Re: KFest 2010 Report

[Kirk Mitchell <kirkmitchell@gmail.com>]

This is written after an 11 hour drive home.  I'm still blurry and
bound to forget some point.  Wow, what a great time!

Morning started with boxes and boxes of Apple II stuff from Sean's
garage lovingly carried from James Littlejohn's Magic Bus to the lobby
of the dorm.  Soon, we were poking through the goodies and
accumulating small piles of treasure to lug back to our rooms grinning
from ear to ear.  My Kensington System Saver died during a recent
move, but what did I find?  Its replacement!  I have an Apple II+ with
one Disk II.  It has a second drive now.  Good times!

Afterwards, Ken Gagne (golly, that boy is active!) reported on the
state of the union of "Juiced.GS".  Apparently, he has more
subscribers than any year since he took over the publication!  It's
obvious why, Ken publishes a quality work.  He announced another year
of publication, plus something he called the "Juiced.GS Concentrate"
where past articles of similar nature will be concentrated into ...
Hmm...  I can't remember how he was going to do this.  I might have
rested my eyes about then...  Anyway, it's good news!

Ivan Drucker introduced some of his newer programming projects, one
Nuinput, a revised Input command for Applesoft Basic which bypasses
that "extra ignored" error that plagues us when folks add a comma or
colon to input data.  He also showed an ingenious method to include
machine language routines in Applesoft programs... and no, it wasn't a
bunch of pokes!  He calls it "Slammer". Great work!

My former loser roomy who couldn't make it to KFest for the first time
in 15 years, sent a movie file where he announced a send only email
NDA.  He's done several nifty projects like this, and I'm sure it adds
power to the GS.  Emily II should prove to be very handy!

Tony Diaz demonstrated the repair of a variety of disk drives.  I'll
admit I skipped this session as I've already seen it 4-5 times, and if
I can't remember after that many times, I never will...  Tony did a
good job then, and I'm sure he was entertaining at this session as
well!

At the New Product Demos session, we had a surprise visit via Skype by
Bill Gates, aka Dr. Steven Weyhrich who announced a revision to his
Apple II History website at http://apple2history.org  It looks really
nice!  Great source of information!  Unfortunately, any hardware
announcements were postponed until parts suppliers actually get their
wares to our developers.

The Hackfest projects were presented, and most were neat, amusing,
unfinished...  The winner was Martin Haye, who finally deprotected the
1981 classic "Wizardry"...  I know of Wildcard cracks of the game, but
I think this is the first time it's been totally deprotected by boot
tracing and patching and all that.  Whee!

The Swap/Vendor Fair wasn't as big as some in years past, but I found
stuff I hadn't purchased before, and only got home before I realized I
hadn't tackled Peter to get a copy of MacroSoft...  grrr..

We went to Jack Stack BBQ for dinner, and I'll say right now, I'll
never go there again.  Sure, Saturday nights are busy, but I'm not
going to stand around for 3 hours to get in.  We went two doors down
to a great Italian place and had a wonderful time!  The horde split
up, without about half going to the movies, while the rest of us went
back to the dorm to play "Apple Jeopardy".  No one won or lost because
we were hitting the wall about then, but it was fun, and I learned
that Woz's first wifes maiden name was Robinson...  Or maybe that was
a hallucination.

I actually went to bed before my new roomy...a first this KFest.  Got
up later than usual this morning, ate breakfast, drank vast quantities
of strong coffee, packed, said goodbye, and an 11 hour drive later, am
home and sorta sad, and sorta grateful that I can take a breather.

That's it for this year!  Hope you can make it next year!