VCF Midwest update?

Hi Julian and anyone else concerned. I'm sorry you didn't experience the full enjoyment that the VCF "experience" is supposed to be. It's not a professionally managed event in the sense that there is a staff of people handling every aspect of the event. In this case, there were two people, Pat and me, handling the coordination, scheduling, etc. In Pat's case, he had work and a lot of the inevtiable personal stress going on throughout the planning of the event. Me, I have 30,000 projects going on at any one time, so my attention is always divided. Between the two of us, I think we put on a great event that, from the many comments I have read, many people enjoyed. I'll attempt to address each of your issues. On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Julian Wolfe wrote: With an event of this kind, there are hard costs that need to be paid. There's the cost of the venue itself, there's the cost of advertising, the cost of the time of the people supporting the event, etc. The biggest cost by far is the venue. Exhibitors and vendors are charged a fee commensurate with the cost of supporting their presence. Since vendors will (theoretically) be making money at the event, it makes sense to charge them more. Exhibitors are charged the minimum cost of the time it takes to manage them as well as the defrayed cost of the venue (i.e. the space they will take). In exchange, we try to offer enticements beyond just the pleasure of exhibiting your prized computers and interacting with attendees. In this case, the event is new and this is the first time Pat organized it. The awards aspect was not planned or executed in an ideal manner, and for this *I* will take responsibility for not properly instructing Pat. The award ribbons were not available at the event but I will send out the ribbons to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place exhibitors as promised. In all fairness, the bit about the t-shirt was missed by both Patrick and myself. It was default text that gets automatically inserted when a new VCF event website is created. Since we did not have the budget to offer t-shirts for this event, it should have been edited out but was not. Since it was there it is only fair that those who were expecting a t-shirt should get one. I have a reasonable stock of VCF t-shirts from prior events as well as the popular "Geek" and "Nerd" VCF shirts. If any VCF Midwest exhibitors who were expecting a t-shirt still want one then please e-mail me your address and a preferred size and style and I will send you a t-shirt. It's only fair. This is another aspect that got over-looked. In reality, the exhibit category should not have been a factor in this exhibition at all. It only works when there are 20+ exhibits as then there is a good distribution of exhibits per category. Again, that is an oversight on my part. The VCF website has certain default features and I have to go out of my way to customize it for each event. The other 30,000 projects vying for my time distracted me from editing out the part of the form that instructs the exhibitor to select a category for their exhibit. As was explained in the exhibitor rules, the exhibits were to be judged on a straight attendee vote, and the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place exhibitors are to receive much deserved award ribbons. We learn from every event and it always comes back better than before. I think anyone who has attended any two VCF events can attest to this. I'm glad to hear that overall you had a good time and I can give you my personal guarantee that the next event will be even more fun than this one. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]