Robert Redford's 1992 classic, "Sneakers" was on on USA the other night, and I stayed up until 2:30 watching it. While certainly a stupid movie, it's been years since I first saw it and I just wanted to make sure that it was *still* stupid. I was hoping that maybe I had missed something important when I saw it in the theaters. Perhaps I got up to buy more Drops and another cherry slushy and missed a crucial plot twist that explained or excused all the ridiculous nonsense both before and after that little black hole of missing time. However, I watched as intently as I could that night, but to no avail. Sneakers was still a damn stupid movie. Something having to do with "universal decryption chips" and what not. James Earl Jones appeared at the very end, playing the friendliest NSA agent you could imagine. His appearance helped a bit I guess. After all, you really can't go wrong when James Earl Jones is in the scene, but I digress... Anyway, as if these things aren't already filled with enough meaningless tangents, I should probably identify this glob of words and punctuation before you as the third Rubi Con newsletter. For those of you who aren't writers, or for those of you who are like me and just like to pretend to be writers, you should know that when you want people to read something it's important not to do anything that will lose your entire audience before you have even begun. You shouldn't require your readers to wade through confusing prologues before arriving at the interesting parts, or in this case the explicit pornography down at the bottom of the newsletter, or for our purposes, the true function of what they might actually be reading. For instance, starting long pieces of prose off with uninteresting stories about what you have been watching on TV recently, rather than diving into the actual issue at hand, tends to confuse people, and confused people have a tendency to veer off. But those of you who actually read a lot of my writing probably already know that my motto, "if they can understand what you're saying, you're not trying hard enough," is strictly adhered to. Of course, that axiom is only observed after another, more important, precept has been satisfied, "if it's less than 2,000 words, it's not long enough." That said, let me remind everyone that, as has always been the case, if you want to be removed from this mailing list just send an email to me at tantalo@mail.id.net specifying your desire to be excused from my mad ranting. Likewise, if you wish to redirect anything to a different email address, add email addresses, or similar adjustments, the stated address also applies. For those of you who missed it, archives of past newsletters are available at our (transitory!) website, located at http://www.id.net/~tantalo/rubicon. Past scribblings have been preserved for all to laugh at. NOW, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO... CONTENT! 1. I'm not really the person who is in charge of this affair, but I felt I might bring people up to date on the hotel we will be using for Rubi Con, come May. We are renting over 6,000 square feet of floor space for three days in the respectably posh Holiday Inn. The sales reps have seemed fairly eager to cut a deal with us in terms of food, beverage, room rates, and otherwise seem highly receptive to hosting Rubi Con. We told them that it would be an event where a few hundred computer geeks would get together and talk to each other in acronyms, which to an extent is true, but I think we may have made the whole affair seem a little bit less destructive and subversive that it will probably be. They have hosted Mac Hack (don't laugh, I went last year and it was pretty cool) for two years in a row, and so I guess they must have a good idea of what to expect from a computer conference. All in all we're happy with our hotel choice, and will probably use them next year. We had looked at an area Hilton, a Marriott, and a Four Seasons, all of which either turned us away in the parking lot entrance, or laughed at our idea before pushing us back out the door. The sales rep at the Holiday Inn was probably one of the main reasons we decided to go with that hotel we did. She seemed unexpectedly receptive to what we were trying to do. Not only that, she was really interested in making a sale, throwing in various "free" services and whatnot. Plus she was a babe. Ron "The Machine" Ulko was quoted as saying, "I want to fuck her." However, for all that it's worth, our hotel situation is starting to suck a little bit. Not that we're not going to get the space or even that we're thinking about switching to a different one. It's just that the issue of money has suddenly entered the picture, and money, as I have always said, is the worst reason for doing anything. God damn I would have made a good hippy. I wonder what went wrong. Anyway, one of the things that sucks to an especially high degree is that the hotel has told us that they want all the money, all $7,000 of it, before the event actually occurs. As if that didn't suck enough, they want the additional $1,000 to $1,500 is food and pop (pardon me... "soda") that we plan on providing up front too. This wouldn't be all that bad if we hadn't been planing to use at least some of the money we would be getting from admission to pay for all or most of those things. Such as it is, our total expenses in the hotel alone are going to be over $8,000, and that's going to have to come out of the collectives asses of the organizers. At this point we are expecting more than three fourths of our attendees to pay at the door, which means that advanced registration will not be