As one might surmise by the badge above, I attended WordCamp Boston this year. It was held right down the street at Boston University. I had only found out that a WordCamp was being held in Boston about a week and a half beforehand. When I saw where it would be, I leaped at the opportunity. Registration was only US$40, which is incredibly reasonable for a technical conference.

Read on to hear more about some of the panels I attended.

The best session overall was the double session with two of the WordPress core developers. It wasn’t technical at all, but it was just a great forum on where WordPress is currently and where they would like it to be somewhere down the road. They were also taking questions and looking for feedback. I asked if there were any plans on improving the migration and management of WordPress w/ Multisite and I got a very interesting answer. Apparently they had a one button upgrade process ready to go, but the more they looked at Multisite and saw what people were doing with it and what problems they were encountering, they decided to make the upgrade more difficult as a barrier to entry. If you could upgrade to Multisite then you at least had enough knowledge to be able to troubleshoot some of the issues that may arise from the upgrade. I could not disagree with him, as the management of Multisite is still pretty klunky and not as intuitive as it really needs to be. It did make me consider writing a plugin to migrate a WordPress site to a Multisite though.

The best technical panel that I attended was wholly owned by K. Adam White and his talk on Stepping into Custom Post Types. I had only recently realized that pages, posts, revisions and attachments were all stored they same way just with different custom post types. Sitting in on this panel made me realize just how much you could do by creating your own custom post types. It was a fantastic presentation with great real world examples. It was a shock to most when K. Adam said that this was the first time he had given this presentation. I’ve already adapted custom post types into two different plugin projects that I am working on, one of which is with Ben from DeadpoolBugle.com.

I went to three different marketing and SEO sessions in a row Saturday afternoon. While they had some fantastic information that was really relevant and useful, part of me felt like I had watched a very similar panel three times in a row. In retrospect, I would have liked to have attended the session on CSS3 instead of one of these marketing sessions.

I handed out many business cards and met quite a few, very nice people doing some very interesting things with their little space on the internet. It makes me hopeful that I can have an impact on the industry somewhere along the way. I’ll definitely be attending WordCamp Boston next year. Maybe one of these years I’ll even run a session.

I have finally gotten around to posting the gallery for Botcon 2010 on Orlando, Florida. Maybe sometime I’ll get to doing the gallery for 2009. Above you can see the obligatory group photo. Unfortunately, it was done very impromptu as Ernie and Rubin were trying to leave, so we couldn’t find Sam nor Robert in time to be in the photo.

There was lots to see this year. I took plenty of pictures of the display cases for upcoming product, the Transformers Hall of Fame and some random rare items found at various dealer booths. The image above is me holding one of the rarest items that was released at retail exclusively in Japan. That one, in particular, was on sale for US$1,000. Most of you don’t care about that though, so here is a picture of Sam ironing his shirt.

Next year will be back in Pasadena. Hopefully it won’t be quite so humid out.

Yesterday marks one of my favorite times of year. Halloween.

Its one of those instances where I really like to go all out. Normally I keep my costume a big a secret and work on it for months ahead of time. Now that Brenna is here, I figured we should do a group/couples costume and I already had an idea that I had been percolating for the past couple months. Figuring that we were both pretty obstinate people and that we would be stepping on each others’ shoes if we worked on the same parts of the costume, I divided the task up. Brenna took the costumes and I took the ‘accessories’. The costumes themselves are fairly simplistic, though, I admit, I underestimated how much attention to detail she was going to pay. The accessories were incredibly ambitious and I wanted the challenge of learning a new skill. As far as I’m concerned, unlearned skills are obstacles waiting to be overcome.

In case you haven’t guessed by the post banner image at the top, we decided to go as two of the Voltron pilots. I went as Keith, pilot of the black lion and Brenna went as Lance, pilot of the red lion. The accessories that I was to work on were plushie versions of our respective lions. The project turned out to be so ambitious that I only completed the black lion. I say completed, but it didn’t have any hind legs. I just ran out of time, so I referred to him as a sea lion the entire night.

More on the lion another day.

It should also be noted that as I was walking out the door on Thursday to leave, Davidson convinced me to bring the tube despite the extra baggage fees. As it turned out, Joaquin ended up taking his luggage as a carry on and checking in my tube.

I don’t leave for about another hour and ten minutes, though. Naturally I’m spending that time furiously packing my luggage since didn’t do enough of that last night. Unfortunately, with the economy the way it is and the gas prices the way they are, it was brought to my attention this week that airlines (even more of them now) are still charging for checked in baggage. We’ll be flying AirTran. I had Joaquin look up what the policy is and he found this website, airfarewatchdog.com.

AirTran is charging US$20 for a second piece of luggage to check in. Thats US$40 for both ways. This means I’m not bringing a second piece of luggage. This also means that I can’t bring the wooden sword that is part of my costume since the tube I carry it in is too large to be a carry on and would be considered a second checked item. The sword is the most recognizable part of my costume and is really what other people see and immediately associate with my character. I would categorize this as ‘sucking big time’.

