Motor City Fur Con is one of the offspring of Furry Connection North, which surprised us all by ending its run last year; Great Lakes Fur Con was the other. Motor City has a pretty good claim to being a true successor convention: besides (I hear) a fair number of people on staff coming from FCN, the con started out in the same Novi-area hotel and aimed for a very similar atmosphere, which is to say alcohol provided for people on the sponsor level or higher. Despite the threads of continuity we didn't think to pre-register, probably out of uncertainty whether the first-year convention would be that well-organized, given our disappointment with Great Lakes.
So we expected to have to get up painfully early to get through the registration line and make opening ceremonies. A last-minute check of the schedule revealed we didn't have to get up painfully early, because opening ceremonies were set for 6 pm, even though the con had stuff running from about 1 pm. This was apparently because the hotel had another group (psychologists, which is the sort of thing to amuse furries) taking up the room that opening ceremonies would be in, but, I hope they keep opening ceremonies an early-evening event in the future. Whatever the logical flaws of having some panels and such before opening the timing worked great, and heck, they have Olympics events before the Opening Ceremonies, so, why not?
But the registration line was fearsomely long, winding around the largest meeting room the hotel had. Although they did have people going through the line with iPads taking registration information, this didn't seem to make the process any speedier. It's hard guessing just where the bottleneck was, but my suspicion is they didn't have enough credit card readers, and only the one con badge printer. The badges were handsome things, full-color plastic badges the width and heft of a credit card, instead of a sheet of paper in a fold of plastic, but it did make a choke point for getting people through the line. We'll be more careful about this in the future.
For the handsomeness of the badge, and the pretty sweet usefulness of the drinking glass with con logo (a tipsy jackalope) on it, the con information booklet was disappointing, since as far as we can tell there wasn't one. All there was were two-sided photocopies of the schedule, without explanation of what the panels were. Somewhere on the web site descriptions of the various panels were available, but 
bunny_hugger just knew this was going to kill attendance at her Letterboxing panel, since the title doesn't suggest much about what the panel's about, and yeah, her pessimism would be proved right. Maybe she needs to bill it as ``Hipster Geocaching'' in future.
Trivia: Within two years of Amerigo Vespucci's 1503 publication of Mundus Novus twelve different editions were printed in Germany alone. Christopher Columbus's 1493 letter announcing his discoveries had been printed once. Source: The Fourth Part Of The World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America Its Name, Toby Lester.
Currently Reading: The Concepts and Logic of Classical Thermodynamics as a Theory of Heat Engines, C Truesdell, S Bharatha.