The specific convention my wife and I were looking at is ConQuest NW in Bellevue, Washington. Unfortunately, there is no real information on the website as to the schedule of events. There is also GameStorm 10, although by the looks of some online galleries I found, that convention centers mostly around boardgames and role-playing, not my main interests. We've also got Enfilade!, which is all historical miniature gaming and still has the 2007 web page up.

All of these fit the approximate time period and location I'm looking for, but I have reservations about the whole thing. I think a large part of it is my own social anxieties. I am socially awkward, especially in new situations. If I attend a gaming convention I will probably sign up to participate in a few games, and the combination of new rules, new figures, new people, and the crush of people moving around will probably be enough to reduce me to a quivering mass of nerves. And I really don't want to be the guy who the other players go home and post about on their blogs as ruining the game. You could argue that I would go to a convention to gain access to the vendors and flea market area. I have a relatively set number of projects and interests, and I somewhat doubt that after driving several hundred miles, paying for a hotel, paying for registration, and whatever else that I'll have any money left over to make any substantial purchases at a convention. It's almost worth it to stay in my little cave and use all the con money on a new army. Of course, that is negated by the fact that the wife wants to go on a vacation anyway, so we will be going whether I like it or not.

We could go to the Emerald City Comic Con again, as we've been twice so far and had fun both times (aside from the cool guy we met in line for a sketch who suddenly turned into a creepy stalker and made things uncomfortable for me, my wife, and my brother-in-law, then sent me several e-mails wanting to hang out some time even though we live hundreds of miles away from each other). Unfortunately, now that I've dropped out of comic book reading altogether it seems a waste to go to a convention all about comics. It's a lot of fun to get sketches from the artists, but I've already got a couple hundred dollars tied up in sketches that have sat in our closet ever since we got home from the last convention.

All this adds up to me being unsure if it's worth it to me to go to a convention of any sort. I would like to, but I don't know if I'll be able to overcome my social hangups enough to have an enjoyable time. I would prefer not to meet any more creepy people.

But the real issue here is my new phone. I can't get the Media Player to work. At first the player wouldn't recognize the songs I had on the memory card. Every time I wanted to listen to music, it would tell me there were no songs in the Library, so I'd have to go to the memory card and queue up the music folders manually. Even if I paused the music for a few seconds, the player would stop recognizing the music. Or it would stop and say there were too many programs running, even though there was nothing running aside from the media player. So I hooked it up to my computer and moved the music folder around to different folders, trying to find the right spot. Nothing. So I deleted the music from the memory card and now I'm trying to resync my playlist onto the phone. It's not working. It'll get about 40% through the list of songs and then freeze up. I hate hate hate working with problems on my electronics. I have to leave the room periodically to keep from throwing the phone through my monitor. There is just no reason that the songs shouldn't work. I was playing them fine yesterday. They played this morning. I may have to take this phone back and get something less technologically advanced, because at least my free phone from the last contract worked all the time.