and possibly find a ladder, along with John
Galvin who is one of the founding folks behind Genericon.  We wandered into the
Fiz Plant boiler house down below, hoping to find someone on duty who would
also be able to find us a ladder, and ran into a large jovial individual
sitting behind the same desk the old black guy from last year had been.  He
seemed to sense no threat in our presence there, and then when we told him the
story about the old black guy at 4 in the morning last year, his eyes opened
wide and he went "oh, that was *you* guys?  My boss made me *clean the sign-ins
off the tank*".  And we all had a good laugh riot about this, because they'd
repainted the tank anyway, and so few people were ever going to see the oil
tank anyway that we all realized that keeping it looking nice was completely
academic.  He told us how his boss would sit up in the little tin shack that
served as his office, above the boiler room floor, and occasionally stick his
head out and yell down at the grunts.  And then we expressed a desire to go
look at the works again, and he said "Sure, go explore, do what you want, but
just come out through here so I know you haven't died in there".  What a win!!
With the wonderful sound of throttled-back steam all around us we went off
through some old familiar tunnels, signed in *again* in the freshly-painted
tank room but this time on the ceiling above the tank itself so the boss-man
might not find it, and went off down a tunnel we'd never seen before.  This one
was a good deal more crufty and old than the others we'd hitherto found, in a
more rounded cross-section and full of crumbling old brick.  At the far end
there was a ladder up to an access plate outside somewhere, and a tiny hole
past the pipes that turned right into oblivion.  I stripped off my gear [the
only way I'd fit through it] and wiggled my way around the corner, under some
other stuff and into the basement of the next building down the hill from Sage.
Whereupon I soon ran into what looked like an IR alarm sensor, and the only
reason I saw it was because its light was on meaning I'd tripped it.  Damn!  I
quickly looked for another way out, and there was the obvious doorway and
stairs, but just as I started to go up these two random ladies came into view,
sat down in some chairs right next to the stairway for a smoke and a chat.  I
waited there for about five minutes, far longer than I should have with what
could be the entire RPI police force converging on the building, and finally
gave up and scrambled back through the tiny hole to the tunnel.  By this time I
was completely filthy and hadn't signed in anywhere in there.  We exited soon
after this, taking with us a tall stepladder the guy decided to let us have
after all, with the proviso that we bring it back Sunday afternoon before the
boss-man got in and wondered where it was.  No problem, we told him.  Upon our
return to Sage we discovered that some clown had broken the elevator, rather
hopelessly as we discovered upon going down to look at the controller, so we
schlepped the ladder up 5 tall ones to get it to the room.

And thus continued our many trips up and down those risers, lifting all the
expensive stuff up and coming down again to align mirrors across the room,
drink more Jolt, and headscratch about where the next piece was going to go.
We spent most of the evening on this.  By the time it neared completion I had
two tripods on the table with a bunch of catch mirrors taped down, which could
route the blue and the red to various places, mostly to the hanging frobs but
some just out across the room and back such that they could switch around
fairly fast.  Frodo and Karyn went out and returned with a *case* of ramens,
which we made dinner out of.  There was a sickening moment of doubt when it was
learned that the fog machine had been allocated only for the previous night and
was to be returned to the theatrical group before we could use it.  I ran off
yelling for Crash, found him down in the lecture hall again and we went
upstairs and found the closet that someone had stashed the machine in.  We then
liberated it and took it up to the room.  There was no fucking *way*,
especially with setup so far along, that we would survive without it.  We hung
our various corporate logos and bits of propaganda on the front of the risers
-- all this time I thought I'd never get to hang my paperwork in someone's *con
suite*, but here we were and there it was.  We had essentially taken over the
entire con suite to set up, which later on became increasingly difficult as
more people filtered in and wound up in the way.  We were suddenly glad that
the equipment was safely up top.  Someone had brought a fairly studly stereo
for con use in general; we appropriated this and took his amp topside, ran
telco wire out to the two little pillar things at each end and levered his two
*large* *heavy* speakers up on top of these.  This made things acoustically
interesting since the music had to bounce around some before actually reaching
the people down below.

And as midnight approached, so did our state of readiness.  For the first time
we were actually *ready* to go, *on schedule*, including having had time to go
off and do some other things.  And amazingly enough, nothing was drifting out
of alignment.  Praise be to good old solid buildings!!  We discussed musical
selection; Phil in a stroke of genius came up with the idea of using the first
bit of Zoolook as an opening, with things afterward to be determined.  Regis
and someone else ran off to quickly create a mix tape of some good TD and such,
which at something like 11:45 was delivered back to us.  The room by now was
quite packed with people, many of who were already sitting on the floor
waiting.  A captive audience, you might say -- after all, we'd taken their con
suite!  At about ten minutes to, Phil and I sat up on the peak of the little
roof between the risers [a summit conference, of course] and overviewed how
things were going and told each other the equivalent of "Let's kick ass".  We
then retired to our respective sides and waited for the Midnight Sacrifice.

Somewhere just past midnight someone yelled up to us "start".  Some confusion
ensued, in which I couldn't figure out for a while how to get the damn lights
to turn off and someone thought the Sacrifice was either done, or punted, or
still supposed to happen.  The result was that we finally got the lights out
and about ten seconds into Zoolook and a "hold it!" cry went up.  No, the
Sacrifice hadn't happened yet.  It then did, which was rather amusing with
someone intoning lugubrious ceremonial incantations and thumping a large
walking stick on the floor.  The victim, a young lady, was officially declared
dead, Crash took his place down on the floor with the fogger, the lights were
nuked, and we were on.

This particular piece of music starts with a rather slow and dreamy part,
punctuated by strange noises suggestive of animal grunts, that goes on for
about 7 minutes or so.  During this time all the lasers were on but only two
little weakish red beams from the handhelds were wandering around the room,
chasing each other through the rafters [the "mating flies" stunt], occasionally
residing in a hanging crystal or two but not strong enough to really show what
they were, and being generally low-key.  Meanwhile Crash was shooting fog and
the room was filling with miasma.  Somewhere around the time when people began
to wonder if this was all we were going to do, the music shifted and oozed into
a section with a faster rhythm, but it was still fairly mellow.  The small red
beams' paths became more random as those running them around started to quietly
reach for other equipment -- Phil had some object blocking his main argon beam,
and I reached one hand up for the tripod handle...  the soundtrack gave its
three preparatory bass drum licks, BOOM BOOM BOOM, and in one of the most
glorious moments I've ever experienced, I yanked the tripod handle over just a
little and Phil removed the blocking object.  Ka-pow!!  It was perfectly timed:
on the next phrase of the music, which started the loud lively part, bright
blue and green beams suddenly leapt everywhere around the room, and a most
rewarding involuntary "Oooh!!" drifted up from the audience.  The next few
minutes had beams dancing in all different directions, through crystals, back
and forth overhead, and red and blue patterns from the galvos and the
spirograph frob danced on the ceiling.  The fog made an incredible enhancement
to it all; it showed every beam path in vivid colorful detail.

The only thing wrong with this approach was that we'd only come up with a
beginning.  Not a middle or an end.  So the show was rather like a Grand Finale
that went on for the next couple of hours -- we ran through everything we'd set
up in about five minutes, and then sat there wondering what the hell *else* we
were going to do with it all!  Having not thought about it before I quickly
vectored a "hack beam" off the riser edge so I could sit there and hold things
in it, letting the results go on the ceiling.  We spent the rest of the time
switching the same things back and forth and trying to do something different,
and basically just playing, until people began to get tired and drift out.  We
noticed this, had a brief conference over the roof peak, and decided to recover
by slowly fading out the lasers and slowly fading in the lights.  Since they
were mercury lights that take a while to come on anyway, this was perfect -- I
left a crystal spread spinning around and jumped down, sneaked over to the
light switch and started them up.  The bulbs were just starting to go from dull
orange to purplish by the time I got back up on the riser and dropped the argon
output power a notch or two.  As the lights caught and brightened we blocked
beams until everything coherent was contained and the room was light, although
it was still quite full of fog.  And unexpectedly, a rousing ovation went up
from those who were still left.  Yow.  What a post-orgasmic feeling, indeed.

We had used *all* the fog juice -- over a quart of the stuff.  I powered down
the argon and discovered that a piece of lens paper had gotten caught in the
power supply fan, causing it to rotate at about half its normal speed.  One
ballast resistor was fairly cooked, but it's ceramic, so no harm done.  The
extension cords were warm, as usual.  Phil discovered that the borrowed amp had
thrown so much heat up into his tape deck that the grease therein had become
far less viscous, and the tape was running faster than normal.  We shut down,
threw open the windows to let the fog clear out, made some very strong hot
chocolate, and retired to a nearby lecture hall with the rest of the Genericon
staff to kick back and celebrate.  Soon we started to hear tremendous booms
from outside -- we learned later that someone had gotten hold of some dry ice
and was making soda bottle bombs.  [Dry ice, water, cap tightly, shake, and get
the fuck *away* from it.] Sometime toward dawn we stumbled out in various
directions to go crash for a few hours, after which it was time to take it all
down.

Sunday, or whatever it really was, was the usual teardown, except that this
time we didn't have to *check out* of a room so we could take our time.  My
arms were trying to tell me that it was time to stop jumping up and down off
that damn riser.  We packed away all the toys, and the last thing to do was go
topside once again into the rafters to take down the ropes and return the smoke
detectors.  Now, sometime along the way we'd been downstairs where the fire
alarm controller was and noticed that the 5th floor circuit was on "trouble"
all weekend -- we didn't know if it was from the lack of smoke detectors,
figured What The Hell, and put them back in their mounts.  We must have done so
at *exactly* the same instant, because something down there got confused and
the goddamn fire alarm went off.  We looked at each other, went "oops", got
down *out* of there and shuffled out of the building with everyone else.  For a
routine false alarm which it obviously was, the FD took *forever* to show up
and fix it.  They probably went over it again and again trying to find the
errant detector, and of course couldn't since by now everything was properly
reinstalled.  They came out mumbling something about a "malfunction" and let
all the now-freezing con folks back in.  Phil and Donna took off for Boston
soon afterward, and Lissanne and I headed south into the gathering dusk for an
uneventful ride home.  And when I got there, I slept bigtime.....

		-*-		-*-		-*-

The next major turning point in things was the Trenton Computerfest, the annual
orgy of Cheap Parts.  This year I made out like a bandit: found a 15MHz
dual-trace scope for about $180, and a 5 mW He-Ne which I dweebed the owner
down to something like $130 for [which for that power is a *steal*, works
perfectly, and has hard seals and a nice tight beam].  The other thing I took
home was this large assemblage of machined metal which was a UPC scanner
prototype from Litton.  Some engineering staff had built this thing as a
testbed for developing a commercial supermarket scanner, but such that they
could easily change it and add things.  Basically the output from a laser tube
was brought through some collimating optics and a shutter and bounced from a
rotating 5-sided mirror drum out to some distribution mirrors to give a sort of
crosshatch scan at the window on top.  The backscatter was collected along the
same path in reverse and Fresnel-focused into a phototransistor, which via
additional electronics on the attached board read the barcode and sent the data
off to the store's central price computer.  This is basically how most scanners
work, but the production units are of course designed more toward volume
manufacture.  This unit is unique, and since Litton was apparently finished
with it long since, having brought their production model to market, they
dumped it.  $140 later this thing, including a 3 or 4 mW He-Ne tube and power
supply brick and the 3-phase Hall effect motor with driver board and the
beautifully-fitted chassis that could only have been the result of someone's
machine-shop orgasm, was mine.  I wasn't yet sure what I was going to do with
this thing but what the hell, I had yet another He-Ne and power supply.  Along
with the other stuff I'd culled from the Fest, I felt much more wealthy.  I
redubbed the scanner as the Optical Orgasm, and after initial testing it sat
around in a corner for the next couple of months awaiting modifications.