putting a tremendous dent in our expenses. The first down payment is due in January and totaling not less than $830.00. Best of all, since I'm the only organizer who has a job at this point I get to pay for it all myself. I have been known to use the word "hurrah" to describe my present situation. The balance of our expenses will be due in periodic installments of random amounts until the entire thing is paid for, and long before May is even close. It could just be that they just don't trust a bunch of underage dorks in black trench coats who say they want a large amount of space for several days. It could also be that the management types at the Holiday Inn are a bunch of ass hole capitalists who only want to gouge the convention-organizing population for every penny they have. Oh well, it's only several thousand dollars, right? And after all, who needs a car anyway? 2. This being first and foremost a *volunteer newsletter,* and only secondly a general purpose "information hose" for the unwashed masses calling themselves The Public, I feel I must pause for a moment and discuss some recent changes in our volunteer policy. We have been getting a lot of very positive responses from people all over the country who want to help us out with Rubi Con, and we still have over six months to go. The support we've already gotten has made us so optimistic about the future and so excited that people will really be interested in Rubi Con when it finally occurs. However, we have recently decided to tweak our volunteerism program, making it much more official and asking for much more information from those offering us their time and expertise . Because there were a number of drastic changes we are asking that those of you who have already offered to volunteer at Rubi Con 1999 go through our new process. I'm sorry if people didn't really expect to have to do this, but we needed some way to keep our volunteers in order. That is, we needed some official system that is more structured than just mailing me and saying that you are interested. We set up the form that we want people to use at http://www.id.net/~tantalo/rubicon/volunteer.html. There is also a bunch more information there about volunteers, our intentions for them and what they can expect from us. The form asks for names, email addresses, any areas of expertise that people might be willing to be put in charge of, and an assortment of other information. I apologize if this strikes people as being too bureaucratic, but it makes things so much easier on our end. 3. Just for an update, there have been some changes in our "RootFest Problem" since it was first discussed last November. RootFest is, for those of you who do not know, a computer conference just like any other computer conference, three days in length, with a $40.00 attendance fee. All in all dangerously similar to Rubi Con for my tastes. However, it does get worse. RootFest is scheduled to occur Friday through Sunday, May 21 through 23. Just a week before Rubi Con. As if that wasn't bad enough, RootFest is will occur in Minneapolis Minnesota, only a few hundred miles from the proud sprawl of our Detroit. Given all these conflicts I contacted their directors asking if they might be willing to alter the dates of their event, perhaps pushing it back by several weeks. My reasoning was that having our two conferences so close together was mutually destructive, and that there would probably be people who could potentiality attend both, but with the events so close together we might actually be lowering our own and each others attendance. I wasn't trying to force them into doing anything, and I don't think that my suggestions were unreasonable. After some correspondence and an attempt on their part to change some of their dates it was found that, because the speakers they had at the time were unable to move their commitment dates, RootFest would not be able to push their event back or forward at all. As a consolation their organizers offered that even though the events were so close both in terms of time and space that there would not be a tremendous conflict in that there was a relative margin of one full week between the conferences, and that Detroit and Minneapolis were still several hundred miles apart. So that was pretty much the way we left it. Officially, RootFest is not considered a competitor and the only problem we really have with them at this point is that they emphatically refer to their event as "the first of it's kind in the whole Midwest." I could have sworn that Michigan was in the Midwest, but I guess I must be wrong. 5. In other news, we are still looking for anyone who can help us out with a DNS listing for our inevitable real domain name. We have gotten some possibilities as yet, but if anyone out there thinks they they might be able to help us out in the department *please* get in touch with us. If you know anyone, or if you yourself work at an ISP or something similar perhaps you could turn that to our advantage. Either way, the sooner we get listing on a DNS server the sooner we can get a real domain name and establish a more professional looking Internet presence. Alternatively, if anyone out there knows about setting up DNS servers on Redhat or NT that could also prove helpfull. If we can't get a listing on someone else's server, we can set up our own... WELL, THAT'LL DO IT FOR TODAY. THANKS FOR READING, AND HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR... Jim Tantalo Director of Operations, Rubi Con 1999. The only computer conference in the entire universe, and absolutely the only one in the Midwest region of the United States. Definitely.