after you hit the upgrade button …

They did warn me though and I had numerous backups. I was able to restore the site in a few hours and as far as I can tell, except for a missed forum post all should be present and accounted for.

If you notice issues let me know…

I am still going to upgrade the site but am working it in a parallel branch. Overall more work but less distruption.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Aug 2008 issue of the Silver Bulletin, the USS Pioneers newsletter. Thanks to David R for putting it all together and dealing with some very late articles from me. Check it out here:

http://usspioneer.org/modules/smartsection/category.php?categoryid=6

Let us know what you think and hope to see your articles in our Sept issue.

At Worldcon we got the honor of meeting Kevin and Rebecca, very cool. During their signing they handed us a copy of the first book in their latest series Crystal Doors.

Apparently to promote the series they are giving away, free as in beer, a hard cover, not an eBook, a hard cover, version of it. Want to get your own? Well here you go:
http://www.wordfire.com/news/crystaldoorsoffer.html

I just got it but as soon as we can we will post a review. There is even a teacher’s guide. I really enjoyed the panels at Worldcon they were on and was amazed at the breadth of work they both had, especially when looking at the bookshelf trying to decide what to try to get signed.

Let me know when you get yours and what you think. Check out their blog and let them know thanks and what you think of it.

Thanks to everyone on the Crew of the USS Pioneer for stepping up and making this another great convention for the Pioneer. We had several big last minute changes that effected the Federation Ball, Poker and our panels. Plus the addition of the Starfleet Regional panel at 8am on Sun. We got quite a few awards that we will present at the next meeting. I didn’t make the regional panel, sicne well it was 8am on Sun after all
Poker on Fri night was a big success once again, thanks to the efforts and donations from many of you we were able to give out something to everyone and Arty, Debby, Audi, Bette and I donated shirts, matchbox type cars and much more. HOPS on 104th donated some glasses and HOPS Bucks for our winners and final table. Ultimate Poker of Champions gave us shirts to wear and entries for our winners to their quarterly tournament. We wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without the assistance of David R, Jennifer, Arty, Debby, Audi, David H, Bob S, Ed and Gary. Thanks everyone. Next year?

Our crafts panel on Sat morning was well attended even though it was earlier than usual. I didn’t make that one but heard it went well and the Paper Models/People were a big hit. Thanks to everyone who helped out there.

Federation Ball - This was the biggest change from last time as we had to move to the Atrium to make room for Gamefest. I didn’t make it into Gamefest but heard it was a big success. Anyone go/enter?  The last minute change to the Ball put extra work on everyone but we got quite a few compliments and our DJ’s were awesome as usual. At this time we have a few things we need to get worked out to make it a bigger success and are at this time planning to have it back in there. Give us some feedback on what went well and what needs improvement. We didn’t loose money but it was touch and go. We hope we can move the time back to 9-12 next years as I think this was the biggest impact.

Utopia Planitia - I actually attended this one and had a great time. We had a good turnout and everyone seemed to be having a good time. The paper models/people were a hit here as well. Thanks to everyone who helped out here as well and thanks to Gary for organizing it.

I was also able to make it to one SFA event on Sun morning. Starfleet Fashion or Faux Paus? It was well run and Bruce and Trish work so well together. Funny and informative.  They also helped me make it to the Utopia Planitia panel since it immediately followed and in the same room!

Overall I had a great time we all work really hard on planning and putting on all our events. I got to see some of the speakers and all were excellent. I did miss the Studio presentation so I want to hear all about that one from those that did.

Thanks again to everyone who made this another great Starfest you rock!

Hard to believe it, it was 2008! How did that happen? We all converged on Captain Hudson’s house with lots of food and drink. Pizza rolls, bagel bites and chicken, oh my. Add peanuts, popcorn, chips, veggies and dip, etc.

Who showed up? Gary, of course, and his brother Jim and his girlfriend came in around 2:00 am, Audi, Duane, Arty, Kathleen, Glen and Kathy, Joe, Scotty, Charlie, Ed, David R, Jennifer, Eric, David H, Joe Turtle, Riker Bear, Peaches, Max (the dog) and me. Hopefully I didn’t miss anyone, but I’m sure I can come up with an excuse if I did. LOL
the highlight for most people was the home made beer that Gary made. We tried to come up with a good brand for his new beer, and at first Garyweiser was the top choice. However, the later it got, and the more people drank, it became clear……. Spare Tire. The perfect name for this so interesting brew. Please note that I did not actually try the beer, since I’m not a beer girl, but I drank most of two bottles of champagne myself. The guys tell me it was great. Kinda sad seeing all those dead soldiers on the kitchen counter at the end of the night.
We brought out the wii, and started the games. Bowling was the hot ticket, and baseball was on deck (pun intended). Scotty took up golf, and then it was back to bowling. We had started off with Wrestling, but the game didn’t work. What a bummer. I was looking forward to taking some pictures of the guys slamming each other with wrestling moves.

