Simon Callan

Thinking about the next con, and bringing Susan to the next con, there are a number of areas that I need to consider:
1) Do I volunteer? This is a thought that I had last time, but I did not follow it through. I definitely should try to do better next time.
2) Is she there all the time, or just some of the time, such as evenings. This will tie in with whether or not I volunteer to assist in the running of the event.
3) Dressing up snazzy in the evenings would be logical. What sort of snazzy do I go for? Just a straight round-world snazzyness or do I go for something Discworld specific? If so, what? I sort of feel proprietary about Mrs Palm, having won the masquerade with her, and with her being a lady of a certain age, we're probably of a similar age.
4) I don't think I'm going to bother with the Gala dinner, unless I can find a group of people to attend it with, and I don't really like sitting with people I don't know. However, if I do, I'd have to find something to top the Saturday costume in some way.
5) Masquerade, Do I try for this? If so, it will require a certain amount of preparation before hand. If nothing else, coming up with a suitable idea will be difficult.

Being the sort of person that I am, I have a habit of leaving things to almost, but not quite, the last minute. For example, take my trip to the Australian DWCon in about 2 weeks time. I've just booked my airplane flight! And what a palaver that was.

For the past month, I have been telling myself to do it, and I started on thursday, booking through expedia. I found a suitable flight, and stuck it away, reserving the flight without actually booking it, while I thought about it.
I then went back to book it, and the system said there was some sort of error, and I should contact Expedia staff.
When I phoned Expedia, their response was roughly "Yeah, there is an error".
Back on their web site, I starting getting a different error. I contacted their technical support, who said the problem is due to you not having booked the flight. Obviously complete and utter crap, but I tried booking it again, and still got an error.

I then gave up on that attempt, and started again. This worked perfectly (and save me £400 on the trip), until I tried to pay, and my credit card got bounced by my CC company for some reason. I tried again, and got the same error.
I started feeding in another card, and while doing this, my phone rang. "Hi, this is your credit card company fraud department. We've noticed some odd behavior, and stopped your card."
After the standard prove who you are bit, on both sides, the very nice gentleman took the hold off, and I was able to book my trip, but what a palaver!