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Game Night for "Week of the Family" a great success!
KublaCon was proud to support the "Week of the Family" for the City of San Carlos. For the past 6 years, The City of San Carlos has hosted a weeks worth of events for San Carlos families to enjoy together. KublaCon organizers joined the tradition by hosting a Family Boardgame Night on Friday, February 4th, 2005. KublaCon Staff members taught and helped run games for the participating families - nearly 75 people! All sorts of games were played - Settlers of Catan, Nobody But Us Chickens, Montgolfierre, Ticket to Ride, Guillotine - but the hit game was Blokus! If anyone knows of similar events happening in their cities or towns, please contact me to see if KublaCon can help make your event a success.
Kevin O'Hare
Events Coordinator
events@kublacon.com
Hyatt introduces PassKey™ online room reservations for KublaCon
Attendees can now book their rooms online using PassKey. This system is customized for KublaCon providing:
- KublaCon date availability
- Ability to list up to four names per room
- Get the special KublaCon discount rate online
If you prefer to book via telephone, a new toll free number now puts you directly in touch with PassKey reservationists - 1-888-421-1442. The old 800 number will still work, but the person who answers the phone will forward you to the PassKey specialist.
For ÜberGeeks only! KublaCon Server issues update.
First, a sincere apology to any of our GM's or attendees who've had problems with entering or viewing our event listings. We pride ourselves on having one of the best game convention websites, and strive to make it better all the time.
We've taken steps to make your experience a bit smoother from now through KublaCon... and much smoother in the long run. Here's a more detailed version of what's been going on:
History:
Last year we had disruptive server crashes... intensified just before the con.
In an effort to upgrade and avoid the same situation we:
Purchased a new/faster server machine (an Xserve) with OSX Server installed.
Purchased an upgrade to Filemaker 7 Server Advanced (This is their top of the line product for serving pages to the web.)
Purchased Lasso 8 for interacting with FM7 Server Advanced.
Unfortunately, the migration process is very complex. Just to get FMServer Advanced up and running with Lasso I spend 12 hours on the phone with various tech support people (I kid you not!) Many of these issues were software related... and fortunately not just because I'm an idiot.
And... this doesn't include any time actually migrating our old data and re-creating nearly 100 web pages that serve the data up in different ways.
Knowing that it would take time to migrate to the new system, and given that the XServe is a much faster machine than the old one, we moved our event databases onto the XServe and began serving them using the OLD version of FileMaker. Sadly, as I came to discover, old Filemaker on OSX is much less stable than running it in OS 9.
Subsequently, we've had more crashes in recent weeks than we had the week or two before KublaCon 2004. We realized that this was something we needed to address ASAP.
Solution:
Basically, I've re-launched the old server running on OS9.
This should be more stable for now... and allows me to keep the Xserve running. I can use the Xserve for development and testing of the FileMaker 7 solution, and when I'm ready to deploy, I can start to migrate 'sections' of our databases -- like the "FAQ's" section -- before "mission critical" databases, like our event listings.
Of course, I've also got a fairly steep learning curve to get up to speed on Lasso. So, if anyone out there has experience with Lasso, and you can help me with some development questions, please contact me right away!
Japji Khalsa
Executive Producer
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