Saturday of the second weekend of Academy, instead of spending the whole day in dread of the teacher calling on me in IP class, I got to spend a more pleasant morning cleaning out and doing repairs in some privies where the water had been turned off for several months and the odor of long-ago urinations and defecations greeted the nostrils upon entering. It was mid-afternoon until I was able to swab all the floors with some deodorizing soapy water.

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There was the usual "Mixer" potluck feast on the evening of the first Saturday in February (the 4th). The meal itself started at about 6;30, but I was told in a e-mail that there would be a dance rehearsal at 4, so I went the the Castle at that time. Between the end of the rehearsal and the dinner I was able to find both Karen and Donald in her office, and walk in and say I wanted to have a talk as soon as they were done with some other persons who were there. When they left, I went in and heard, "What's on your mind". Then I went on to say that I wanted my contract to say "Musician" and not "Street Performer", and that I would like to spend the 2nd and 3rd Academy weekends doing some work on the privies, and not doing all the IP stuff. Karen said "I don't see any problems with that", and Donald agreed. On Saturday morning, the first Academy day, Jeremy S. came up to me as we all were sitting waiting for the first class to start, and said, "I've got the word that you are now classified as a "lane act", and you will be under my direct tutelage." With a smile on my face I gave him a military salute, and he returned it. I would be reporting to him as attendance was being taken.

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I'm posting this to Live Journal so I can post it to Facebook, because Facebook doesn't let you post more than 500 characters.

Requests for the PDF version of the 2011 Rainbow Guide will not be filled any more. There have been people posting it on websites, in spite of our requests not to. But I have started an online Guide at www.bliss-fire.com/RainbowGuideOnLine.php. Only people who have specifically given permission will be included in it. All people in it will also be included the paper version that will be distributed at the next July 4 gathering.

Having e-mail addresses laying out in the open for any man or machine to pick-up en masse is not healthy for people's inboxes, and many people don't want their phone numbers known to just anybody either. The tacit understanding has been that the Rainbow Guide would go out mostly to family, and there wouldn't be that many copies floating around, and the newsprint wouldn't last very long. But it is different when personal information goes on the World Wide Web. So the consensus of the people who have been involved with producing the Guide (about a half dozen folks) has been not to put it online.

But this past year we agreed to have me send a PDF file (the selfsame file that the printing company's computer-controlled presses used to make the paper version) to people who have requested thru an email, and only to those who sent an e-mail. Last January someone posted on alt.gathering.rainbow a link to some blog site that had it on its homepage. I sent an indignant reply to that post on a.g.r., and in the thread that followed were reports of even more sightings on the web. At this point I came to realize that keeping it off the web would be like trying to keep one person out of 10,000 or so from signing a permit with the Forest Service. So the barn door is closed, even tho that cow is out, and we ain't gonna do it with the 2012 or any more thereafter.

There have been, since last July, 45 entries submitted thru our entry page that included e-mail addresses. I sent out a mass CC email to all of their authors on January 21, asking if they wanted to be in the online Guide. I said that I would not include them unless I received a reply specifically saying yes. Since then, 5 have bounced and 3 have replied yes. At face value, this means 37, or 82 percent, have told me by not replying that they don't want to be included. It could be that some of these just don't check their e-mail frequently, but I would say that it's not more than a few. (This I would present as an indication of the general attitude of Rainbow Guide submitters.)

But I have heard other people express interest in an online Guide, so here is the 1.0 edition. I would imagine that the people who would want to be in it would include regional focalizers, people with Lightlines, people with facilities for large get-togethers, intentional communitarians seeking new souls, people who want contact with a lot of people, and who are all prepared for any of the problems that can come with openness. The Guide entry page has been modified to include a question about inclusion online, and all new entries will be in the printed Guide next summer regardless of how this question is answered.

This Guide will be updated approximately as fast as new entries come in, and there will be an annual e-mail sendout and housecleaning, and all links will be checked periodically.

The page for making entries is www.bliss-fire.com/GuideEntry.php.

The information is loaded onto a text file, which will not respond to any JavaScript or any other mischief someone might try to upload. It will be transferred to the Guide's files by a human, with no automation involved, and any garbage will simply be deleted. The e-mail addresses reside on the server in a password enabled SQL database in a fragmented form, and are reassembled into HTML code only when they are sent to your browser. This won't stop something determined to access its contents, but it will slow it down, making it more likely to move on to easier pickings elsewhere.

On Tuesday of last week my computer started refusing to boot up, even in safe mode. I took it to the Office Depot and had the man put it on their diagnostic rack, and he said that the hard drive had totally died. So I got a new machine, this time a laptop with Windows 7. I also used the occasion to get off of my old dial–up ISP and get a wireless dongle from a local broadband company called Sprocket. I haven’t completed disassociating from the old one yet (I still have to look for some old e-mails I want to save), but my e-mail address will be changing soon.

Now I have been spending most of my free time loading up all the programs I use regularly and then changing all their default settings, and getting what stuff I had on backup disks back on. It’s as involved as moving into a new house.

Some of my old programs wouldn’t load onto this new thing with its 64 bit operating system, among them Adobe Illustrator and what was my favorite MIDI Sequencer, Voyetra. (That company was bought out by another who discontinued all their MIDI stuff – major :-( . But I’ve found what might be adequate replacements as programs, the kind where you can download a basic version for free, and pay extra if you want the bells and whistles. And all my old Microsoft Office things it ate, as well as Finale 2003.

I’ve still got lots of unpacking to do, so it may be a while until I get together a post about the last two weeks of OKRF, but I will do it eventually.

"CORUSCANT — Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock. ..."

I'm gonna be part of this going viral:

http://www.galacticempiretimes.com/2011/05/09/galaxy/outer-rim/obi-wan-kenobi-is-killed.html

I never thought I would be needing the cloak on the third weekend in May, but I did this last one. Fortunately an overcast sky broke up to reveal the sun at about 10 in the morning Saturday, and all day Sunday, which made up some for the temperatures which never got out of the 60s

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Once again I ask: is anyone here also on Facebook?

Does anybody ever read the things I post here?

After the dress rehearsal where we finally have all the participants present, on Saturday of the first weekend, and a Sunday where at about 3 in the afternoon I had to leave where I was performing with others and skedaddle to the castle because I was shivering uncontrollably, the second weekend I finally settled into what is going to be my routine for a day working at the Oklahoma Renaissance Festival.

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