Bill Roper's Journal

Today was spent writing unit tests and fixing bugs that turned up when I ran the unit tests.

Which is, I suppose, the best reason for writing unit tests.

I have a few more unit tests to write tomorrow and then I can move on to the next project.

I spent some time today dealing with some smaller projects around the house. One of these was to take some measurements in the library, which is now done.

The next trick is going to be finding someone who wants our old Reebok RX-3000 treadmill which is sitting in the library taking up space. It is free to a good home. A good home is currently defined as "someone who is willing to take it away". :)

I am continuing my efforts to get the Flash pinball in the basement up and running. One of the projects that I may be able to handle myself is to fix some screw holes in the playfield where the screw no longer bites in properly, resulting in loose parts, which is not good. Filling these with toothpicks and wood glue has been suggested. Curiously, that is the same suggestion that has been made online for fixing Julie's bedroom door, which will not latch. I figured that I like the pinball machine better than the bedroom door, so why not experiment there?

The door still does not latch. It *might* latch if I had carved out a bit more wood to make room for the strike plate, because the door actually *does* latch if I *remove* the strike plate. But the toothpick and glue method is a bit messy.

I fixed one of our bathroom cabinets that had a similar problem using some very nice wood filler and I am thinking this may be a better solution to the problem. I will think about this a bit longer before taking a run at it. :)

Anyway, tomorrow it will be back to work, so projects will wait for a bit for me to catch up...

Ok, it *wasn't* March, but weather around here was certainly like the end of March -- and a *temperate* end of March -- for several days in a row. I was able to go to my lighter coat, the sun was shining. It was gorgeous.

February has now reasserted itself with a cold and blustery wind. It seemed even colder just because it had so recently been relatively warm.

Overall, it made sitting at my desk and getting some programming done look really good. :)

Real spring will be here soon.

I am working with the code assist AI at work to try to clean up our Gradle scripts. It did a magnificent job of doing so, but managed to delete some instructions from the scripts that we use and that it didn't realize were being used. Oops.

But that's no problem. I'll tell the AI to restore the missing parts from the version that's saved in our Git repository.

If only it hadn't accidentally discarded all of the changes in one of the files when it retrieved the backup copy. Oops again.

So I have the AI remaking the changes that it discarded.

And a new appreciation for knowing when to back up code changes to defend them from the AI.

The Dodeka taxes are now printed, signed, and in envelopes ready to pay tomorrow.

All of the documents for our personal taxes have been downloaded and/or scanned and then uploaded to the accountant along with various caveats about "expect a revised form for this account" and "K had a summer job" and "please note the Certificate of Error for the property taxes". We'll see how that goes.

In other news, our iSense mattress has developed an annoying leak on my side. Today, I finally managed to call them and start a warranty claim. I am hoping this goes well. :)

Today, I finished off the sixth load of laundry in the six days following Capricon, which means that I am caught up on the laundry, at least momentarily. Yay!

I also went to the post office where I filed an extension for the Dodeka tax return so that should the IRS open it late again this year after I mail it on a timely basis, they won't try to charge me hundreds of dollars in penalties for late filing. I also mailed the Capricon sales tax, because the State of Illinois has changed the rules and no longer collects event tax from us when we file our sales tax for the year for reasons apparently unknown. Neither Gretchen or I recall having been notified about this change, although we seem to have been notified about all sorts of things that don't actually matter to us.

And I mailed a gift to one of Julie's friends. That cost $22, which is a painful amount of shipping charge and explains why paying for Amazon Prime shipping looks so good.

Meanwhile, I ran another 13 games of the second half for the computer division in my APBA league, so there are only two more rounds to go there.

And I finished making the adjustments to the Dodeka taxes, which means that I should be able to start putting numbers on the forms tomorrow.

After which I can try to get *our* taxes off to the accountant.

Whee!

I am apparently a minor deity of some sort.

It doesn't take much to be one. You just need to read the console output from the build process and then read the documentation for the Gradle build and test processor. Do these things and you can make all *sorts* of things behave properly.

I tossed a thunderbolt as a warning shot tonight. With any luck, it will get the attention of the right people.