The next actual con was another vacation from the laser stuff, primarily
because the Boston contingent didn't feel like trucking all the way to
Baltimore that weekend.  I headed down a day early with the intent of jumping
through Crosshaven and visiting Vicka on the way.  This essentially got
flummoxed by a small soap opera, but I got a lot of reading done in K&R.  The
rest of the housemates were rather amused by all this.  Crosshaven is one of
several houses occupied by Johns Hopkins students and associates; they are
located within a small clutch of blocks near the campus and most of them have
interesting names.  Everything south and east of there, except for maybe the
strip down St. Paul street, is *evil*.  I approached through the crufty eastern
part of town, which is an endless wasteland of two or three-story shacks.  The
area right around Hopkins is like a small island of Real People, although there
are occasional infringements thereinto by what's outside.  For instance, there
have been a couple of shootings just up at the end of Vicka's block...

Anyway, the day of the con rolled around and I headed down toward Inner Harbor.
But the hotel wasn't really in the Harbor area, it was off to the west a bit
but I finally found it; a pair of sort of grimy yellowish concrete boxes of
about 14 floors apiece.  This is another one of those twin-tower screws: to get
to the equivalent floor in the other tower you have to go all the way down,
through a small maze of halls, and up the other one.  All this with slow,
convention-overburdened elevators.  As usual, the service vators were the
correct option.

I managed to wangle a corner room out of them, which turned out to be a fairly
magnificent cubicle with lots of windows on two sides and a long hallway
entering it from the doorway.  In fact it was rather reminiscent of the Boskone
room.  It would have been another good room for laser toys; all I had with me
was the 5mW HeNe which got used to confused passing pedestrians down below.
The door contained a lock type I hadn't seen yet -- a Cor-Key magnetic deal,
which I've since detailed to the Security list.  Upon taking this apart I
realized that I'd lost the original combo but after comparing my key with
numerous others from maid carts and other people, I eventually reconstructed
most of the "master" combo such that the lock would work for the hotel again.
Meanwhile, we discovered that the roof was a complete pushover, to the point
that they'd left all the doors *wide open* let alone unlocked.  These opened
out onto the main roof which was bounded on all sides by a wall about 10 feet
high.  The only way to get a decent view was to go up one to the top of the
'vator doghouse, or down one to these funny little galleries surrounding the
HVAC rooms on the top floor of each tower.  All of this was left quite
accessible.  Further winnage was found when I successfully parked in the
loading dock the entire weekend and never gave anyone money to park in the
regular deck.  There was a fast route from the dock through the deck to the
doors, if that makes any sense -- in other words, getting from the hotel to the
loading dock via a non-service-corridor route was easy.  There were a number of
cameras down below but it turned out that one could come out a door *behind*
the security office and look over the attendant's shoulder at the monitors.
Most of them were quite burnt from passing headlights, and most of the detail
was completely lost.

Gnome and I went out to find her car and recover her stuff at one point, which
was a couple of blocks away.  On the way there we passed a big steel Corporate
Logo Frob in front of a building, which I attempted to climb but there wasn't
much to grab hold of.  At this point a city cop came along and started giving
me hell for doing this; I asked him what I could possibly be harming by
standing inside the hole in this structure, and he launches into this I'm-
going-to-assert-my-authority schpiel about someone else's property, spending
nights in jail, and "word games".  What a twit.  He was obviously afraid I'd
out-logic him and demonstrate the harmlessness of climbing the thing, so he
resorted to terror tactics instead.

Back at the hotel I was beset with requests for Elevator Rodeo training.  Karyn
and Frodo hadn't done this before, so we decided to have a go with the ones
here.  Mistake: these were some of the *worst* vators to begin on, because they
were small and had the M.A.-of-2 type of cable configuration with a pulley on
top of the car instead of just a beam.  Thus there was precious little to hold
on to, and they went fairly fast.  This combined with some apprehension on the
part of the trainees soon caused us to quit, although while I had Frodo on one
of them I was getting bombed with tracer disks from on high where Karyn was
waiting...

It was decided to take a small road trip over to Hopkins and do some tunnels.
We all piled into Bob Jesse's car and my shitbox and tootled up to the campus,
went and watched Watership Down which I'd never seen, and then Bob and Vicka
served as tourguides as far as the tunnel entrances.  Bob declined the actual
run since he had to go home and take care of things, and Vicka because she was
about to graduate and getting caught down there would have prevented this.  So
the somewhat large bunch of us split up and went two different directions from
Maryland Hall, MGrant and Don and company toward FizPlant like they *weren't*
supposed to and I and Karyn and Frodo and whoever else was with us toward the
northwest.  We ran into a somewhat elaborate system of dead ends which were
nonetheless rather interesting.  The Hopkins tunnels are some of the most
yuppieized; they are nice and tall and wide and well-lit and not completely
crammed with pipes [yet!] and present no navigational difficulties save one:
You can't get *out* of them at the canonical exits.  Somehow the exits we found
were *locked* to the inside, and liberally sprinkled with institutional Best
locks.  I couldn't manage to deal with *any* of these, much to my frustration.
At one point we had climbed over this crazy wooden half-wall and found
ourselves in some kind of kitchen-looking thing.  We had decided that it was
time to get out of there and go meet the rest of the folks at Levering Hall
like we'd agreed, but as a result of this technical screw we had to go *back*
over the fucking wall and down through the little hole and all the way back
down the tunnels and out through the sub-basement of some random physics
building, whose exit door was open.  Foo.  In addition, I had once again been
skrod by those lousy Panasonic event logger microtapes which I will *never* buy
again; the humidity had apparently caused it to get hopelessly wedged so I
missed a lot of the latter half of the journey.

We finally met the rest of the folks and discovered that MGrant et al had found
this tributary down near FizPlant that went for what seemed like miles up the
eastern edge of the campus.  All of this was substantiated the next day when
Vicka brought her official tunnel map down to the con; the crude map we'd drawn
from memory after getting back was actually somewhat accurate.  However, after
we exited there was a more immediate problem: Bob had taken the other car and
gone home with it, leaving about 7 people and my shitbox to return to the
hotel.  Just as we were scratching our heads and considering how to space-pack
this mess the Hopkins security-patrol-joke drove up and asked us what was up,
and I said "leaving, if we can get everyone in here", and they seemed somewhat
amused with this answer and drove away.  We did manage to pack everyone in
although it was pretty squirmy, and arrived gloriously cruddy at the hotel.  We
then sat around and pigged out on ramens and drew our proposed map.

Don and I stayed up until dawn, and decided that since the Legos hadn't been
used yet that we should do so.  We trucked them all down to the con suite.  The
first building effort was an archway over the door made out of the potato chip
boxes; after some reinforcements this worked fairly well.  Then we opened up
the lego chest and dumped the entire thing out on a sheet, and lots of people
tied seriously in and started building things.  For the next four hours or so
it was a wild orgy of construction and "where are more of these things" and
"are there any of these wheels over your way".  The products of all this
included a really detailed and beautifully-executed hydrofoil of some sort, a
large crane, a solid and nicely-detailed house, and numerous little space
buggies of one sort of another.  My effort was to find a use for the air-piston
things, the result of which was a sort of hot-rod looking thing with a working
air-shock rear suspension.  To do this I needed a lot of the "god" pieces,
which are the little 1/3-height wafers that you can fit skads of together to
make just about any shape you need.  My final action was to find and disable
the awful Muzak they turned on around 8AM; with plenty of pictures having been
shot and most of the constructors now gone, we packed the Legos back up and
took the chest upstairs.  And that was about it; after minimal sleep we were
once again on our way home.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

Soon after this, the Great Course of Things found me back in Boston for that
annual frolic and stress-test of stomach lining known as Steer Roast.  This is
documented in more depth in a previous flame; this year was similar in overall
structure except that I was hanging around with Phil, Corwin and Scliff from
CMU instead of MG and the mysterious Peri [who has completely dropped out of
the known universe since last year].  As a prelude to this, I finally addressed
the Optical Orgasm and decided that it was time to do something with it.  I
wanted to build a spirograph generator of my own, having seen how nicely
MGrant's version had performed at Genericon.  The obvious framework to start
sticking such toys on to was the Orgasm, since its heavy and eminently
drillable aluminum chassis could hold many such.  After some putzing around I
decided to mount the motors on the center piece that originally held this odd
conical piece of aluminum that seemed to have no particular function.  But
there was a thick plate there that I could bolt other hunks of stuff to, and
the result was the pair of motors with small mirrors mounted on the ends of
their shafts, as opposed to MGrant's original version with enormous round
mirrors from a compact, with the ultimate output pointed such that it could be
directed against the spinning 5-sided thing.  A small difference here was the
addition of a reversing switch, which Mike's didn't have yet.  This generates a
whole 'nother slew of patterns at low rpm.  This worked quite well; not only
could I put a fairly round pattern on the ceiling, I could bounce the center of
the rosette off the 5-sider and generate these weird things all the way around
180 degrees worth of walls that vaguely resembled Chinese characters.  One
motor was a fixed-speed thing from a tape deck that seemed quite happy being
fed 5 volts; the other one was run through a driver transistor controlled by a
pot on the side of the case, so its speed was variable.  Thus the variable
motor could spin faster or slower than the constant one, giving the full range
of available patterns.  I then threw this mess and the rest of the gear into
the back of the shitbox and headed off toward Boston.

I arrived at Senior House that Friday afternoon while they were just strapping
the meat to the iron frame thingy -- with *brick strap*, yet -- and immediately
found many people I knew.  I finally witnessed the Lighting of the Fire, which
involves sliding a flaming roll of toilet paper down a wire from the roof to
the fire pit.  When it got there the gallons of charcoal igniter they'd dumped
on it went up with a wonderful satisfying WHOOOF!, and the Steer began to
Roast.  The weather was still a tad nippy, it being early May, so to compensate
for this we spent many hours out on the front lawn by the Great Dome, tossing
the disk back and forth.  From this standpoint there is an interesting illusion
of curvature in the great columns that support the front foyer of building 10
when they're lit up at night.  There was a small bit of Rainbow-style drumming
in the Senior House courtyard, but this didn't last too long as some of the
participants had other things to do.  We continued wandering about, not really
vadding anything but definitely dinking about in fun ways with each others'
brains, until sometime past dawn.  I set up the Spiro Generator in some random
stairwell and entertained passing people with loopy red things on the wall.  We
found some extremely colorful documentation from the Maytag company about their
laundry equipment, we determined the parity of the bricks in the walkways near
the Green building, and had a small soap opera with Ben Blout's roomie.

Phil uncrated his argon in the Holman 4 kitchen so we could have some fun with
it and maybe run it through the Spiro Frob.  We had a look at the breakers
downstairs and determined that there would probably be no problem with power,
and fired the thing up.  Just then Blout's roomie came home, walked into the
kitchen and saw this blue beam across the room, and freaked completely out,
yelling "turn this off, this isn't right, get this out of my kitchen".  Well,
we later got the real story about this person's utterly irrational behavior.
He had been putting in all his waking hours on his thesis, which involved using
high-power YAG lasers, so he spent lots of time in a lab being continually
paranoid about putting his eyes in the wrong place and having them fried.  He
had come home to relax and get away from it for a while, and here are *more*
lasers in his kitchen.  So he just lost it at that point and could do nothing
else but sit there and scream.  Since it was getting pretty late at that point
and our hearts weren't really into messing around with lasers but more into
sleep, Phil just packed it up again and we left.

Phil and I arrived back at Senior House the next day in time for lunch, which
of course was the entire idea of the weekend.  They slid the grill away from
the fire and unwound all the brick strap, and placed the now black and crispy
hunks of cow in trays to cut it up.  A line formed that reached all the way out
to Mem Drive and around the corner; by the time one got through the line once
people were back for seconds.  Basically there was lots of meat and more meat,
and salad, and corn, and bread, and just when you thought you'd had enough meat
there was more meat and when you were quite ready to explode, they brought out
the ice cream.  Oooog!!  Along with all this there was Rich Stillman and the
bluegrass folks again, just like last year, and a side trip over to a lab for a
Coke bottle full of liquid nitrogen, with which we shattered flowers, breathed
fog, and generally had a lot of fun.  There was also a large chunk of dry ice,
which in combination with soap solution created a gross pile of bubbles that
resembled a gooey insect egg mass.

