Smofcon was in Portland this past December, offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to glimpse the inner workings of this rarely examined world. And I can report to you that the secret is: orbital mind-control rays. At least, that's the only way I can account for some of my behavior.
Item: I went to the L.A. Con IV information session, where it was made clear ahead of time that volunteers would be solicited, fully intending to observe, and fairly sure there wasn't anything I could be useful for anyway. Yet somehow, at the end of the session, I found myself going to the chairman and inexplicably offering to write a quick Disneyland guide for the Web site or some other con-related literature.
Item: I went to the show-and-tell of various con program scheduling software and left vowing that someday I will find the time to yank con program scheduling software out of the dBase era.
It's not natural, I tell you! It's obviously... er.. um... where was that PostgreSQL documentation, again...?