The sad thing is, looking at that chart, AirTran appears to charge the least of any of the carriers, while American Airlines makes no misconceptions as they tell you to grab your ankles and think of Christmas.

Tonight, I go to the Celtics playoff game.

Tomorrow, I go to Botcon.

Its going to be a long haul until I’m finally there, but the excitement is building.

Tomorrow, I will be meeting Brendan at the airport and we will fly to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, we will meet Sam and drive for 9 hours to arrive at Botcon in Cincinnati, OH. Its going to be a very long day, but I’m pretty excited for it.

Sam and I did something similar two years ago when the convention was in Lexington, Kentucky. I flew to Chicago and we drove down together. It was actually a longer drive, but it was fun and it gave him some company on the way down. Last year, he flew here and we all drove down to Providence, Rhode Island, stopping at every store with a toy aisle along the way.

I already have a small list of things I’m looking for, but I’m sure its incomplete and I’ll only find two or three of the listed items. Weighing much heavier on my mind, are all things I need to do before I leave. Laundry. Packing. Determining what toys to bring to sell and making sure I leave enough room to bring toys back. Withdrawing some money. Getting all the video equipment together. You get the idea. Not a lot of time for so much to do. I better get started!

I mentioned in an earlier post that we waited in the registration line for 4 hours on Friday, even after we preregistered months in advance. We had it easy though. Those who did not preregister were in line for anywhere from 5 to 10 hours that day. Paul met up with us on Saturday after the registration staff took drastic measures to try and fix many of the issues they had the day before. He got there at 8AM and still stood in line for 3 hours.

My favorite quote:

I promise you all that I will take what I have learned from this disaster and do everything in my power to make sure this does not happen again.

Choice.

AnimeBoston came early this year. March 21-23.

Brenna came to town again for the con. Friday, the first day of the con was her 23rd birthday. Naturally, we celebrated, but one thing at a time. I have posted a not so brief summary of the week/weekend after the jump, but if you are only interested in seeing the pictures, you can check out the gallery here.

Her flight was fairly late on Wednesday, so we did not get to do much that night. We ended up ordering out and watching Accepted.

Thursday we had the entire day to ourselves so we packed up and headed to Harvard Sq. I got a sweet parking spot, but since it was still a regular weekday we needed to mind the parking meter. The max time on the meter was sadly an hour. We headed into the Garage, which is basically a small multi-level mall. After looking around Hootenany briefly and spending nearly the entire hour in Newbury Comics looking at toys, comics, and music, we went back and refilled the meter. Then back to the Garage to check out Tokyo Kid. The store was in disarray because they were preparing for AnimeBoston, but we still managed to spend a little bit of time in there before we went to Crazy Dough’s and got some pizza. I had a chicken parm pizza slice. It was pretty good. I think the most outlandish pizza slice I’ve gotten there was a broccolli, shrimp alfredo slice. It was actually pretty good. After pizza, we got some ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s and headed back to the car. Upon our return, we got out of costume and headed over to Best Buy to pick up Super Smash Brothers Brawl for our gathering the next night. We basically just hung out at the house for most of the rest of the night and played Brawl. And by that I mean we hung out and Brenna completely abused me all night in Smash Brothers Brawl.

Friday morning was spent getting our costumes on and getting to the convention. We got there around 11:45ish. We headed straight to the pre-registration line, which was actually in a function hall all on its own. That was a little depressing. Especially three and a half hours later when we got to the end of the line in the hall only to realize it continued into the hallway into another room with another large line. An hour of despair and hunger later, we finally got our registration packets and were ready to go. Unfortunately we were already a man down. Brendan and Thanh were about an hour ahead of us in line. After standing in line for four hours and taking a quick tour of the dealer room and the artists alley, Thanh left the convention for the weekend before Brenna and I even got out of the preregistration line. He probably spent about 20 minutes at the convention, even though he pre-registered for the entire weekend. I’m still mystified by that.

Now that we had all been registered, our small group of three headed straight for the artists’ alley.The artists alley is essentially a funtion hall full of aspiring artists trying to make a name for themselves and sell some artwork at the same time. Over the past couple of years, it has quickly become my preferred area of interest in wandering about the convention. It used to be the dealer room, but the dealer room changes little from year to year. Mostly the same stores have tables selling the same trinkets. Very little changes from year to year. We were able to secure half of a table through Brenna’s hardwork and pestering on the AnimeBoston message board. We lost out on a full table because the Alley sold out in roughly 24 seconds when the tables went available for registration online. In retrospect, I think the half table worked out best for us since we used no more and no less than the space we had. Maybe something to keep in mind for next time. We were only there for maybe 2-3 hours before it was already time to leave and get home. Stupid registration line. It wasted almost the entire day.