Somewhere in there the idea had come up to try and enhance that evening's
musical efforts with the lasers.  The residents in charge of band setup were
fairly vague about what they wanted [they had no way of *knowing*, really], but
they seemed to think it was a fun idea.  The performers were a few local bands
whose style seemed to largely be frantic leather-and-mohawks punk.  Stage
lighting was minimal but it was definitely enough to completely mask out any
light we could crank out of the lasers [but we didn't know this yet].  After
stringing up Corwin's large crystal frob over the stage and setting up Phil's
argon in Corwin's bedroom with brickstrap kludges to get the beam down to the
ledge below, we sort of realized this, and that most of the people down below
couldn't really see anything.  Phil at this point gave up; I sat the Orgasm out
on the ledge and put some spirographs on the wall over my head.  This was all
hampered by the fact that people who wanted to sit on the ledge wouldn't give
me enough room to work.  Oh well.  This was our first indication that doing
band gigs with our current stuff is a lose.  Also it wasn't our usual type of
music, so we weren't sure what to do with it even if we'd had a good setup.  It
probably would have been better if we'd arranged to use a kitchen or something
and turned it into our usual Environment, and left the punkers alone.

The evening progressed onward and eventually ended; for some reason this one
didn't feel like the usual Steer Roasts I'd been to in the past.  There didn't
seem to be the late-night philosophy-by-the-fire going on.  We wandered over to
Tech^2 for a while and yakked at Nick the Guard for a while; he seems a lot
more laid-back than the rest and has learned what the hacker type is.  Anyway,
the next day a pervasive lethargy seemed to take hold of everyone.  We slept a
lot; of course with Corwin this was justified because he'd been up for 60-odd
hours over the end of the preceding week, but there wasn't any really good
reason the rest of us should have felt so dead.  I finally dragged my butt out
of Boston on Monday and got home and slept some more.  We didn't vad One
Kendall like we'd talked about; we hardly vadded anything at all.  It was
another object lesson for me:  yes, it is possible to be Bored in Boston,
which I'd previously thought unheard-of.  Weird, indeed.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

In the short intervening time before Disclave, the next convention, I didn't do
a whole lot with hardware -- there was lots of Real Work to be done and back
paperwork to deal with and numerous other mundane impediments.  I did add a few
more routing mirrors to the Orgasm.  These were starting to follow a common
design: the standard little mirror clips were mounted on new pieces of brick
strap which in turn were mounted on the frame with friction-fit mounts.  This
allowed the support to turn around the other axis without the usual loosening
screw [that's a bad pun].  Since I couldn't find spring washers anywhere
around, I punched and bent small bits of brick strap into little sprung
fittings which would exert force against what they were bolted into.  In
addition to this, the location of the spirograph thing got changed slightly
after I decided that it was in the way of some other things I was thinking of
mounting there.

We'd decided that Disclave, normally a long and otherwise mellow con, might as
well be full hardware so we'd have lots to do.  Phil, Donna and Corwin rolled
into Level 0 sometime after midnight on Thursday night, and we sat up until 3
or so while Phil showed off his latest toy, a magnetic optics bench made from
pieces of a desk found in an MIT hallway somewhere and numerous little mirrors
and splitters and right-angle pieces all epoxied to pieces of the rubber magnet
strips you find in refrigerator gaskets.  Having thrown this together just
hours before taking off from Boston, he needed to drill some additional holes
into it for connecting bolts.  While the rest of us talked in a rather loud and
animated way, Phil went off into the other room with the drill and created an
unholy steel-against-steel racket.  All of which Chris, sleeping upstairs,
didn't hear one bit of; thus the Level 0 insulation job got its acid test, and
passed.  And I *still* can't find the quarter-inch bit he used.

We all got minimal sleep and got up around 10AM so I could head northward and
collect Lissanne and her artwork, and we all eventually arrived at our favorite
crufty little Sheraton.  The first *huge lose* we discovered was that the POOL
WAS EMPTY!!!  Not one drop was to be had, let alone swum in.  The hotel people
made a half-ass promise that maybe it would be up this weekend but there was no
way in hell it was going to get cleaned and filled by the following weekend,
let alone Sunday.  Oh well.  Not much we could do about it at this point, so we
went on with other business.  The exact room I wanted, next to the little
alcove where they did the "Right Through the Wall!" thing last year, was taken,
so we settled for another second floor cabana a few doors down.  The first
thing to deal with was the door lock, which turned out to be a complete kludge
in rather rough shape.  Phil at one point got locked *into* the room, because
the lock as given to us jammed somehow.  It was lucky I'd brought along the
key-in-knob style Falcons, because all our other mortise cylinders wouldn't
fit, and even then we had to thin it down some before it would fit.  Having
finally created a secure environment to put our toys in, we started setting
things up.  I found a fiz plant person who informed us that the breaker panels
were way down at the *other* end of the cabana block, about as far away from us
as it was possible to get.  Ack pifft!  We brought both argons up to "normal"
power and were getting about 6 amps apiece out of them, which was completely
unacceptable.  Against the fiz plant person's edict not to run extension cables
outside, we draped Phil's long one out the window and bypassed the intervening
room to Donna's room, and proceeded to suck the two rooms' worth of power
completely dry to run everything.  Some small kludges needed to be done to hang
up the spin motors, but that seems to be the norm since most hotel rooms aren't
designed with hanging things in mind.  The result was a laser room that
surpassed Boskone in terms of tech, but not in attendance of people.  And we
were still close enough to the appropriate overpass that we could give the
Right Through The Wall people three wandering blue dots so they could reach the
Eighth Dimension properly.  Ultimately, this ceremony never happened; there was
too much else going on.

Mingled in between this were some usual con type things; someone was walking
around with a can of Deviled Spam, which was apparently some special
anniversary product.  The shortest way to our room was up the stairs from the
lobby and through the alarmed fire door, which wasn't *documented* as alarmed
but there wasn't any question once it had been triggered.  The hotel refused to
simply leave it open all weekend, so the concom hung a large "Evil hungry fire
door, do not feed or open" sign on it.  In an attempt to get places without
having to go all the way around I climed down the steelwork near the stairs a
few times, and got yelled at by one of the goons who then went off duty ten
minutes later.  Phil and Corwin went off to Zayre's across the street to try
and find some T-shirts, a nominally simple task.  What came back over the radio
was something like "How long have we been in line?!  Dunno, lessee, *three*
price checks, the sun's moved about 2 degrees while we've been here, it rose at
5 and it's going down at 9, calculate the interval ... we've been standing in
line for about 20 minutes."  Rickland showed up, talking about nothing but his
latest commercial venture, a video rental place.  He was going around saying "I
have $150K and need $50K more to start this thing up; I guarantee *hundreds of
thousands of return*." There were inflatable alligators everywhere, most of
which came from the Generic folks.  All of them had been brought for the pool.

The canonical Friday Night came along while we were doing all this; we hung up
the Coherent documentation, people started to wander in, and we were off and
rolling.  I eventually punted the spirograph-output-redirect mirror which could
only throw it on the wall, and sent it straight out into the room instead.  The
next hack was to experiment around with color separation.  The argon, running
at a reasonably high power, generates more than one spectral line, due to the
gas atoms being excited to different states.  What you get, given a rear mirror
that will reflect enough of the bandwidth, is the 488-nm blue-green that is the
default color, some deeper blues [*very* pretty shades], some greens on the
other end, and if I really ram the piss out of the tube, a yellowish line.
These are all separable with a diffraction grating.  I had obtained these
"instrument-quality" [hah!] reflective diff gratings from Edmund, which were
better than the ones that Karyn had gotten from a friend a while back.  These
generate one direct-reflective split that is essentially unmodified, and a
diffracted split in a different direction of a reasonably high energy, and a
few secondary diffracted splits off to either side.  The net result from one of
these gratings is a spread of multimode [more than one color] splits which fan
out away from the grating.  Some of these were previously in use as "beam
splitters" before we really knew that I could get different colors out of my
argon.  Phil's argon apparently was designed differently, because it didn't
want to give us much multimode.  Anyway, I set one of these gratings up and
took the main spectral off it and sent the different colors different ways into
the spinning crystal frobs, and took another spread and ran it wholesale
through the spiro generator, giving a whole pile of parallel spirographs of
varying colors.  By nudging the routing tripod back and forth I could change
what colors actually got all the way through the spiro.  Just for kicks I
worked some red into it as well, and had lots of colors spinning around on the
ceiling.  And to make it all completely out of control, I ran the total output
through the plastic dual-axis diff grating, which made it all very confusing.
It was here that we discovered that two layers of this plastic stuff create an
absolutely awesome splash of dots on the far wall, which moves around itself in
really interesting ways.

Phil's side of the room didn't have any sort of switching mechanism yet, so he
took little subsplits of the beams and sent them through everything at once.
This was a nice contrast to my switched side, since then the ceiling had plenty
of stuff on it all the time, regardless of what I was doing.  So basically the
standard scenario existed again: I was continually jumping up and down to
change and fix things, and Phil, once his side was set up and running, could
just sit back and look at it.  It had seemed during the evolution of all this,
at least to me, that people we knew were starting to make reference to
"Hobbit's laser show", which was completely incorrect since Phil was hitherto
the integral other half of it, and other folks like MGrant and Mason and such
had at times put in a good amount of hacking on it as well.  This originally
may have arisen due to the fact that observers usually saw only me jumping
around the equipment while the show was running, while Phil was sitting around
like part of the audience.  [They hadn't been to Genericon, either.]  I've
since been pointing out the reality of it when appropriate, to try and make
sure other folks got a deserved piece of the limelight [wherever that was].

As if all this wasn't enough, one floor down and a little over was another pile
of hardware.  Don had brought his Apple, of course, and Mason his galvos and
driver amp boxes [which allow the galvos to take sharp corners without
bouncing], and they were down there generating prototype text on the walls.
The eventual idea is to write something like a PostScript interpreter that
drives a galvo pair instead of a laser printer.  The initial text output was
simple stroke letters connected at the bottom with lines [since they didn't
have a modulator to turn the beam off] but they spelled out a number of fun
phrases and rear-projected them on a sheet hung up over the window.  Speaking
of sheets, in keeping with the previous year, Don's room was also the Pillow
Pile again.  The very same pile of pillows was still in the linen closets where
we'd left it last year, and was shortly moved to Don's room where they put
pillowcases on them all and then threw them and people on the beds.  Actually
moving them this year was a little more difficult, since the room was across
open space on the cabana level and all the pillows had to come through the
lobby.  They used the original packing cases they had come in, trucking these
large cardboard boxes right past the flatheads as though they were all
something they'd brought in for the con.  So when you walked into Don's room
the first thing you saw was pillows, and then the strange red laser stuff on
the wall, and then the gallon bottle of Coke syrup he'd brought along, and then
the reflective mylar sheet they'd hung up near the bathroom.  In a different
way their room was just as strange as ours, and all of it was lots of fun.

We didn't spend the entire time babysitting the laser room; there were other
places to wander to and people to hang out with.  The con suite this time was
downstairs next to the huge dealers' room/art show place.  The Generics were
hanging around near the shower watching Dawn Wilson climb the tree outside
Strider's room.  The pool being empty seemed to put a bit of a damper on
things; not only was there no water in it but the entire enclosure was locked
and dark.  Normally the pool enclosure was a place to hang out.  People were
walking around with the inflatable alligators, which sported such names as Biff
[the original one] and Chip, and there were a couple of Gumbys as well.  Since
they couldn't be used in the pool, people were using them as dancing partners
instead.  I at one point returned from a small wander and found the laser room
fully powered up and *nobody in it at all*.  We made a couple of visits to the
better linen closets for more supplies, one being an extra sheet to make the
Big Etch-a-Sketch out of.  We had discovered a while back that an argon beam
would write on glow-in-the-dark material, since its wavelength was close enough
to the UV end of the spectrum.  In particular, in a multimode spread, the
higher blues would write on it while the greens wouldn't so well, and red had
no effect at all.  We'd discovered this with the Exit signs from Worldcon, but
we wanted something enormous that we could cover a large part of the ceiling
with and draw big things on.  So Phil had gotten hold of a large can of
phosphorescent powder and a vehicle to mix it with.  They took a sheet out into
the driveway, mixed up the mess and spread it on.  Apparently the hot, humid
weather really affected it because it didn't want to dry very fast, and it sat
there and stank up the entire end of the building for many hours.  When it was
ready to hang up we did so, and discovered that it wasn't quite as responsive
to argon-beam drawing, although it lit up very bright green under UV light
while people were playing with the Play-Doh.

