I attended my first MARCon (Multiple Alternative Realities Convention) in Columbus, OH on May 28, 2011. The theme for this year’s MARCon was “steampunk”, which happened to be the style and inspiration of my latest costume, called The Experiment. I think of it as Frankenstein’s monster with a steampunk twist. I entered the Masquerade contest and was awarded the “Truly F#%*ing Creepy Judges’ Choice Award”. I like that.

This is the first time I’ve revisited a past costume to make changes and improvements. When I made The Experiment back in October of 2009, I also turned my garage into a haunted house for Halloween. So when I got to the end of the design process on the costume, I had run out of time and energy, and the one piece blue jumpsuit was good enough to finish it off. Because I’ve never worn this costume to any of the Halloween conventions yet, I decided it would be a good one to focus my annual creative energies on, and try to bring it up to the same level of awesome as my other costumes. I think of this costume as a steampunk Frankenstein’s monster.

Starting with FileMaker 10, a new script step was added called “Install OnTimer Script” which allows you to trigger a script on a repeating interval of time. It can be used for things like performing database synchronization or other tasks on a regular schedule. While I’ve found this script step to be quite useful, I’ve also found it difficult to monitor its status or progress.

We use Entourage 2008 at work, and our desks are arranged in the typical cubicle environment, so I decided to customize my Entourage sounds to make it easier to know when it’s my email arriving and not one of the other Mac users sitting around me. From what I’ve read, the same sound set format works for Outlook 2011 for Mac.

There are plenty of thorough reviews out there by people who review video games for a living (Entertainment Buddha for example). I wanted to add my two-cents worth from the viewpoint of someone who isn’t an avid video game player.