No replies to this topic

[KevinKorell]

First of all, I am sorry to have missed a few chat sessions in the past few weeks, but duty calls at work. This past weekend was an unexpected mainframe outage on Sunday that required my presence until midnight.

I will address the questions asked during the chat about the fest. This discussion is about a spreadsheet I e-mailed only to Fest participants, so those who are not going won't know what we're talking about here.

Was hoping Kevin was here, what does he write the fest list in?

It is in HTML, the same language as everything else on the internet. I very well could have done it in Excel, but I don't think the results would have been any different.

America Off Line

Nothing to do with AOL.

It's probably not formatted for a printer though, and if it is, then it is formatted for his printer. Which won't help unless by some miracle you've got the same printer.

It was not intentionally formatted for anything.

I can read it fine but to print it out I only get 1/2

There is a LOT of information there. It obviously is longer from side to side, so it should be printed in "Landscape" format.

Kevin must have a large engineering graphics printer I haven't tried to print it either.

No, just my trusty Lexmark Z600.

My preview mode suggests two pages.

Depends on size of font.

I wonder if it would work "landscape" and/or making the type smaller?

John figured it out! And actually I have the font reduced big time, like to 30% (70% smaller than the default), and while it is small, I have everything on one page.

And as was mentioned, thanks to the Union Pacific, I am deleting 4 participants from the fest who were going to be riding with us from Lincoln, NE to Glenwood Springs, CO, since the Denver-Glenwood Springs segment looks like it will be a bus ride for them if they had travelled on the same trip. The only good to come out of that is that the list becomes smaller and might fit better on one page with a slightly larger font.

Anyone figure out what the mysterious color coding is all about. It does have a correlation with hotel in San Fran

Yes Jishnu, it does.

it can't have anything to do with hotels, as Piotr is the same color as me and my mom, and he hasn't even picked a hotel

Except Piotr has a color without a hotel :?

OK let me explain. I am writing four different itineraries for the SF Bay Area, based on the areas where we have groups of people staying. I divided us into 4 teams, Team Green, Team Yellow, Team Red, and Team Blue. I figured on using colors rather than numbers or letters, so everyone feels as important as the next. The Yellow team is the contingent staying in Walnut Creek. The Green team, which so far comprises of only Skip, is staying in Oakland. The Red team is staying in downtown San Francisco. And the Blue team is staying in the SFO Airport area. The Blue and Yellow teams were so-named for the BART routes they will mostly be riding each day to and from their hotels.

To clarify further, everybody is following the main itinerary together, only we are coming from 4 different directions to get together, and are going 4 different ways when each day is completed. The color-coded itineraries will tailor the plans to each particular team.

Since the text of the spreadsheet was updated, Piotr has confirmed to me he is staying in a location that would put him on the Red team.

Now the reason for all of this is to figure out how much you will have to load on your stored-value BART farecard for the 4 days in the area. Each group will have to ride BART at a minimum as part of the official fest activities, but also to and from your respective hotels. Since the time you entered the system is also encoded on your card, the different teams will be spending varying amounts of time riding to and from the official fest activities, particularly on the day we actually ride the BART system. The Red and Green teams will spend less time in the system than the Yellow and Blue teams, since the Red and Green people will board and detrain in downtown San Francisco.

Also in the main itinerary, which I wrote some time ago, I used Embarcadero as the downtown start/end point. Now knowing where most of the group has chosen to stay in hotels, that station is de-emphasised since almost everyone (except the Green team) will be getting on or off BART elsewhere. So each color coded itinerary, once I make them public, will reflect where your particular team will be getting on and off BART from early morning until you return back to your hotels at night.

Does that clear everything up?

I think that Kevin was just experimenting with how to use colors in HTML. lol

Yeah right....

The teams have nothing to do with Muni fares, although everyone will need to ride BART to get to the start of Muni riding at Balboa Park. Note that the Blue team will not have to travel to downtown SF the day of Muni riding since we will be coming from the other direction and will meet the other 3 teams there at Balboa Park.

As for the people thinking of dropping out, we'll leave that for off the board.

Now to other itinerary changes...

In Sacramento I have turned the day of riding the light rail system upside down. I now have us doing the Blue Line first, and then the Gold Line. The resulting itinerary has us starting right after lunch (at the Downtown Plaza mall), and then taking a 2-hour dinner break while in Rancho Cordova, where there is a dining/shopping/entertainment complex called Nimbus Winery. In that complex there is an Old Spaghetti Factory and a Cattlemen's Steakhouse. Be thinking about which one you might prefer. The dinner break keeps us off the light rail at the heart of the rush hour.

I still haven't scheduled anything for that Friday morning, since we might wish to sleep late due to the late arrival the night before. If you want to arise early and visit the California State Railroad Museum or do something else in town, you can meet us at the mall at lunchtime as indicated in the revised itinerary. Those staying at the Embassy Suites can probably walk to that mall, as it appears to be roughly 6-7 blocks away. And it is closer to the Travelodge as well.

We don't have the color-coded teams for Sacramento because we will all just use DayPasses to ride the LRT to our heart's content.

More updates follow. I will let you know when the 4 separate itineraries are available for viewing. What is holding up its release is our coming to an understanding on how we are going to handle the car rental issue and where we will therefore be meeting.