Someone volunteered the information that they'd seen the Stone Mountain laser
show down in Atlanta, and described it.  This was the thing we had missed when
we were down for Worldcon.  Apparently they mostly drew pictures and sent a few
beams through the air back and forth, but the entire thing was tainted with
this gung-ho America God-fearin' redneck stuff.  This is *SACRILEGE*!!  People
like that shouldn't be allowed to own lasers, we all agreed.  Chris had brought
along a hundred pounds of dry ice which we didn't use all of, but I heard the
tale of how Don and company had gone completely overboard with hot water and
lots of this stuff, filled the *entire* room about two feet deep in drifting
CO2 fog, creating an oxygen-deprivation environment.  We determined what the
four basic elements are: duct tape, brick strap, resin and hardener; from these
you can build anything.  Towards morning we found a pile of sort of strange
keyhole-shaped bricks sitting under a stairwell which we started building
things out of, but never did anything really elaborate with.  There was too
much risk of mashed toes when it fell over.  Besides, it was pretty late, so we
soon hung it up.

The next day, or what was left of it, held some miscellaneous hackery while it
was still light out.  Like the previous year, the AT&T card fones in the lobby
were still connected to regular old lines, so if you were fast on the modular
connector you could make calls via MCI and such and probably confuse the crap
out of some billing rep.  Eric the Flute wandered into our room and wound up
learning how to pick locks -- with no initial idea of how they really worked.
I successfully modeled the relationship between pins and shear line and torque
for him with a couple of shampoo bottles, and before he left he managed to open
a random Master someone had brought along.  Mark meanwhile was trying to get a
Best padlock into change mode, which we referred to as "advanced technique"
that Eric didn't want to try yet.  Suddenly Mark had wild sex with it and out
came the core.  The next thing that we heard was "Does anyone have an E blank",
which I happened to, and he spent the next hour or so happily filing away, and
eventually discovered that anywhere the hotel used Bests, they were
control-keyed alike.  We couldn't figure out why they didn't use Bests for
everything; perhaps the rooms were keyed earlier or on a lower budget.
Meanwhile down in the Pillow Room, Rehmi et al were developing another hack
with the apple such that joystick position was vectored cyclically through this
big random sine/cosine table, which produced *very* weird tangles of flying red
dot on the wall.  During all this Mackler peeked out from under the pillows and
said "How, high are you?" and went back to sleep.  At one point Don wanted to
look at Rehmi's code that was driving this stuff, and said "Is it fair if I
decompile it?"  to which Rehmi said "Sure, it's on screen 63." The next thing
was a loud burst from Don resembling  "WAACHEEZE it's in ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE yech
ACK!!!"  which had everyone rolling on the floor.

As is the norm at Disclave, most of the attendees were parked around the lobby
in little groups if they weren't in programming rooms.  Rosethorn eventually
showed up, traditionally gorgeous in something flattering she'd made.  She told
stories of Blacksburg VA, pointing out that there *are* no cabs to be had, it
was a walking town, and anything over 5 miles away you took a bus to.  She took
off for parts unknown far too soon, and I headed back to the pillow room and
this time there was nobody in them, so I dived in.  Then I noticed all these
brownish marks on the cases, and was informed that Adam had nosebled over a
number of them.  Placement of the covers had taken a long time in the first
place, and they didn't get to all of them while recovering from this.  And just
to add randomness to weirdness, MGrant came rolling in from California at some
point that day, and headed immediately for the con.

Evening fell, and it was time to fire up the laser room again.  We're always
surprised when we go back to these benches full of duct-taped kludges and see
if everything's still in line, and it usually is pretty well and maybe requires
very minor fixes.  We keep expecting *everything* to drift.  I guess what we
keep forgetting is that once all the beam paths for everything are determined
and laid out, even if there's some drift one can usually identify the piece
that lost and tweak it easily.  It's initial setup of all the paths that takes
forever, I guess.  We threw on Zoolook to play with our "opening blast" ideas
again.  Mark brought up his galvos for a while and set up a slow scan through
Rehmi's weird bubbly ashtray; however, the ashtray was held up over the galvos
by duct tape and chopsticks, which eventually parted company.  But while it was
up it delivered some pretty good things.  I was playing with multimode through
the floppy diff when Lizzy and Ron walked in and observed it all for a while.
She then said "I want to compliment you two," to which I responded "Mason put
work into this too, except that it fell over a while ago."  Again, when we all
get this stuff together at a con, it's nobody in particular's laser show, it's
a big group Play Period.  Scliff then contributed a kludge to heat up some fog
fluid, using my variable DC power supply as a baseplate and a Sterno frob and a
tuna can.  This required continual babysitting to regulate the heat and fluid
input, but it and the incense did generate enough fog to show beams pretty
well.  A while later it caught fire and we sort of gave up on the idea.  [Fog
fluid does have a flash point, which is why a lot of people fear Rosco foggers.
The heater regulating switch on Roscos apparently can become welded shut, so
the heater gets *very* hot, and you wind up with a flamethrower.]  MGrant took
the leftover mirrors out of my box and spiderwebbed the room through about five
hops, not realizing that the beam he was using came from a diff grating that
*wasn't taped down*.  While attempting to fix this we lost most of this
arrangement, oh well.  Meanwhile, since we were dissipating two rooms' worth of
power into one, the air conditioner was barely holding its own against the
argons and the people.  The outside half of it was pissing a steady stream of
water down on the walkway underneath, and by the time the night was over there
was a big gooshy puddle down there in the rug.

The Big Event for Saturday wasn't our room, however, it was the Prom.  This was
Disclave's substitute for the costume event; they made a dance out of it.
Kelly had created a rather awesome dress for this that was apparently targeted
somewhat in MGrant's direction.  It soundly nailed everyone but -- Larry was
running around going "I'm in *lust*".  When I finally saw this it took a while
to recognize Kelly under it, because all her hair had vanished into tight ties
in the back.  Zann did something similar by donning a rather fancy and
absolutely delicious wedding gown.  John Galvin showed up in the expected tux.
There were many other outfits that represented significant efforts by their
wearers before the con; we observed not for the first time that there are
numerous ways in which people frantically build something a week before a given
con to impress their cronies with.  For our gang it's new laser toys, other
people it's costumes.   Either way you build it, you take it to the con and
show it off, you make your splash, and you go home happy.  Have I detailed this
before sometime?  Perhaps in regard to Worldcon, where there were some of the
most elaborate and detailed costumes in fandom.  Cons *are* sort of a show biz
at a low level and for a small, specific audience.

Rosethorn showed up in her gold shimmery thing, and stopped by the laser room
*just* as Yellowstone, "her piece", was starting.  This was the piece we'd
attempted to do last Evecon and didn't really have things set up correctly.  We
didn't here either but she stood up on the bed, and while I aimed the
spirograph output on her she did sinuous movements.  Suddenly I felt like I was
at a party of futuristic renegades of some kind, as though everyone present
were longtime spacefaring bandit types who had met on this little remote planet
somewhere to have a bash.  And that a member of this ragtag little band, a
beautiful and competent woman, and perhaps one of the best pilots in the group,
had jumped up on the table to dance and was being encouraged by all of those
present.  The spirograph was centered on her hands overhead, so it gave the
illusion that she was generating and controlling this weird magic stuff on the
walls by herself.  She ding near clobbered the motor overhead holding the punch
cup, but what the hey, we were too transfixed by this to care.  The piece
drifted into its end and she sagged into a heap on the bed, and received the
most enthusiastic ovation that that small gathering could muster.  I labeled it
a religious experience, and Phil and I realized once again that a full-blown
Laser Dance piece definitely had to be created and done, because it would rip
the guts out of anyone watching.  Then the spell was broken; someone exerted
free will on the tape deck and put in something else, and we were back in New
Carrollton MD.

Shortly after this we decided that there weren't really that many people coming
by to see the toys, so we shut it down and went out to wander around and see
the Prom, which was still going strong downstairs.  I talked ever so briefly
with Aesclinn, the spellbinding "she" from last year, who presently headed off
to sleep.  Her present Other Half and I discussed lock frobbing for a little
while, and then he went to join her [sigh!].  I headed down to the con suite
where Lissanne and Gary and a bunch of rowdies were sitting around playing this
bizarre FRP game called TOON, in which the players become cartoon characters
and go off vadding things.  There seem to be no particularly constraining rules
in this game; I caught such bits as "...Hypnotized him into believing he was
the other sex and in lust with the other pink elephant" and "No no, *he*'s a
vampire and she'll think *he*'s the vampire and kill him!" on the event logger.
The eventual end apparently was to find and dispatch the vampire before it got
you.  Chip the Inflatable was by now wearing a toga.  I found a bunch of
champagne tops and made a small structure out of them; they were the white
plastic things that look like mushrooms but with the spore delivery things on
the wrong side.  I didn't use all of them, but stuffed some extras into my tool
belt and went back to the room, where I found Phil and Donna playing with the
Play-Doh under the black light.  Phil was doing a maze, Donna had done a cute
little sleeping cat.  Scliff and Kelly then decided to create a bucket of
ooblick.  Not nearly in the volumes from that Boskone, just an ice bucket about
half full, which was still quite enough to make a considerable mess.  Most of
this wound up all over the driveway outside; we were all out there drooling the
stuff off our fingers into the bushes at one point.  I had said "Nah, I'm not
going to get into the ooblick this time" and five minutes later went "arright,
I'm in here, *yarrgh*" as I plunged my hands deep into the stuff.  It's
amazingly compelling somehow.

I was farting around with the Play-Doh Extrusion Frob later, and Regis walked
in and bawled "Who's got a rubber?!".  Regis is not only female, but doesn't do
men, so while trying to figure out what the hell, said I'd brought some as pool
toys.  She took one and headed for the bathroom, and soon there was a pile of
people in the bathroom door laughing hysterically as Kelly installed the latex
goods over her *hand*, added some water inside, and was splshing it all around
in the toilet.  This and the entire stock of Phil's food coloring eventually
went down the Big Pipe for entertainment's sake.  Later we went outside and
discovered that the ooblick splashes in the driveway were still not quite dry.
Next stop was the film room where we caught the end of Vincent and Metal Crabs,
both very strange animateds.  I ran into Don and Adam who were trying to hack
the elevator, but there were a lot of people in the 'vator having a 'vator
party.  I got into the car, so that Don and Adam could maybe get on top and
ride for a while, but then the damn thing got *stuck*, containing me and a
bunch of randoms I didn't know.  I decided "fuck this", pulled the door open
and jumped out, enjoining anyone who wanted to follow to do likewise, but first
placing my Lasso loop on the outer door latch mechanism.  Nobody followed, so I
let it close, and it went down another floor and stopped.  Just as I was about
to pull the lasso and hop on, this flathead comes swinging around the corner
wondering what the fuck.  Luck had me just standing in front of the door right
then like I was waiting for the thing to come to my floor -- I said "Listen, I
think there are people stuck down there".  We both leaned into the closed doors
to listen, he quizzically fingered the piece of string hanging out of the crack
once, and took off down the stairs, saying "I'll make sure they're okay".  I
pulled the door, rescued the loop and *cranked* upstairs out of range to find
Galvin and Laurel sitting around on the 8th floor plotting breakfast.  While we
were talking about this and that an enormous soap opera erupted at the far end
of the hall, with some guy face down on the carpet wailing and pounding the
floor.  Apparently he'd just been dumped.  Ignoring this for the most part, we
agreed that Bob's Buffet Barfola Breakfast was the Right thing.  Dawn found us
all parked in the lobby, Kelly lying across other people with Larry munching on
her legs. Glenn was tickling the guitar and talking about what happens if his
nails break and coming up with bizarre ways of playing it.  Larry and Kelly
then started thumbwrestling.  I dragged Phil off and got the story of the small
soap opera with Donna he'd been dealing with out of him, which was somewhat
inconclusive, and we went to Bob's, paid our $4.whatever and ate synthetic eggs
and warmed-over cheese food product and beef-n-pork-rejects sausage, to the
puke point minus epsilon.