When it got to be close to midnight, we handed out parchment paper. Each person was supposed to write down on the paper what their worries were for the coming year. The next step was for us to go out and burn the scrolls. This was based on a Peldar Fest tradition from Bajor. Anyway, it was SO cold that we looked for options to starting a fire outside. The fire place was an option, but we decided not to start a fire in the fireplace just for this, so we did the next best thing……. Gary drug out his paper shredder. It worked quite well. We loved that little ceremony. I thought of another paragraph after my first sheet went in, so scribbled another quick one to add to my troubles, and rushed it into the shredder. Then, we realized we only had like a minute until midnight, so everyone grabbed something to drink for the countdown. It was close, but we were up to the challenge.

As soon as the kissing and hugging stopped, we set off like 160 party poppers all over the living room. We kept laughing about the smoke alarms going off, but they never did. I was kinda bummed by that. I thought it would be funny to watch everyone taking dish towels and wave them at the smoke detector until it went off. Oh well, there’s always next year. Each of the party poppers had confetti in it, and there was confetti all over. I must confess, I found confetti in places I didn’t know it could get.
A bunch of nice people helped to clean up, and then it was back to baseball and eating/drinking. People started leaving a little after midnight, one or two at a time, and Kathleen took a little nap on the couch. It was all because of Gary-he served some Lemon shot thing that was almost 100% everclear, and it did horrible things to some of us. If only I could remember (just kidding).
Eventually, there was only a few of us left, and we helped to clean up and then headed out. I think we got home around 3:30 am or so. Thanks to Arty for driving us to the party!!!

Welcome 2008! It’s going to be a great year.

Twas the Day after Christmas and all through this blog it’s actually a post!

Hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forward to a great new year. As a group we had another great year with many trips and outings. Congrats once again to all our annual awards recipients and especially our Crew Member of the Year Ed Dougherty and Cadet of the Year Nikki Hudson. Thanks and keep up the great work.

There we many great moments this year and if I had to choose one I would say it was the Roswell 60th Anniversary. Debby and I coupled it with a tour around New Mexico and got to see some very cool places and things. We spent three days in Roswell and met up with Duane, Brian, Audi and Scott from the Pioneer and Deb and Dennis from the the Merlin. The only thing that would have made it better was more of the crew to join us there. Next time.

Looking forward to 2008 and setting some goals for this site the biggest thing I want to accomplish is getting even more content and having more of it added by our members. I’d like to see more discussion in the forums and I will post more in this blog.

I think the overall design is good but have some tweaks I want to try out as well. What would you like to see?

Wishing you all the best this holiday season and for the coming new year.

The website re-host is nearing completion and for most of you you may not have even noticed. This is a good thing. I did what I could to make it as transparent as possible. With the change I was able to get some things looking more the way I wanted originally and was able to upgrade the versions of some of the more popular components along the way.

The site overall feels faster and we still have options for caching and tuning it as well. Arty has figured out how, via his mac calendar, to send out reminders based on our calendar entry, good work Arty! I’d still like to get them directly sent from our calendar but it is fairly involved and I’d like to focus on adding more content and getting our members more involved in adding content as well before I delve into that.

In the forums we have started a Classifieds/Trading post forum to facilitate buying/selling/trading between members. Hope you like it and will participate in it often. How would you like to see it expanded?

One of the biggest things I want to see added is a Shopping Area/Catalog where would could sell Pioneer goods, offer renewals online and such. The biggest obstacle is the payment gateway and what it will cost us. We will most likely start with Paypal and evolve, if needed, from there.

The biggest thing we need is you. Yes, you. What do you use, where do you go on the site, what would you lie to see added/changed?

We can do all sorts of cool stuff but the primary goal of this site is to build and online community for our members and to promote your club out into the world.

There you have it! See you soon!

Back when Enterprise was still on the air and we used to do weekly viewings we used to listen to the weekly Sci Fi internet radio show I-Sci-FI (http://www.i-sci-fi.com) we really enjoyed it although not everyone was into it and I couldn’t always hear.  We used to all get involved in the trivia and even got on the air a few times. (Can you hear me now?)
I continued to listen after Enterprise failed to make a return for a fifth season still participated inthe chat and still got on the air once in a while as well. I really enjoyed the news, trivia and interviews especially the show done at the opening of the Borg Experience because I sooo wanted to be there!

Well as things go we didn’t listen as regularly and they had some issues where they weren’t on every week and well we found a new passion, free poker! We played several times a week and kinda went overboard as you do with any new interest that you want to learn more about and in this case get better at. can’t say I ever got good but I can hold my own.
In the last few weeks we have come full circle, somewhat at least, in that we have started listening again and wonder why we quit. Last week they had an interview with Ken Rand a Utah author and a guest at the upcoming Mountain Con in Sept (http://www.mountaincon.org). I tried to answer the chat room trivia but was always a second or two behind, if I knew it at all. So I would make up some off the wall answer in a vain attempt to be funny, although some of them really were, really!

