Penguicon Prep

This is as much a checklist for me as it is a post for anyone else.

Ribbons are due to be delivered tomorrow (er, later today, since it's after midnight). The labels for the ribbons are printed already, waiting for the ribbons to arrive.

Specialty badges are designed, tweaked, and saved as a PDF ready to be taken to a printer.

Reminder emails have been sent to those who wanted one.

The code to generate badges has been written and tested. For reasons I cannot fathom, the first forced page break works and the rest don't. After fucking around with it for an hour, I've opted to just print badges two pages at a time. It sucks, but at this point it would take less time than finding what's causing the page-break bug.

Envelopes for badges are already labeled (thanks, AJ and Alex!). There's about 15 more labels for last-minute changes and additions, which are printed but not yet stuck on an envelope.

The scavenger hunt bingo card has been tweaked, and is ready to be taken to the printer.

Prizes for the scavenger hunt have been set with the badge holders and lanyards in an effort to collect all the bits that need to go with me next week.

Still to go:
* Find last year's "how to sell badges" documents, or re-write them. (Probably re-write, since I can't find last year's)

* Actually generate the badges (two f'ing pages at a time)

* Take the entire stack of "things that need to be printed" to the printer

* Put badges in envelopes

* Put labels on ribbon packages

* Generate a list of badges with non-zero balances (partially done; there's a report but it has issues with manually-entered badges, meaning it thinks I owe about $3000 because I put the staff-badge orders in under my own name)

* Put "needs payment" labels on envelopes containing badges with non-zero balances

* Print a full list of all badges, for cross-referencing if it all goes to shit

* Print a full list of all ribbons, for cross-referencing if it all goes to shit

* Print a full list of refunds already given, to stave off people who think we still owe them something.

* In my dreams: Get OpenId logins working on version 2 of the registration site. More likely: make the email field mandatory and put a note that OpenId logins are an intended upgrade.

* Nag Nuri to approve the pricing for 2015 so that I can update the config file so that I can open 2015 registration next week.

* Actually update the config file.

Argle bargle

More backward than forward today. I was stuck at home until UPS showed up to drop off the ribbons, because UPS is full of fuckers and every single time I've assumed that they can handle leaving a package, they've screwed me. I can't afford the time delay if they left me a little "We tried!" note.

So, I sat at the computer and printed out badges. 90 minutes and a little more than halfway through the files (with a bug-fix in the code generation), and I thought to do a test print on my black and white printer. Sure enough, the two pages of badges that I can get to print at a time... they don't line up exactly. Which means I can't have them cut in the big machine. I'm certainly not going to cut them by hand-- it would take forever. So, now I get to scrap everything already printed and do it over again one page at a time instead. [insert swearing here]

The ribbons DID show up (at 4:45pm, just in case I wanted to get anything done outside of the house), whereupon I discovered that the second vendor doesn't package the ribbons by type-- they were packaged up 1000 ribbons to a bag. So John and I sat at the kitchen table and sorted all the ribbons out into individual sandwich bags. Whiiiich meant I didn't get back upstairs to work on printing badges. So for a day that had a primary goal of "Prepare all the badges for printing" I managed to prepare exactly none of the badges for printing. Go me!

Two ribbon orders are borked-- one my fault, one the vendor's fault. I've emailed the vendor about the one that's their fault, and hopefully there will be some sort of solution that isn't "suck it up, buttercup." I emailed the person who ordered the one that's my fault, and I don't have any solution there at all. (A third order is technically wrong, but not in an obvious way, and that one's my fault as well.)

However, I DID manage to get all the packages of ribbons labeled with who they belong to, so that they can be sorted for easier retrieval. So.. yay, I guess. I had hoped for more.