I need to get back to work on the taxes so that I can finish them up.

On the other hand, most of the TV shows that I'm watching with Gretchen are signing off until after the Winter Olympics, so that should free up some time. :)

And if we are both going upstairs early because of the lack of TV, that is *not* going to make the dogs happy...

Consequences, consequences.

And I'm back from Capricon.

This is a slight exaggeration, because I commuted to Capricon this year, living about 15 minutes from the hotel and having discovered that there were no rooms with two beds available in the block when I was looking to reserve a room. (The hotel would rent me a king room in the block or a double/double outside of the block. Neither of those would have been particularly helpful.) Anyway, the result was that I was commuting to the con with a whole passel of kids.

The good news is that sales at this year's Capricon were better than the sales at my last pre-COVID Capricon back in 2020. That is largely because the sales at that previous Capricon were abjectly terrible. (Pulls up old tax paperwork to check. Yes, terrible.)

Looking at the tax paperwork causes me to realize that what I paid for two tables and a membership this year was the same as I paid for three tables and multiple memberships back in 2020. This is not a complaint that's unique to Capricon. *All* of the general-interest SF cons that I go to have boosted their table prices substantially post-COVID at the same time that their membership has gone down noticeably. This is why I no longer attempt to deal at Confusion -- there's just no prospect of making enough sales there for it to make any sort of economic sense.

Now, I understand that conventions are trying to get enough income to survive. I have worked enough cons over the years for that to be clear. But it doesn't *appear*, for instance, that the rates that are being charged to artists are a lot higher than before. (I can't speak exactly to the amounts that the artists are paying for hanging space, but that 10% commission is the same before and after COVID, to the best of my recollection.)

When I questioned the rate increase for the tables at Windycon, I was told that this is what other nearby cons charge and I *think* that referred to anime and possibly furry conventions in the area that have more members than Windycon or Capricon. I could be wrong about which cons they were referring to, as I didn't feel like it was even worth trying to make an argument (and I am *on* the Windycon concom).

All that said, my sales at Capricon were definitely ok. They were a bit less than at Windycon and I have no idea what the actual attendance at the con was like, because you couldn't divine it from the badge numbers. Maybe it was announced at Closing Ceremonies, but I was busy knocking down the table. :)

I just feel like the cons are going to price too many dealers out of the market. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe other dealers are doing a lot more volume of sales than I am, but that's not the impression that I get. I will make money on Capricon this year, but only because I commuted to the con and am only charging one membership against the table. (Which is fair, because I was really the only person who worked the table, which meant I was pretty tied to it.)

This is not a complaint about Capricon. The folks who ran the Dealers' Room were nice and competent and good to me and I *appreciate* that. This is a complaint about general-interest SF cons in general. It would be good if they were not trying to balance their budgets on the backs of the dealers, because having a large and diverse selection of dealers is an asset for a convention, IMO. And if I am going to spend all of my daytime during a convention sitting behind a dealer table, I need to be making my nut or the IRS is going to wonder what I am doing -- and so am I. Witness that I don't try to deal at Confusion any more. :)

Ok, all of that rant out of the way, I had a good time at Capricon. I had some nice conversations. I enjoyed the two panels that I was on. It would have been nice to have a concert, but that didn't work out for whatever reason. Maybe next year. The art auction was a lot of fun and it is great to have K there auctioning beside me and Dr. Bob and Mike. And K's friend from school and Julie ran art along with Lisa and did a fine job. I had fun at the open filking on Saturday -- I was too tired on Friday and had to get back early to open the dealer table (there is a recurring theme here :) ).

The new hotel seems workable, although the restriction on taking things out of the con suite was a bit of a problem when you're a dealer. It is, in any case, in the suburbs, which means that it is much easier for me to deal with. And being able to do move in on Friday made a *big* difference for me.

So I am happy to be back at Capricon for the first time since the remote con in 2021 which was the last time where I ran filking for the con. :) My perfect attendance run is well and truly blown by 2022-2025 and that's ok.

We'll try it again. :)

I need to finish shaving and then I can run over and unload the van for Capricon.

The new CPAP worked admirably last night.