Sunday rolled around as it always will, with the difference that we *didn't*
have to pack it all in and get out of there -- four-day cons are a *huge* win!
There wasn't much programming planned, though, so the Generics decided to throw
a big birthday party for Jeff.  I wandered up to their room while most of our
bunch was out to dinner and found John and Laurel eating take-out Chinese food.
The room was very empty; they'd moved all the furniture into the next room
over, which was also part of their holdings.  I slurped up the leftovers of the
food they didn't eat and knew I'd be back there later when the party started.
Around this time John and I observed that there were times when one would lay
out quite a bit of money and effort to run a party, or a laser room, or
whatever at a con, without much hope of getting any of it back.  And we decided
that blowing a couple of hundred every so often, if one could afford it, was
definitely worth it for the sake of getting lots of friends together and having
a good time.  Thus things like large soda and liquor purchases, funding of a
hotel room or two, and the energy input to create the desired environment were
all perfectly reasonable investments.

The rest of our room returned from dinner and we ran the toys for a little
while, but shut down early and headed up to the 8th floor in stages.  Getting
there was strange: I took a nice quiet mellow elevator from the lobby, which
gently drifted up to 8 and opened -- and I was hit by a wall of noise that
almost pushed me back into the vator.  There were people all over the vestibule
and spilling out of John's room and lots of music, Biffs, balloons, people,
guitars, hilarity everywhere.  They had indeed thrown a grand one, and almost
the entire con was up here since there was nothing else to do on Sunday night.
[This was apparently driven by Kelly's idea; they would have tried for a
different night otherwise.] Various cloved fruits were making the rounds, a
standard device/excuse for lowering inhibitions.  Jeff appeared in the skimpy
nylon shorts he'd won at the prom the previous night.  The hotel personnel
stayed completely out of sight for this one, even though there was lots of
noise until far into the morning and loud singing echoing up and down the
firewells.  MGrant showed up and handed me my pick, which had dropped out of my
pocket somewhere.  [It's since been established that I can't possibly lose a
pick if he's around -- he'll always find it.]  Someone started playing with
Regis' tits and Phil and I observed that since they jiggled around so much, if
you were to mount a mirror on each one at 45 degrees and bounce a laser off
them while she danced...  "enough duct tape --" "not on *my* tits!!"

Eventually all the randoms drifted out and went off to recover, leaving a few
of us sitting around talking and being fuzzy.  The discussion turned to soap
operas again; the "idealized" conclusion was something like "those who are
relaxed and don't take all relationships so seriously avoid the soap operas." A
Great Truth indeed, as long as *both* parties subscribe to this philosophy.  We
all got to sleep sometime *before* dawn this time, since we had to get up and
travel the next day.  But this hotel knows how to treat fandom; checkout wasn't
until 4PM again, so we didn't get out of there until evening.  There was a
small hitch; Don and Chris were using some of the pillowcases to move things
out to Chris's car, and some flathead spotted them.  Hotels often have this
habit, however nice they are *during* the con, of going back into pinhead mode
a little too early while some of the con leftovers are still there.  The moods
of the personnel seem to just get *ugly* that same evening, and if you're still
around the hotel, they will probably use some excuse to yell at or, in extreme
cases like Boskone, harass the remaining people.  Thus the flathead handed them
all kinds of grief and was this close to calling the cops on them for "stealing
linen".  Two lousy pillowcases, that he probably wasn't going to bring home
anyway.  They wanted to search his car.  Fortunately all the pillows and such
had already been returned, though there may have been a couple of close calls
on that one as well due to the open-air path they had to take.  This all seemed
even nastier in light of the fact that our bunch had hung an effectively
destroyed sheet out over the railing for over a day, in plain sight.
Eventually we all got out of there without being arrested, and headed out our
separate ways.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

About a month later, over July 4th weekend, was the Rainbow Gathering in North
Carolina.  This may be documented in a separate writeup, since it didn't have
to do particularly with lasers.  Phil and I did bring the portables out there,
for entertainment value like I'd done last year in Pennsey.  And of all places,
where we expected to find universal acceptance for the things, we ran into a
paranoid anyway.  One night we were walking up one of the main trails and found
this little pyramid frame made from aluminum tubing, large enough for a person
to sit on the ground inside it.  Phil did so, and held his glass-ball faceted
frob in his hands while I shot it with the portable from across the trail.  The
effect was rather amazing given the context; he was sitting there in the Power
Pyramid with something like a crystal and generating lots of strange magical
light.  A few people passed by in the meantime and reacted with suitable
amazement, until they realized what was going on and were still fairly amazed.
All of a sudden this woman strode in front of me and held her large floppy
beach hat in front of the beam, and demanded to know if it was a laser.  As I
started to tell her yes, she tried to grab the box out of my hands to look at
it in a rather rude fashion, to which I responded with something like "this is
delicate equipment, please don't touch it again".  She started in on us,
claiming that it was dangerous to peoples' eyes, and [get this] *especially
when bounced through a crystal*.  Phil and I: *Huh*?!  She went on to claim
that she worked with lasers "all the time" at the Detroit Science Center, and
"knew all about them" and that firing a beam through a crystal would "amplify"
it to a dangerous level and shoot it off in some random direction, straight
into the eyeball of the nearest hippie.  Phil and I: **WHAT**??!?! -- anyone
who's had the slightest exposure to high-school physics knows better, obviously
-- but when we tried to *explain* to her how the maximum power you'd ever get
out of the laser and crystal combination was the 1 mW beam going *into* the
crystal, she didn't seem to buy it, and kept claiming that it was dangerous and
that we shouldn't use them around the Gathering.  In disgust I finally told her
"Noted and logged, and that's the best we can do", and we walked away.

We bumped into her again about 20 minutes later up in a field.  We were up
there playing the beams through the grass, which looks pretty wild, and some
people who were tripping their brains out at the other side of the grass were
yelling "Even if you are Martians, we love you!"  And then our Favorite Physics
Professor walks up [having heard the general response of everybody *else*
around the place] and starts in on us *again* with the beach hat and the
grabbing and her "credentials".  I came *this* close to decking her for her
goddamn malicious tampering, but this time she had some large fat male friend
with her who seemed to be supporting her theory.  Once again and in the
presence of a lot of other people we went over maximum beam power, and
FatFuck's lame comeback was something like "Why don't you just look at the
stars?", which was one reason we'd come *out* there in the first place.  Phil
and I looked at each other and decided the whole thing was hopeless, just got
the hell away from them, and never saw them again the rest of the Gathering.  I
have not yet called the Detroit Science Center to inquire about this person,
but I think the reader can see it isn't really necessary.  Her name apparently
fell off the Event Logger somehow anyway.

The next real road gig was Unicon in Annapolis, a couple of weeks later.  At
first we weren't sure what we wanted to do for this one; I was telling
inquirers that we *might* do lasers.  A lot of it had to do with the Boston
side of things getting all the way down to DC and perhaps with equipment.  Phil
didn't feel like driving the whole long haul.  There was also a concurrent con
in New Brunswick called NyClone, but as the time drew nearer it became clear
that NyClone was going to be a tiny and mostly useless con, and that most of
the fun people we knew were going to be down at Unicon instead, and that Unicon
was going to be a better con anyway, etc.  The upshot of it was that Phil and
Corwin and Diana drove all the way down from Boston, *with* the equipment, and
I drove down with mine, although we'd still reserved the right to not use it if
we didn't feel like it.  Phil had reserved the room for a change, but when they
got there [before me] they'd been told there *were* no more rooms, or something
to that effect, which they sanity-checked and discovered that the Bridal Suite
was still available.  They took it.  So a while later there we were in this
*huge* room [by normal standards], with a heap of toys, some of them new and
largely untried yet.  We might have known it; the "let's create our normal
environment" urge was strong, and we started setting up what turned out to be a
full-blown playroom.  So full, in fact, that to run both argons we had to find
an additional power feed for a room in which *all* the wall outlets were on one
lousy 20 amp breaker.  I noticed the heater/air conditioner sitting there and
realized that it had its own separate feed, a 20 amp 240V line.  Half of this
and ground would form a 20A 120V feed, so we opened up the control box and had
a look.  This room had the same ultrasonic sensor things on the wall as we'd
seen at Evecon, and upon taking the heater controller apart we discovered that
the ultrasonics are simply used to change the thermostat setting if the room is
occupied.  All that worry for nothing!!  There was absolutely no evidence of
any wiring going down to the rest of the hotel -- the heater and control box
and ultrasonic sensor were one self- contained unit.  Anyway, we found a 120V
side, *fixed* the relay wiring which was very badly done, but needed some wire
and an insulated outlet.

We had to go shopping anyway, because we also needed food and hornet killer.
Right outside where the sliding window opened there was an overhanging ledge,
and from this dangled a small gray multicellular paper construction.  I have
*no* idea how the residents of this didn't object in their own inimitable way
to our presence, because we'd thrown the window open wide a couple of times and
stuck our heads out right under them.  Now, having just returned from the
Rainbow, where everyone present was being reverent and considerate of Nature,
there was some question whether we should leave them be or kill them --
*fuck it*, we *paid* for this room, it's *ours*, they *go*.  Hornet killer was
definitely needed.  We knocked off setup for a while and went across the street
to Giant for random food items.  While in there we found a sign to the effect
that all the UPC scanners were going to be replaced soon.  We immediately went
to find a manager and asked him what was to become of the old units, had a
helluva time getting him to understand that *we* wanted some of the surplused
parts, and finally got the number of some outfit called Data Control who was
supposed to remove the scanners.  Leaving him very confused and hefting our
bags of Con Survival Rations, we left and went to hit the lighting store
further down the mall for some parts.  They didn't *have* electrical parts but
they *did* have a largish selection of various molded glass thingies you hang
on chandeliers.  Phil didn't yet own any of those cut-glass crystal balls, so
he bought a couple of things for real cheap.  We then went on to the hardware
place and got a small length of 12/3 and a wire- end outlet, and went back to
the hotel.  Having blasted the hornets with most of the spray can and watched
them shrivel or return to the nest to find it uninhabitable, we forgot about
them and continued setting up the toys.

And a few hours later we were observing how the pulsating ovals on the ceiling
from the respective spirographs were having sex, until one's motor speed
drifted and one spiraled in and out very fast [Ooh, oooh!].  We hung up the
documentation just like always, and people began to drift in and out to see the
stuff, and the big difference here was that there was *enough room* for them
all to park *and* keep all our own stuff out of the way, since the room was so
huge.  The air conditioner breaker seemed to have no problem powering the
compressor and my argon at the same time.  *Now* it felt like a con, since the
room looked correct.  And then there was another pounding on the door, and
standing in the hall were some people with an *immense* balloon construction
that they'd put together and somehow dragged all the way up here.  While we
watched, some of the topmost components of this touched the ceiling and burst
[it was one of those sponge-stucco ceiling designs with lots of little sharp
points sticking down].  We said "very nice", they came in the room and looked
around and said "very nice", and they shortly left, and then we discovered that
they'd left the balloonoid *in the hall* outside our door.  What were *we*
supposed to do with it?!  Answer: shut down and go to sleep.

The first order of business upon arising the next day was to hit the pool.
This was outside, so there was no hot tub, but the pool itself was quite nice
and well-populated by the convention all weekend.  Sort of made up for
Disclave, I suppose.  We found half of an old kick pad constructed out of
sections of foam tubing glued together in two layers.  The lifeguard types,
having already percieved that we didn't behave like your run-of-the-mill
Annapolis poolgoers, said we could have this, so we started tearing it apart
into separate tubes.  The first application for the longer ones was boff
sticks, and Phil and I started whacking each other with these while the
lifeguards became highly amused.  Some more of them came off and we started
figuring out where to cut and connect them to build things, without all that
much success.  I observed that the steel rods comprising the fence around the
pool would have fit inside the tubes if you could torch them loose.  A
halfhearted attempt was made to interface the tubes to the deck chairs, but the
lifeguards were uncomforable with this.  Having sufficiently immersed, we
carted all this stuff back to the room where it mostly lay unused for the rest
of the weekend.

