Beer
The ale on offer this year will be Bass. We have 216 pints
of it and the con has to pay for all of it, whether it is
drunk or not. We're not asking you to drink to excess, just
suggesting you drink Bass in preference to any other beer the
hotel might offer.
Quiz confirmed
Good news. Dan Lester is definitely doing the quiz this
year which means you won't have to put up with one of
mine.
Con booklet
The 2009 booklet is now
available for download. It is in duplex PDF booklet format. This means you will need Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view it, then a duplex printer to print
it (or you could just print both sides manually). It now
incorporates the maps, though you might need a magnifying
glass.
The best reason for printing off the convention handbook is
so you can contribute updates to it. If you found a
particularly good restaurant or a free place to park or you
have a nugget of information that would be useful to other
attendees, please send details to
us.
Registrations are running at the highest level ever seen
under the benign auspices of Jeremy Tullett, which is great
news.
We still have room for about another 40 people should you
want to turn up on the day and just pay your convention fee at
the desk. If no one is at the desk, wander around the
convention rooms or (more likely) the bar looking for someone
who has a balloon attached to his chair - the universally
accepted symbol of a convention committee member.
While we have more room for day attendees, we do not have
any rooms available at the hotel. There may be some later
cancellations, so feel free to contact the hotel directly, but
I strongly suspect that if you were planning to spend the
week-end away in Birmingham you will be obliged to find
alternative accommodation. Some alternative options are listed
below.
Other places to stay in Brum
All information correct as at 2:00pm, Saturday, 7 November.
Arc
Apartments, The Arcadian Centre, Hurst St, Birmingham
B5 4TD. About 1.2 miles away from the hotel. £22 for two
nights (i.e. £11 a night per person), with car parking space.
Birmingham
Central Backpackers, 58 Milk Street
Digbeth B5 5NH. Mixed dorm. From £16 a night.
Hatters,
92-95 Livery Street, Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, West
Midlands, B3 1RJ. About half a mile away. Double bed, private,
en suite for £32.50 per night. Mixed dorm en suite £19.50 a
night (6 bed dorm) or £16.50 a night (12 bed dorm).
City
Quarters at Burne Jones House, 11 - 12 Bennetts Hill,
Birmingham, B2 5RS.
Campanile
Hotel, Chester Street,Aston , Birmingham, B6 4BE.
About 1.5 miles away. I am not going to quote a price because
they have a special 'book 5 days in advance' offer so it will
probably be gone by the time you read this.
Those are just some ideas. You will probably be better off
trawling the web yourself, in which case the following sites
may prove useful:
Laterooms.com
Bookings.com
Superbreak
Diplomacy tournament
There will be a Dip tournament this year, probably only one
board but maybe two if the press gang do their stuff.
David Norman is the tournament director so contact
him if you are interested in playing.
The tournament will run on the Saturday and Sunday from
10:00am. Rounds
will be short, probably to 1907, and will use the C-Diplo
scoring system.
Mystery virus problem solved
Many thanks to those of you who wrote to tell me that the
MidCon site had been hacked. The problem had me pulling
my hair out and running every scanning package I could lay my
hands on. Eventually a boot scanner from some outfit Dr. Web
located a nasty trojan buried deep on my local PC. I presume
it was this item that enabled the hack into the MidCon web
site hosted on the Fiendish Games web site.
I am 99.9% certain the problem has been resolved now, which
is to say that I know the files on the site are clean (at the
time of writing). I've changed passwords on the FTP site,
switched to using a Linux based computer and next week I am
going to install a new hard drive and install everything from
scratch, just to make sure I have no more wretched nasties on
my PC. Hopefully that will prevent the site from being
contaminated again.
Please accept my sincerest apologies for any frightening
moments caused. Fortunately, everyone seems to have virus
software on their PCs these days which prevented them from
accessing the site while it was contaminated, but if you do
not have a virus package then you are strongly advised to
get hold of one plus a bundle of spyware scanners and run
comprehensive scans on your system.
I have listed some software packages below, all of which
are free. Contact John if you want some advice on cleaning up
a virus - I've become bloody proficient at it over the last 10
days or so.
Free anti-virus packages
AVG free from Grisoft
Avast!
Avira
Drive
Sentry
In general, it is not a good idea to use more than one
resident anti-virus package, though I have had no problems
running AVG and Drive Sentry together.
You can also make use of online scanning services such as House
Call, Kaspersky
and BitDefender.
I am sure there are others.
Free anti-spyware packages
The free versions of these packages are all on-demand
jobbies, if memory serves, rather than memory resident, so you
can have as many of these installed as you like and run them
as needed.
Ad
Aware from Lavasoft
A-squared
from Emsi Soft
Cure
It from Dr. Web
Anti-Malware
from Malwarebytes
Spybot
Search & Destroy from Safer Networking
Spyware
Blaster from Javacool Software
SuperAntiSpyware
Windows
Defender from Microsoft
There is no reason not to have all of them.
Bring & Buy
We'll be doing the Bring & Buy again.
This year I am going to
(a) bring along a PC that does not freeze up every 5 minutes;
(b) get a committee member to help me with the admin. My
apologies to all who were kept waiting last year and thank you
all for your patience.
Convention handbook
The 2008 con booklet is still
available for download.
If you want to see what all the fuss was about it is
still available for download
in duplex PDF booklet format. This means you will need Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view it, then a duplex printer to print
it (or you could just print both sides manually).
You will need to print the map
off separately. The key to the locations on the map is
on the back page of the con handbook.
The best reason for printing off the convention handbook is
so you can contribute updates to it. If you found a
particularly good restaurant or a free place to park or you
have a nugget of information that would be useful to other
attendees, please send details to
us.
Peter Berlin, Richard Beattie
& John Harrington leave a French restaurant in Birmingham,
the name of which escapes me ...
Games that will be on offer
If you want to give punters advance notice of the games you
will be bringing along to sell, contact John via http://fbgames.co.uk
or, if you can't be bothered to visit that web site you can
probably work out his address by rearranging the following
elements into the right order:
- @
- john
- fbgames.co.uk
Clue: Put them in the following order: 213, with no spaces
in between!
Since the Diplomacy
tournament died, convention supremo Jeremy Tullett has had to
console himself with registration duties
If only you did T-shirts
Hard though it is to believe, we still have some MidCon T-shirts
so
they will be on sale again.
These are high quality jobbies, because we know you like to
make your clothes last for decades ... The cost will be £12
each. The shirts will be available in navy blue, cardinal red,
olive and charcoal in sizes ranging from Small to XL. 
|
I know I say this every year, but this year I promise
to be a bit more organised with the second hand game sale.
Firstly, I have a new laptop that does not randomly freeze up
(not yet anyway). Secondly, Pete Card has volunteered to
help on the stall which should make things run more smoothly,
and offer ample opportunity for punters to get a year's worth
of sarcasm in a single afternoon.