I had invited people that Brenna had previously met to the house around 7ish to hang out for her birthday. Dan came over early and hung out with the three of us. We played Rock Band for hours. During that time Peggy and Joaquin came over as well, which was really great because I wasn’t sure if they were coming and I hadn’t seen them in quite a while. Later on, Duke, Toby and their girlfriends came back from Dinner and joined in as well. We had a full band going most of the night with people rotating on instruments and microphone. I got some fun footage. Duke’s brother, Chris came over at my invitation and rocked out on the drums. He is a drummer and showed us what he could do on Rock Band’s drums on expert. It was really impressive. I’ll probably post some of the footage I took in a future post. Once people started going to bed, we quieted down and started playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl. I didn’t win at all, but it was a lot of fun and I’m getting slightly better with the pokemon trainer. Squirtle is still pretty terrible on most levels though. Eventually everyone headed home and Brenna and I went to bed. Tomorrow was going to be another long day.

Saturday came very much like Friday had. We got up and put our costumes on and Duke was kind enough to give us a ride to the convention center. Thankfully, we did not have to wait in a line. We went straight up to the Artists Alley and setup shop. Paul showed up not long after. He apparently had been in line since 8am and had only just gotten out. He was dressed up as Time Jump Shino. It looked really good.

Sunday was a very early day. Since the convention closed at 3 or 4. We needed to be there early to make sure we made the most of the shortened day. I dressed up as Xorn (my last halloween costume) and Brenna wore her civvies. I did a last walk-through of the dealer room. I went back to the FUNimation booth and bought the WildCATS dvd I had seen on Friday because I was still thinking about it and it was a very good deal. It was the full series. Outside of that, I did not find much that I wanted. Brenna was able to sell a few of her other prints on the final day, which made her rather gleeful. I sat in on the charity auction to try and bid on first pick of the artists alley for next year. Little did I realize so many other artists had been jaded in the immediate sellout of the alley. While I was bidding, the price escalated quickly out of our range. When it hit 250, there was a short silence and it almost ended, but I bid 251 just to be a jerk because it was clear this girl would not be outbid. Naturally she bid again, but someone went higher and it continued to escalate further. The final damage cost her 320 dollars for her pick of the first table for next year’s artists alley. Thats not far off from what a dealer’s table costs in the dealer room. I left in frustration and went back to our table and took a nap on the floor behind it. I was starting to get a headache from wearing the Xorn helmet.

The day passed by very quickly. It was not long before we were wrapping things up and heading back home. Duke’s family was over for Easter so we quickly went upstairs and changed. I took another nap to try and get rid of the headache. Brenna read another of my graphic novels. After a while, Duke’s family left because they were stuffed, but he still had more stuff cooking so we went down and helped out, of course. Davidson, Antonia, Duke, Danielle, Brenna and I all sat down and ate and talked for a while. Then we called it a night.

Very early the next day (6am!) I dropped Brenna off at the airport and reentered the mundane working world from my relaxing vacation. I wish vacations were longer.

The first one was a fluke. Brendan texted me there was a convention in town and to meet him at Boylston station. I had nothing better to do, so I met him and a friend of his named Thanh. A fateful first meeting to be sure. All that aside, not realizing we needed to register and pay to get into the dealer room, we went in anyway. It was cool to be sure, but it was only the dealer room. The convention was spread across multiple venues in the city so we stayed in the building with the dealer room. We wandered up and down aisles for hours looking at all the cool schwag. That was the first time I had seen a Naruto headband. Two weeks, 52 episodes, and over a hundred chapters of manga later, I was all caught up and hooked on the series. Certainly not my first anime series obsession, just my latest. All in all it was a good time.

The second convention was significantly better since it was entirely encapsulated within the Hynes Convention Center in the middle of the city. I was actually dressed up for this one. We walked around the dealer room for what seemed like the entire day on Saturday and once that closed, I went panel hopping while Brendan and Thanh decided they had a more urgent need to go bowling. I sat in for a few amusing panels which I enjoyed until they returned for the highlight of the evening, Dick and Buster’s Live Hentai Dubbing Extravaganza. Basically audience members are selected and brought to the front to do live voiceovers for animated japanese porn. Good times. I couldn’t stay for the whole thing, but we saw most of it. I was exhausted and had a terrible headache.

Last year, Brendan, Thanh and I went again with the extra company of Brenna and a brief cameo of Paul. The prior year, Brendan had won a prize in the charity auction. He got first pick of any table in the artists’ alley. It turned out to be a great idea. We were right against a wall next to the door of the hall. I gave out over 100 business cards for PowetTV, Brenna sold some art, Thanh sold all of his ribbon origami fishy things and Brendan sold 2 shirts. Not only that, but it gave us a base of operations. We could put down all of our stuff at the table and take turns going to panels and the dealer room, while the others sat down to relax and mind the table. It was by far the best plan of action we had yet and we all vowed to do the same next year. Brendan decided not to bid in the charity auction though and to sign up for a table the normal way through registration on the site.

AnimeBoston this year will be in March. For months, we all have been eagerly monitoring the AnimeBoston front page for updates on when the artist alley registration would open. Unfortunately, that update never came. It was posted on the Artist Alley page of the site only. Thus we missed registration 2 weeks ago and didn’t find out until today.

Brendan and I are following up a couple of unlikely leads, but its looking as though we will be returning to a nomadic approach to this convention. It is not a prospect we look forward to.

The charity auction will be a top priority this year.