Since it was still light out, we wandered the con for a while and actually saw
the art show and such, which are often missed as a result of spending too much
time hacking lasers.  Mikki stole the Event Logger and interviewed Kurt and
myself about the convention.  I wandered into the main ballroom and found Siggy
and Carl setting up the sound board for Chowder, and playing with Sig's new
HiFi VCR toy.  The afternoon turned and faded into evening, or Saturday Night
at the Con, and we converged on the Bridal Suite to make sure everything was
still in alignment and ready to roll.  Some critical mirror on Phil's bench had
fallen over or something, so he and Corwin were fixing where the miscellaneous
beams went.  I should note here that Corwin was starting to spend more and more
time around the lasers, not just at this con but Disclave and previous.  He was
definitely becoming a third party to the Hardcore Laser Weenies, hitherto
mostly Phil and I with occasional additions.  It also helped immensely that
Corwin had worked in the planetarium when he was in Miami running the star
projector.  They'd done some laser shows there too, so he had a *good* idea of
what a production-quality show should look like and some of the implementation
details.  Planetariums, with their huge white domed ceilings and big play area
in the center of the room, are definitely the kind of place you want to do a
laser show in.  So we talked at length about ideas for new things, which is
what we usually do at cons anyway, but it was nifty to have the additional
input from a slightly different point of view.

There was yet another pounding on the door a while later, which opened to
reveal Amq standing there with an *enormous* can of Pork and Beans in her
hands.  Without even thinking I started yelling "No!  EVIL!  Get away!!!", so
of course she tried to hand it to me.  I rolled it back out the door, because
there was no way I was going to let it intrude into my universe.  The last time
I'd had pork and beans was at the previous Rainbow, where they'd had a powerful
soporific effect and weren't all that good anyway, and of course there are
numerous legends about beans.  And here were enough to blow the side off the
hotel after suitable digestive processing.  Somehow the can ended up in our
room anyway, so we decided to drop it off the roof later.  I went downstairs
for a while and caught Chowder's last song entitled "Wombat Stew", watching
Siggy and Carl do their thing for a while.  I tooled about and talked to a few
people, including Aesclinn who of course showed up since this con was in her
town.  [She *still* hasn't seen one of our laser rooms, now that I think about
it.  Foo.]  I decided I wanted more Red and Blue Spirographs from Hell and went
back to the room, but I was followed by a couple who seemed from an older age
group, but walked in and liked the stuff anyway.  They told us that we reminded
them of something from the 60s, since we were standing there hacking visual
mind toys while wearing tie-dye.  I meanwhile was trying to figure out how the
coin bank the guy was carrying worked -- it was a model of the ESB about two
feet high with a plastic gorilla attached to the side.  When wound up, the
gorilla would climb to the top of the building.  The height of the gorilla had
nothing to do with the amount of coinage actually in the bank, so I dismissed
it as inappropriate design.  Soon after this Jailbait and some friends showed
up, telling the story about how they'd trucked all the way up to NJ to go to
NyClone, and that it had been *so* bad they punted and trucked all the way back
to Annapolis to go to Unicon instead.  Yes, we were glad we didn't try to go to
NyClone instead.

At one point something started smelling rather burnt, and we went scrambling
around to shut things down and find the reason.  Everything seemed fine and we
couldn't find the source, and even while we were conjecturing in every
direction and sniffing the wiring, it dissipated.  For a collection of hardware
most of which is probably UL-condemned, with lots of high-voltage stuff
sticking out, we've had no significant problems other than blown breakers and
the time at Genericon when something got caught in one of the cooling fans,
which was't serious.  Nothing's been broken, and we've never lost any equipment
to theft or braindeath.  At the risk of "speaking too soon", the only small
pains in the ass have been fingerprints and incense ashes all over the optics,
normal road-wear on the cardboard boxes used to bring it all everywhere, some
to the point where duct tape won't fix it anymore, and Phil occasionally losing
a mirror off one of the galvos due to faulty epoxy.  I've been considering some
kind of insurance for my own equipment since it is probably worth quite a bit
in terms of the time I've put in designing and building it and finding parts;
possibly the best insurance is taking good care of it.  This unfortunately
doesn't cover things beyond our control, but see below.

Since everything seemed stable after this, we felt comfortable leaving it there
and heading forth into the con again.  *Someone* was always in the room
babysitting, and even if they were't technical types, they still knew where the
plugs and the fire extinguisher were.  [We'd also marked the appropriate
breakers in the cabinet down the hall.]  Down in room 182, five floors directly
below us, there was a lot of Monty Python.  Someone had constructed a weird hat
whose brim was a Slinky covered with plastic wrap, or maybe it was one of the
shower caps the hotel gave out.  We found that most of the con, however, had
more or less died, because there wasn't a whole lot of activity going on
anymore.  It was time for the Pork and Beans drop.  This wasn't nearly as
exciting as we thought it would be -- I'd found an area of driveway far away
from parked cars and windows, but the can didn't sploosh all over the place
like you'd think it would from six floors up.  It just sort of went "chunk",
and some of the contents drooled out the ends.  Big deal.  We left it there and
went back in, farted around a little more and eventually crashed, since
tomorrow would be drivin' time again.

Sunday was the usual Con Sunday, with the wakeup dip in the pool, and the large
job of tearing down.  As I'd done on the way in I borrowed a cart from the
kitchen staff, which facilitated moving the equipment outside.  The Boston
folks had a long one ahead of them, so they headed out on their way.  I stayed
a bit longer and became part of the "dregs of the con", sitting around the hall
with all the other people who'd packed and checked out and still didn't want to
leave yet.  The upshot of much discussion and indecision was that I was going
to vector through Baltimore on the way out, since I was fairly shot, crashing
at Crosshaven and leaving the NJ leg until Monday.  This was a good idea as it
turned out, since when I finally got out on the road I started to seriously
lose it, and the car was starting to make some weird noises as well.  MGrant's
directions had somehow put me on the wrong end of Baltimore and I had to fight
my way across town toward Hopkins.  I stumbled into Crosshaven and soon became
one with the floor.

The next day I spent with Vicka and Aslan, tootling the occasional flute and
wiring my logo into the screen door and eating cheese steaks and seeing what
Starport Sanctuary looked like.  It was close to evening when I left, and for
once exited Baltimore the *correct* way, toward the north, passing some
unexpectedly pleasant surroundings on the way.  I later learned that the Boston
folks had gotten involved in a small pileup on the NJ Turnpike.  Phil's car
managed to stop in time but then they got rear-ended.  Phil and Corwin had
looked at each other and thought "The optics!!", and piled out and started
checking all the boxes for broken glass.  Nothing had broken, and all Phil's
car had was a slightly bent rear bumper.  But it had felt a lot worse at the
time, I gathered.  At least the incident kept them awake for a while -- only by
rotating drivers and stopping for caffeine did they reach home.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

The rest of the summer passed fairly quietly.  I escaped the heat by spending a
lot of time at work.  Influenced partly by Phil, I'd already decided that there
was no way in hell I was going to make Worldcon in England after all.  I set up
some of the equipment at Level Zero just for fun and did a small sequence of
stuff along with a music track for random visitors, including Mom and some of
her friends, Vicka, Sonia, and this mysterious Iranian photochemist I'd run
into in the Chemistry building and had formed sort of an odd friendship with.
Never try to put mirrors in a drop ceiling and expect them to stay there.
*Everything* drifted out of alignment within hours somehow, perhaps due to
thermal or humidity changes.  Level 0 stayed reasonably dry, for a basement,
during these dog days; there were occasional times of wind and less sogginess
during which I'd open every possible orifice in the walls and change the air.
But the humidity that was there did take its toll; I found some mold in the
expected places and even some unexpected places, like in some of my equipment
boxes.  This wasn't particularly pleasant, but I theorize that if I'd kept it
all tightly packed away this wouldn't have happened.  The room got unbearably
hot every time I ran the argon, and didn't cool off as fast as I would have
liked.  The walls were cooled by the earth behind them, but enough of the heat
from the rest of the house leaked down to me to cause discomfort.  Summer, I
guess, isn't laser season.

Then I was informed, by a large amount of torque on one of my upper limbs, that
I was going to Boston to see the Tech Random Music Ensemble's production of
Robber Bridegroom, and that I should "bring the toys" for the cast party.  So I
packed up and went.  The small difference here was that I threw my bicycle in
with it all, so I could do some riding around the area as well.  5 hours later
I rolled into town and went to Lexington, where nobody was really awake [this
was around 10AM somehow; my schedule had precessed such that I had left at
dawn].  Since everyone I knew there was sleeping or working or not home, I
caught some sleep on their new couch.  I was awakened later by Robin, who came
downstairs for more clothes and somehow thought Phil had crashed there until I
turned over and .. surprise!

Eventually people woke up, and later on started to head into MIT for the second
of four showings of Bridegroom.  Nick and I decided that since it was a
*really* nice day we'd bike into Cambridge, so we took this leisurely tool
through Arlington and friends and eventually arrived at the courtyard, buried
in between some MIT buildings, where everyone else was setting up the props.
These were simple enough -- a piece of fence, a few boxes, sawhorses, and a
trunk for Brother's Head.  Off to one side were the musicians, including Corwin
at the keyboard -- live music, not recorded.  With these the group proceeded to
tell the story of Jamie Lockhart and the Natchez Trace with fine spirit, lively
song and plenty of expression.  Kelly played an amazing Nasty Stepmother, while
Gub cut a dashing figure as the Robber and Jeff as the Dumb Hayseed hilariously
mixed up the orders everyone else gave him.  A small disaster struck the
musicians midway through in the form of a broken guitar string, but this was
quickly fixed in realtime and the rest of the cast carried the whole thing
right through it, and kept the audience highly entertained up until the last
chorus, finishing up with a resounding *thunk* with the trunk lid.  Yay!!

The next thing to do was Chair Duty, and everyone pitched in to collect and
fold all the chairs in the audience area and stack them under the overhanging
roof.  Corwin and I lugged some instruments back to Senior House, and then the
idea was to get back to Lexington to do dinner of some sort.  Nick had gone
back already but Pete had shown up and was headed that way too, so in contrast
to the leisurely tour of the afternoon, he and I took to the bicycles and
*wailed* back to Lexington, which is really fun along the busier-and-under-
construction parts of Mass Ave at that time of night.  There we started playing
around with the video rig they'd borrowed from MIT to tape Bridegroom with, and
were generating some *amazing* video-feedback patterns with the TV and careful
control of the iris.  These weren't just your usual spiraley things; some of
the patterns would suddenly coalesce into very complex kaleidoscopic things
that would then sort of grow in different directions, loop around and
eventually collapse into radial explosions of dots.  We found that one could
"seed" the initial picture by moving a laser dot around on the screen until a
pattern started forming.  Much of this was captured on tape and is still around
someplace.

The next day saw everyone back in the courtyard.  It was necessary to vacuum up
the small puddles left by some brief showers that had passed by -- the
courtyard didn't get a whole lot of sunlight since it's this little cave in
between the buildings.  The cast did it up once again, without disasters in the
musical department this time.  Ad-libs included Kelly wandering around the
audience as the sex-starved stepmother, looking for a man and wrapping herself
around various male members of the audience; she took a moment out to scream at
a passing helicopter which was making it almost impossible to hear the words.
Gub's knife broke during the fight scene, and by this time the sawhorses that
were holding up the kitchen-table prop were beginning to seriously lose it.
But all of these little problems were neatly sidestepped as they headed for
another fun-filled finish.  This time, chair duty was followed by a run to Moon
Villa where we built a structure and left the money inside it, and then on to
Tosci's, of course, for lots of ice cream.  I headed thence to Phil's house
since it was time for us to start thinking about *our* little bit of artwork
the next day.  The cast party, after the last show, was supposed to be at Tau
Epsilon Phi.  A fraternity.  I was initially hesitant about this, wondering why
some of these people would be this close to the frat structure.  My fears
proved groundless when it turned out that TEP is sort of the "black sheep" frat
of MIT and is not only chunk-full of hacker types but is a really winning place
in general.