This week they had the Utah Browncoats on and were promoting a showing for charity of Serenity later that night. The chat room and Call in trivia were based on Firefly and the Wheadon Universe. Man I was on fire in the chat room trivia, either I knew the answer outright or noone else did and I had time to look it up. (Google Rocks!)

The trivia after the break switched more to Buffy and Angel which I didn’t know very well I might have gotten one, maybe, However I also knew the call in trivia so I made Debby call in She was the first caller (operators standing by …) and got on the air, very cool, got in a plug for the Pioneer, the new website and our book media club! Way to go! For her efforts Riker Bear gets a new t-shirt! Thanks to my run at Firefly trivia I held on to take the top honors with 10 questions although with a few more Buffy/Angel questions that would not have been the case. So between Debby and I we made a clean sweep of the trivia for the night! Go Team Venture, uh make that Pioneer!
All in all we had another good time hanging out chatting, trying to answer trivia and listening to news and interviews. So here’s the shameless plug… Tune in Thu nights 7-9pm mountain time. All the info is on their website (http://www.i-sci-fi.com) and join the chat room with us.

Okay, the day started off bright and early. And warm. We all met at the zoo a little after 10:00 am…. Laura, Robert, Fabiana, Norman, Alan P, Audi, Kathryn, Brooks, Griffie, David, Riker Bear and me…. After a quick stop in the gift shop-Robert got a fan with a  water gun (so the water is blown out at the person the fan is facing) and he enjoyed spraying himself and some of us with it. I must admit that I got hot enough that I egged him on to spray me…. and I never regretted it!

We started off watching the elephant demonstration with Dolly (Mimi had the day off), and that was cool. Then we went to the Wildlife show, and that was fun, too. I think my favorite of all of them was the little porcipine. She was so cute, and smart…. she even backed down a little stump on an improvised ladder. So, then it was on to see monkey island and a little more. Then we ate (David and I tried an indian taco, I saw a lot of our gang with burgers, hotdogs and pizza) and then Audi, Laura, Robert, Riker Bear and I rode the (no joke here) Pioneer Train. It only took about 5 minutes to ride, but about 20 to stand in line. The rest of the gang hung out in the shade waiting for us.

After the train ride, we checked out the new exhibit, I can’t remember the name of the exhibit and the map telling about it is downstairs and I’m really tired and too lazy, frankly to go get it right now, so…… anyway, we visited this new exhibit that had a bunch of parakeets (the name of the exhibit is a play on the name, I believe) and we got to feed them nector and try to avoid them pottying on us at the same time. David got tons of pictures of this, and we all had a really fun time. If you go to the zoo, you need to check this one out. Pay the buck for the nector cup, but keep in mind that the dratted things try to take the little paper cup from you, and they can be insistent. Don’t stand directly underneath them, either, or you’ll see what I mean earlier in the paragraph.

Then we went through the primate village, told a lot of bad puns (one of them made me shoot water through my nose) and watched Robert and Riker Bear play the bongos. They were pretty good, although Riker Bear is more of a silent partner. We started back towards the gate, checking out this place or that on the way, including Predator Ridge. Then it was back to the giftshop. Somewhere along the line, Robert lost his little spray fan gun, and Laura was trying to replace it. I loved the idea myself, and got David a blue one (I didn’t consult him on this one) and me a pick one. I also got a black panther (he won’t eat much) and a Denver zoo hat for Riker Bear. (I didn’t want him complaining to the other bears that his mom never buys him anything.)

Then it was off to Dinner at Applebee’s. A quick dinner, right? Fabiana orders JUST dessert, some death by chocolate thing (it wouldn’t have killed her, perhaps, but she could have gotten killed by one of us just smelling all the sugar. Yum. She didn’t even let me lick the spoon…. I guess I’ll stick with my healthy salad….

So, three hours later, we left the restaurant after having shared lots of fun conversation about, oh everything….. and then Fabiana, Norman and Alan said they were going to Borders. Dang it…… A bookstore… at least I can’t increase my blood sugar in a book store, right? Anyway, “We’ll meet you there!” and we did. We got some really cool stuff, some of which we will talk about in our book/media discussion, I’m sure. Kari has been talking about this series by Eric Flint, that begins with ‘1632′ about a town that is ripped from present day and sent back to, you guessed it, the year 1632. There is a sequel, yep, 1633, and probably a few more. Between us, we got a couple of them, they were on sale for $3.99 as a special promotion.

So, then it looked liek we were heading home. I thought I would get this down before I slept and lost a lot of it in my dreams.

I’m heading to Orlando for 4 days, so I’ll be out of pocket. Yes, you should feel sorry for me, It’s for work, and not fun, but most of all, it’s June in Florida. Yeah….

We’re not going to the Ren Faire outing next weekend, so we’ll see everyone at the book/media discussion on the 27th, and then again for the movie day on the 1st, and BBQ on the 2nd.

I’m off to bed…. Goodnight, John-Boy.

Debby