Notes written during a flight from Austin to Cleveland:

We resumed our pattern of heading to conventions for a Sunday-only trip. On the way to Austin, we were worried that there might not be enough happening to justify the trip, uncertainty that was increased because Ikkicon's organizers never posted an event schedule online in advance. When we got to the convention around 10 a.m. Sunday, things seemed quiet for a while, but the action started around 11 a.m. and kept going until events wound down around 4 p.m.

A good example of how Sunday went could be found in the attendance for director Chris Ayres' combat for cosplayers demonstration. At the announced 10 a.m. starting time, few people were on hand other than Ayres, actor Chris Patton and a couple of fans. Ayres said he might call things off if no one showed up, so we wandered off to find more costumers. When we returned at 11 a.m., the room was full of grappling costumers, which either showed that the word hadn't gotten around on the starting time, or that people just weren't ready for fun at 10 on a Sunday morning.

We saw much the same thing with the arrivals, around noon, of artist Steve Bennett and actor/artist Doug Smith, who were sharing an artists' alley table. As they settled in to draw, the line for the dealers' room was building, wrapping back on itself in the hallway. It looked like a solid crowd for a Sunday in February, and we heard that the Saturday crowd was so large that it all but wore out the dealers.

We were a little disappointed that there were no concerts on Sunday, but the largest room in the facility was reserved for the charity auction, and there wasn't enough space in the other rooms for musical groups. The Doubletree used by Ikkicon had a little more room than the 2007 hotel, but not much.

The Sunday-only trip was a blessing in disguise, because we had a chance to watch three of the most interesting and timely events of the weekend. The Greg Ayres panel on fansubs and torrents, the Matt Greenfield panel on how free downloads are hurting the Japanese industry and costing animators their jobs, and the gathering of the Pumpkin Scissors dub cast were worth the price of admission. Yes, most of the acting guests were from ADV Films, no surprise when you recall that the company once had a dub studio in Austin.

Also, thanks to Hightower for recognizing us and giving us a VIP badge that gave us the run of the place, in spite of our unannounced Sunday arrival.

We heard that the American anime importers' changes had gotten to New Generation Pictures, the California dub house that had been one of the busiest in the industry. The demise of Geneon as an importer and distributor took away one of New Generation's best customers, and we heard that they're handling mostly video game translations and nearly no anime projects.

Our only disappointment was not having the wireless broadband Internet access we like. After our Acer notebook PC finally stopped working, out of warranty, after months of trouble, we rushed out and got a Gateway machine that was being sold at a discount because it was a floor demo unit. It worked great. We used only a fraction of the computer's battery capacity in writing this item, and once we got past some slow deletions when we restored some files from the old machine and overstuffed a directory, the  sometimes-feared Windows Vista worked fairly well. However, the evolution of the PC industry led to one change we couldn't overcome. Our wireless broadband access comes from a Sprint EV-DO PCMCIA card, and we hoped to be able to use the card in the Gateway. Then we found that the Gateway, and every other notebook we could find, takes only the newer, smaller ExpressCards. The ExpressCard-to-PCMCIA adapter won't arrive until just before we take our three-day trip to Katsucon in one week, and the EV0DO card was out of service for the weekend.

So we had to use the Gateway's built-in WiFi, and we got only a few minutes' free service on the Doubletree's wireless system before we would have had to pay a highly inflated access price. There was no WiFi at the cheap Austin motel where we spent the night, so we had to detach the motel room's phone line, plug it into the Gateway and set up a NetZero account to be able to finish the Ikkicon uploads. It was the first time in more than a year that we'd been limited to dial-up speeds for Internet access, and it helped show that most of the web has evolved to the point that you need broadband speeds in order to be able to view the sites without falling asleep while waiting for them to load.

That slow access was offset by the Pappas' family's seafood restaurant across the street from the Doubletree. You know that old saying about how you should be careful about what you wish for because you might get it? That happened to us at the restaurant. At home, far from the ocean, shrimp are shrimpy and don't take up much space, on the plate or in your stomach. The seasoned shrimp served at the restaurant were the biggest we'd ever seen. Then came the main course of a grilled seafood sampler with two skewers of food. We got halfway through that big, plate-filling portion before our stomach told us there wasn't enough room. With one piece of fish land a pile of rice eft on the plate, we had to give up – something we never expected.