So we got up that day and found that it had started raining.  Not heavily yet,
but enough to be annoying.  This had been predicted, so the last showing of RB
was going to be in 10-250 anyway.  Phil and I hauled our gear over to this
place on Comm Ave which of course had almost no parking anywhere near it, but
we only took one car and managed to squash it into TEP's litle back lot to
unload.  The first thing I noticed about the house was that it had a really
strange hacked-to-hell phone system whose works were in a little closet
downstairs [the boxer fan mounted in the door clued me in].  We ran around the
basement a little looking for the breaker boxes.  We were shown toward the
front room where we would be setting up, and found that it was quite a nifty
room with old-wood moldings on the walls and a fairly high ceiling, and light
purplish walls that would show laser light rather well.  We strung an extension
cord downstairs through the kitchen window for the other 20 amp feed, and
started setting things up.  Phil put his bench on top of the little bar in one
corner while I used the top of the piano in the other, and the TEPs said "no
problem" to my wanting to stick a couple more nails in the moldings to support
the hanging motors.  We spent the afternoon hanging things and twisting
mirrors, while the rain outside fell even more heavily.

Into the midst of all this walked a TEP alum by the name of Fred Fenning, who
looked around at what we were doing and seemed to know exactly what was going
on.  It turned out that he is now the VP of Image Engineering, a high-dollar
laser show outfit in Cambridge, and back in his TEP days he'd been starting to
play around with the same kind of stuff as we were.  We talked at some length
-- I was utterly fascinated to learn about this; furthermore, we found that
Fred had *built* the phone system himself from random parts he'd culled.  Since
he'd been managing much bigger laser toys for years he didn't seem overly
fascinated by what we were setting up, of course -- but it was interesting to
talk to him and get some tidbits of "what it's like out there" for a
professional laser-show company.  Then he took off to deal with other
obligations, so he wasn't going to be around for our actual show, such as it
would be.  I've called and conversed with him since, and learned that by now
he's sort of bored with the idea of Yet Another Laser Show, so we talked about
power supply technology most of the time.  An interesting fellow, anyway.

Anyway, Phil and I got more or less ready to go and then went back to MIT to
hook up with the rest of the cast and supply automotive power for instruments
and people.  By this time it was *pouring* out.  We got there just as the
performance had ended and they were in the middle of picture call, so we
started trucking instruments out the door and loading them into Phil's car.
There was a massive semi-organized effort to obtain food in the form of pizza,
with the upshot being that I rode to Senior House in the way-back of Phil's car
while holding instruments up.  Only when I got out did I realize that I had sat
the whole way in a large puddle of vacuum pump oil that had spilled on the rug
back there, and now there was a large greasy spot on my shorts -- right where I
often reflexively wipe my hand to dry water off it.  Now I was picking up more
goo than I was getting rid of by doing this, and had to force myself to *not*
do that for the rest of the night.  The only other pants I had with me were
long ones, and it was too hot to wear them.  We finally got sort of organized
and back to TEP, as the rest of the cast came rolling in.  We fired up the toys
and did some final configurations, bringing everything up to full power, only
to discover that the ha-ha 20 amp breaker I was hung off of kept poinking
anyway, until we found the 50 amp "fryolator" feed downstairs and switched over
to it.  This ran my side without a complaint all night.  The people from a room
upstairs supplied a stereo with some impressively large speakers to go with
this, so after a while the room looked just like our usual con environment,
with lots of pretty colors all over the walls along with plenty of Tangerine
Dream and Jarre and Vangelis and Yes and various other fun tunes.  The
Bridegroom cast folks and various TEPpies drifted in and out, and since
everything seemed reasonably stable we went off to explore the rest of the
house, which has some fairly weird features such as a blacklight stairwell and
a Foam Room.  The former is a matte-black back stair with paintings done in
fluorescent colors and illuminated by UV lights.  This leads up toward the
latter, which is a large closet filled about two feet deep with little red
foam-rubber blocks that you can dive into, sit in, bury each other in, play
with, laugh at, and what have you.  We wondered seriously why there wasn't a
Focault pendulum strung down the large open center stairwell five floors down
or so.  The roof is great too; one of the residents who was also sort of
playing tourguide at the time had built most of the wooden deck up top.  The
house is contiguous with the rest in the block, so all the roofs connect, and
stuck on the borders are these chimneys with clay Old-London style chimney-pots
sticking up.  Contrasting to this is the view of the Pru and surrounding
buildings, which the next morning were mostly obscured by mist.  According to
our tourguide they used to have a purple bathtub out there on the deck, which
they use to routinely use to sit and bathe in with a panoramic view of the rest
of Boston, until the local authorities told them they couldn't have a bathtub
on the roof anymore for somewhat vague reasons.  We later found the bathtub in
a shed nearby.  Common sense dictated that people probably lived immediately
under the adjoining roofs and running across them was unwise, although there
was a tale of the police having to come deal with complaints from the neighbors
because some freshmen were trying to fly a kite by running along the entire
row.  Apparently some of the local people are a bit too quick to point the
finger at TEP for random problems, especially the "noise bitch" next door that
they mentioned.

We went back downstairs and played in the laser room some more; some of the
more frattish-type members of the house came wandering by with *enormous* mugs
of beer and wearing those perforated-style football shirts.  They seemed not to
understand what I was at one point telling them about what lasers were for, and
then one of them moved something on Phil's bench, destroying most of his
effects until he fixed it.  I became rather apprehensive of these fellows,
since -- well, if you believe the stories, you never know what drunk fratboys
will haul off and do.  I'm not sure how we got them to go away other than
gently expressing displeasure with their actions, to let them know without
pissing them off that their tampering wasn't helpful.  They eventually went
away, presumably to vomit and pass out.  Meanwhile, some of us discovered the
Downstairs Bathroom.  This is a tiny room under the main stairs with a sink and
a toilet and little else, except that when you walk in there you are greeted by
large painted horrible gooey faces that sort of reach out from behind the
toilet at you.  Evidently someone's bad trip exploded in there and wound up on
the walls.  When you stand there taking a leak, these huge and absolutely
miserable eyeballs stare at you... The fact that this bathroom is usually
fairly grubby doesn't help much.  Shiver.  We went back upstairs to play in the
foam room some more, which was much more hospitable.

The cast party, or what was left of it, lasted until well past dawn, when we
went up on the roof again to watch Boston trying to dry itself off.  The rain
had at long last stopped, but there was still plenty of mist around.  Then to
contrast this openness and height, we went off singly to explore the tiny
little tunnel down in the basement.  Apparently the house was coal-fired at
some point, and a lot of the original coal furnace parts were still there.
This had been mostly built of brick, and the boiler was fed air through these
little channels through the basement walls.  Behind the existing furnace there
was a little chamber with a hole about a foot and a half square leading around
a corner into utter blackness.  We were told that most of the TEP pledges were
sent to navigate this, and a lot of them claustrophobed out.  Well, it simply
*had* to be explored.  I slipped away from the rest of the group and went down
to the furnace room and stuck my head into this.  I couldn't quite see where it
went yet but as I crawled further forward over the inch or two of old coal dust
on the floor, I came to a split.  To the right was the old boiler chamber
itself, a tiny cul-de-sac that one could stand up in and look around.  There
was a lunchbox with a condom in it, a can of Spam, a doll's head, a cube, and a
Batcomputer made of cardboard.  I signed in inside the lunchbox, observed that
the ceiling was constructed of lots of old iron fingers, which formed the
heat-exchanger part of the boiler, and realized that I was sitting in the
firebox.  Sort of a neat feeling; at one point this place would have been
uninhabitable due to heat.  I went back out and down the other fork, which led
toward the back wall of the house and ended under something partially outside,
with a hole leading into a crawlspace under the next house over.  But I
observed the heavy flagstones above my head held up by crumbling bricks and
thought better of placing any strain on them to jack my body into that little
space next door, and decided to exit.  I came out of the hole *completely*
covered in black cruft and spiderwebs, staggered back upstairs to where
everyone else was hanging around, and pronounced it Utterly Glorious.  Phil
went in next, and then Bo.  Meanwhile I took a wonderfully long shower, to
remove the coal dust and vacuum pump spooge and general sweaty ook that comes
from climbing up and down ladders to tweak mirrors.  By this time nobody in the
front room was really awake but all the lasers were still going, so we shut
them down and crashed for a while.

The weekend ended with the usual tear-it-all-down-and-pack-it, shoving all the
toys back into cars, a final fly by Lexington and the Ride Home to the Nice
Warm Bed.  Even without things like the risers at Genericon, playing roadie for
a weekend does afford a certain amount of exercise, and the best part is that
it's all *fun*, and therefore not even noticed as "exercise" until later.  Sort
of like climbing mountains.  Funny we should suddenly mention mountains,
because in the next few weeks I dealt with quite a few of them.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

When I got home to NJ and talked to Mom, I was invited to go along with her to
the house of a recent acquaintance to "celebrate the Harmonic Convergence",
i.e. spend that particular weekend camping out and communing with nature.  This
has been detailed in a separate flame already, but the high point [to make a
bad pun] of it was spending the night on top of a mountain [on the NJ scale of
hill-height].  Shortly after this I was back in Boston again, planning a jaunt
into the White Mountains with Phil, Mgrant, Corwin and Swa.  After much
discussion went back and forth with JBVB tossing in suggestions about places to
go we finally decided upon a little spot in the southern sort of foothills of
the region, near a lake and a hill that was supposed to have a fire tower on
top [I voted for the fire tower because they're fun to climb].  In addition, we
were going to talk about lots of laser show stuff, i.e. how to choregraph laser
play to music to make a cohesive *show*.  Some ideas started to fall into place
on Phil's whiteboard, but then we got busy packing.  We tootled off up the
Interstate the next day. Swa came flying over a hill doing about 80 and fell
into a Statie's arms and radar gun, and got nailed, but without further
incident we finally found the road to where our proposed lake campsite was, and
finally parked just as it was getting dark out.  As we arrived we noticed that
all around us, off the sides of the road, were groups of people camping, within
handy reach of their cars, and occasionally trucks full of rowdies would go
screaming by in showers of thrown-up gravel and clouds of dust.  *This* was
their idea of *camping*??  In disgust we shouldered our fairly cumbersome
packs, locked the cars and hiked up the 3 or 4 miles to the lake, by
flashlight, almost getting lost a couple of times because the trail map didn't
quite jive with the trails.  When we got there we found that the "near" spot
had already been claimed but the occupants thereof pointed us at the "far"
spot, which while obviously pre-cleared was still a delightful little nook in
the edge of the surrounding woods.  We pitched the tents and got a fire going,
and while a gorgeous August moon sailed out from behind the neighboring hill
and over the lake, talked about everything *but* lasers.  The people across the
lake were having a good time too; occasional bottle rockets would go off... And
the next day we hiked back down to the cars, drove a few miles up the road to
the "Mount Osceola" parking lot, and spent the afternoon toiling upward.  We
got separated into two groups because Phil was in some kind of hurry to reach
the top; but he made the mistake of giving all the water bottles to Swa and
Mgrant, so by the time Phil, Corwin and I were nearing the summit our thirst
was becoming positively uncomfortable.  Then we found this tiny little stream
dribbling out from under some rocks and on down the hill that formed a little
puddle near the trail.  We tasted the water and decided that it probably
wouldn't kill us, and then realized that we didn't have any kind of receptacle
to drink it out of.  We wound up using the shell of Phil's flashlight, and
spent a good 10 minutes there slurping it down little bits at a time.  Much
refreshed, we proceeded on to the top and discovered that the fire tower had
long since been removed although the concrete support things were still there.
MGrant and Swa soon arrived and we sat on the rocks over this *glorious* view
northward to the rest of the mountains and ate the food we brought and built
little rock structures and took lots of pictures.  The eastern side of this
mountain has a straight-down cliff a couple of hundred feet high into the
valley below, with a bare rock area above it, so there was an unobstructed
vista of just about everything around.  Like the night on Old Baldy I'd spent
during the Convergence weekend, this too was sort of a religious experience.

The sun was starting to get low when we headed back down, and we realized that
if we didn't haul ass we'd be stumbling around in the dark, so haul we did, and
made it back to the parking lot just as the light was fading to the point we'd
start needing flashlights.  We cut it pretty close.  When we arrived back at
the lake we broke out the Dinty Moore, and just then the guys from across the
way came sloshing across in their rubber raft with *more* of it, because they
were leaving the next day and didn't need it.  Between us we must have put down
about eight cans of the stuff along with lots of tea and hot chocolate.  Tired
and sated, we were capable of little other than sitting around the fire
talking, again, about everything but laser shows, and soon afterward, sleeping.

