Follow-ups

Thanks, all, for the birthday wishes.

Ricky asked me, as he does every year, how it feels to be N. Instead of saying something like "Same as it felt to be N - 1" I said "I think it's gonna be a really good year." And I meant it!

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Ricky's birthday was a few days ago (he's 51 now) and mom got him mandolin lessons, which is a bang-on typical good-intention bad-execution mom-gift. He enjoys playing with his mandolin, though he doesn't actually play music on it, he just mechanically plucks doink-doink-doink through the notes on the page. It pleases him, and for some reason Shadow likes it too; she will often come watch.

Lessons will frustrate him, and I worry that he will confuse and disturb his teacher with bizarre talk borne of this frustration. I doubt he will get past lesson two. (If it were 10 years ago I would further suggest the alternate possibility that he might end up seducing the teacher, if she were female and silly, but he doesn't do that anymore.)

He's also going to fly to visit mom and dad for a bit in Florida and I worry about that, too, making a security risk out of himself by talking weird at people. I console myself to think that people like Ricky must fly around every day and it's not like you hear about flights getting grounded daily because of them. mumble

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I think the solution to the teleprompter thing involves using Final Cut to make a simple QuickTime movie of the text to read as upward-scrolling titles, just as if they were end credits, and then play that on the monitor behind the camera. No page controls needed. Really, I can't think of why that wouldn't work, with just a little practice to get the speed right.

NPL

cthulhia (half-)jokes about joining the NPL in order to gain insight on next year's hunt, but I think I'm actually gonna do it. Waddayathink?

Also the 2007 hunt officially ended for me last night with Immoral Illegal & Fattening's post-mortem and group-reminisce. This was just a great hunt. I look forward to 2008's, and I hope to participate in one or two mini-hunts before then!

I think I've been largely responsible for one new team member per year since IIF took up its current name. Cth joined us two years ago, Zarf last year, and I successfully hooked classicaljunkie this year. She came by to visit early Saturday evening, and ended up solving until OMG-the-T-is-shutting-down-o'clock. There was a rough start, after I chose to work together on what turned out to be one of the hunt's lamest puzzles (which was too bad because it looked really cool). But then we chewed through most of a more interesting one, and then mrmorse grabbed her to kick ass on a Sudoku-themed one and that's really all it took.