One thing that struck me was the incredible *density* of the woods in this
area.  In the wild state, the trees grow so close together that bushwhacking is
almost impossible, even with an appropriate weapon.  The campsite we had had
clearly been carved out of the edge of the woods over a few years of
maintenance by the park service.  This was even more noticeable when we went
off into the wild stuff to try and find more firewood.  There was a nice dead
tree down some distance off, but there was just no *way* we were going to free
it out from between the neighboring trees, so we had to cut pieces off it.  By
the time we had this down to a science, it was time to pack it all up and
leave.  There was surprisingly little garbage left by the time we burned all
the paper and such and collected the cans; it all went into one bag.  We used
the remaining hunks of wood to build a structure on the shore, shouldered the
stuff which wasn't *that* much lighter than before, and hiked down the trail
for the last time.

When we got to the interstate we realized our hairy error: it was the end of
Memorial Day Weekend, and *everybody* wanted to get to Boston all of a sudden.
Traffic speed varied from zero to about 45 most of the way back.  On the way we
stopped in one of the larger rest areas a bit north of the state line, which
also doubles as the State Liquor Store.  Now think about this for a sec.  The
enormous state-sanctioned repository of intoxicants, located right there on
*both* sides of the state's main Interstate highway.  And it was *packed*.  I
was driving at this point, and by the time we pulled into this Swa was
completely dead to the world, but the rest of us went toward the building and
found two interesting things: one, that they were giving out free coffee [this
is semi-normal for big holidays], and that the New Hampshire Alliance for
Safety Belts had set up this odd contrivance which from a distance looked like
a rail dragster, with a long sloping front and a seat high up in the rear.
This turned out to be a "Seat belt convincer" -- after signing some waiver
about bodily harm or some such, the victim would be belted into the chair up
top, which then rolled down the ramp on little wheels and went *klang* into the
bumpers at the end, in a simulated 5-10 mph crash.  Naturally we all tried
this, and although the equivalent speed is something like jumping off a 3-foot
wall, you're catching it with your chest and pelvis, so it's a fairly hairy
impact.  It also makes your face look really funny for just an instant.  Then
they gave you a free detachable key ring that's useful to hang one's Mag Lite
[TM] from the belt.  So, having been crashed and coffeed, we got under way
again.  As the evening approached, traffic started moving a bit better, and
eventually were back in Boston.

		-*-		-*-		-*-

We eventually did do some talking about shows, but not enough to come up with
anything definite.  This was somewhat offset by the news that filtered down
that "we got a gig!", this time in the *real world* for *bucks*.  Not a lot of
bucks, but somehow Corwin and/or Rickland had convinced the owner of a Boston
night spot that they wanted us to do lasers for a band.  But since this was not
until October, there still wasn't a whole lot of communication about it; I
vaguely wondered if it would come to anything or not, but I had started work on
a hot new project.

The one thing different about my stuff as opposed to Phil's or Corwin's was
always that it had some kind of beam-switching facility.  In the early days it
was a tripod taped to the table with a mirror on top, and the beam therefrom
could be swung around to hit different directing mirrors to get the entire beam
output from one or more lasers [the argon in particular, since it had all the
oomph] through one effect-generator at a time.  This method sort of came
naturally to me, as opposed to the split-the-beam-n-ways approach.  The tripods
had briefly devolved into small pivoted mounts made of brick strap and mounted
on the Optical Orgasm, but even these were subject to inaccuracy and endless
fiddling-with to get the beams going exactly right.  And, of course, I always
had to jump up, go over to the bench, and play with these things to demonstrate
the different things I'd set up.  The project at hand now was to fix this.  We
had started thinking about more mechanized forms of beam control, and had been
idly fooling around with some stepper motors.  Phil had throw together a
prototype step controller before the Osceola trip, but from what we could
determine from initial testing this wasn't particularly accurate either, and as
repeatable as we needed, etc.  When I got home I went off to the Museum and
picked over various dead printers and such, pulling out a few different kinds
of steppers to play with.  I discovered that the step angles varied, and that
the ones with very small step angles "felt" really precise.  I did the accuracy
test again, this time correctly: epoxied a mirror firmly to the shaft, gave the
coil in question a holding voltage, which Phil's original hadn't done, and set
up a longish bounce across the room a couple of times.  This gave much more
favorable results: I found that the spot always came back to within an inch or
so of where it had been before, over about ten feet or so.  But why did it vary
that inch?  I was doing a very repeatable action to the motor, even if it was
... *oh*.  I had been stepping to my test place from two different directions,
right?  When I came at it from the left, the dot was at one end of its drift,
and the other end when the step approached from the right.  Approaching from a
consistent direction gave me *no measurable net drift at all*, even with the
lower-resolution stepper I was messing with, and I had the answer.  Accounting
for mechanical hysteresis in the stepper would give me all the accuracy I
needed.

The next step was to figure out how to build this discovery into the Orgasm,
and how to control this stepping action.  The obvious thing to do was have the
stepper mounted someplace where its beam output could address a bunch of
mirrors, probably all across a flat surface.  There were no such flat surfaces
large enough in the Orgasm, but there was a lot of waste space that I wanted to
use.  Enter the wonders of Machining.  The Spirograph Generator, hitherto
mounted smack in the middle of this thing, went, and then as design progressed,
I realized that the piece it had been mounted on would be squarely in the way,
so off it came.  At this point I had the frame of it more apart than ever
before, and discovered that some of the crosspieces were held in only at one
end in a somewhat kludgey fashion.  Aha, so the person who originally built
this thing may have had sex in the machine shop, but apparently didn't respect
it in the morning.  Anyway, where all this space was freed up went a flat plate
cut from a spare rack panel Ricky had laying around, good solid 1/8 inch
aluminum.  This attached with screws down into matching threaded holes in the
corner pieces that used to hold the scatter mirrors from the original UPC
scanner.  The low-accuracy stepper got mounted near one edge of this, because
its beam output over eight or so useful steps covered well over a semicircle.
The high-accuracy one, with the small step size, sat way down at one end of the
frame, because its spread would only cover a small angle into which a lot of
catch mirrors would have to be placed.  All this routing would happen about 5/8
inch above the surface of the plate.  In the end configuration it needed a
detachable extender plate hanging off one side of the frame, because there were
just too many catch mirrors and they were interfering with each other.

In an effort to determine just how I was going to drive this arrangement, I
started idly thumbing through an old TI logic handbook from 1976 or so.  I knew
basically how digital logic worked but had never actually put anything together
with it.  As I read further, reaffirming what I knew and finding plenty I
didn't, it began to dawn on me that this was The Answer, and that a mess of
logic driving the steppers would be the thing that would recreate my original
keyboard idea but this time done right.  Completely hooked, I started doodling
various ideas which at first were completely wrong but as I learned more about
what chips were available, the whole thing began to take shape in my mind.  I
then ordered a mess of the chips I thought I'd need and started playing around,
learning subtleties like inputs usually default to high because they have
internal pull-ups, and that 8-bit comparators really work as advertised, and
just *why* you had to pre-load counter inputs with the clock high.  In more
trips to the Museum I found this old data buffer box or something that
contained a large board full of wire-wrap sockets of 14 and 16 pins, with power
and ground planes already configured for TTL, and a board out of a printer with
lots of high-power Darlingtons on it with which I could drive the stepper
coils.  Eight positions seemed to be appropriate since these chips all did
things in groups of 4 or 8.  And all at once the whole thing fell into place,
and all that remained was to build it.  Even a name for it: Beam-O-Tron.

Since the proposed project only needed 25 chips or so and some support stuff, I
bandsawed the wire-wrap board in half.  A lot of the 16-pin places were
occupied by 14-pin sockets, a clear lose, and getting them out of there was a
royal bitch because of plated-through holes.  *Fortunately* most of the sockets
were tack-soldered in only at +5 and ground, or they would have been completely
impossible.  So now I had a couple of rows of 14's and 16's, and what I
considered a working design.  Now I've always mistrusted wire-wrap, and it
looks like shit anyway and I don't own any wrapping tools, so I started
re-using a lot of the old ripped-out Kynar and lightly *soldering* the
interconnects to the pins.  Most of the connections were made with the non-
crumpled pieces of this old stuff, which by now had been ripped out of the
original board and was in a large heap on the desk.  Concurrent with this I was
figuring out where to mount the Darlingtons on the driver board, which was the
same as the old perfboard that the scan-mirror motor electronics were on.  The
old tach-feedback crud got ripped out since I now had a simple pot controlling
that, and I had a lot of room left, so a neat row of 8 TO-220 cans got mounted
along with backlash-clamping diodes and bias resistors and all that good stuff.
Each stepper has 4 coils, in effect, so a + feed and 4 Darlingtons turned on in
the right order would step it around.  The backlash diodes were necessary; in
initial drive-capability tests I nuked more than one of the things.  However,
since they were driven to saturation and were dropping a max of 2V apiece, they
didn't need heat sinks, which was a win because there's no *room* for them in
there.  The outputs all connected to these little plug-header things which led
to the steppers via the same multiconductor stuff we always used to build tty
cables out of, spliced to the stepper wires with the canonical duct tape.

The original power supply was a general-purpose logic, +5 at some unholy
current, and slightly wimpier +12 and -12.  One stepper needed +12, the other
only +5, to adequately hold and step, and the rest of the +5 was obviously
intended to power the logic.  By now I had the first half of this design wired
up, and next it was time to see if I had been right all along or not.  Sometime
in the wee hours, little bits of wire and metal and screws and solder globs all
around me, stoked up on plenty of Jolt, I inserted the chips, tacked in an
overkill timing cap to the VCO so it would step slowly, and plugged it in.  Hit
the reset line, and the stepper went "thud" once.  A good sign; it told me that
the circuit was at least talking.  Hit "zero", nothing happened.  Good.  Hit
"one", stepper went "thud".  Hey!  Go for it all, hit 7, stepper went
"thudthudthudthudthudthud", and damned if it didn't go *exactly* six more steps
around, and "thudthudthudthudthudthudthud" all the way back to zero when, in
utter suspense, I hit "zero" again!!  Absolute glorious *triumph*, and the Gods
of Silicon were smiling!!  Baby's First TTL Project actually functioned
correctly the first time, and Baby was completely elated at this point.  Baby
knocked off and read his mail.

The rest of the job, perhaps not quite as thrilling but equally important, was
to wire the other half, finish the button interface, find enough ribbon cable
with DIP headers to plug into the interface sockets, and mount it in an
appropriate box.  This latter turned out to be an old Ven-Tel line-driver
cabinet, which *exactly* fits the board, was easy to mount the buttons in, is
small and light, and shaped sort of nicely for the hands to rest on.  A DB25
plug on the back carries power and signaling to and fro via a long cable, which
is the whole idea here since I can now stretch the cable out away from the
optics bench, lay back on the hotel room bed and flip beams around from there.
I can also hand someone the box and say "here, push the buttons, run the show".
In keeping with the resurrection of the keyboard idea, I found the old parts to
the first attempt, and realized that there were ten perfectly good compact
mirror mounts and extra brick strap, so these became the catch mirrors for the
high-accuracy side.  Thus the old dead keyboard lives again.  As part of
designing friction-fit mounts for these I had occasion to deal with an outfit
called McMaster-Carr, which is an industrial supply house with a catalog easily
3 inches thick of flimsy paper, and the most orgasmic assortment of hard steel
objects you could imagine, all the way from huge blowers and ductwork down to
tiny washers and cotter pins.  They seemed to be the only place I could find
these little spring-tension washers that would keep a mirror set to where I
turned it.  Final bolt-together and cleanup led into cleaning all the optics
again, because there *was* a con coming up.  If the axiom that most of the
hardware got built just before a con, the Beam-O-Tron was the extreme example,
but it was probably just lucky that it actually got done before NJAC.  Then I
went to actually see if it did what I wanted, and set up the argon and some
other stuff, lit incense, put on some good music, and tested it.  It did
exactly what I wanted -- seemingly instantaneous beam switching, from any
position to any other within the 8, and deadly accurate especially if switched
from a consistent direction.  Yow.  A new era had started.

		-*-		-*-		-*-
[To be continued; see part 2]