Subject: sooo-o-o-eeee! Ahh, where to begin? With an executive summary, perhaps. I went to work a hacker con and saw hardly any of it, but spent it largely as a weekend-long intensive training on something I've wanted to wrap my brain around for a loooooong time now and fatten up my lighting experience, so to speak. Thus, this dwells heavily on things of interest to lighting enthusiasts. I was basically handed a WholeHog II console, a bunch of fancy wiggle-lights, and a directive to make it all pretty. The people behind H2K2, or Hackers on Planet Earth 2002, saw the music/dance room and the almost solid weekend of DJs scheduled to spin their stuff as an integral part of the con's attraction and culture. While this eventually proved to be a somewhat invalid assumption, it certainly kept a few of us busy, with one result being that I can now consider myself a qualified Hog programmer. It wasn't all play, either -- the weekend was actually a helluva lot of work all round, since not only did the music room itself need fairly substantial lighting and sound rigs built and run, all the other rooms holding the actual conference needed full sound and video support too. From Thursday morning truck rolls all the way into the following Monday afternoon, it was pretty full-bore the entire weekend. Discussion on all this actually began back in mid-March, when out of the blue arrived a message from Chris P, the guy who coordinated all the A/V stuff the last time, asking who was interested in helping again. A mailing list had apparently already been created, from whatever addresses Chris had collected back then. Recalling that I'd had fun with it last time, that they definitely seemed to need extra hands, and that the con tended to get fairly spiffy lighting for some areas it seemed worthwhile for me to pitch in and commit to it. Reading Chris's longish recounting of two years ago helped recall my own memories of the Hotel Pennsylvania space and what they'd done in it -- back then, it was all rather spur of the moment and a bit disorganized, due in part to the fact that they'd never been in that space before, whereas this time it was good that planning was beginning so early and that some people had already taken site visits and more or less had dimension prints. I recalled as much of my own sketchy thoughts about H2K as I could and sent them in with some bits on how I thought things could be improved, which were apparently received as useful ideas. As things progressed, it became clear that the subset "a-v" planning list was being more or less ignored and the bulk of discussion was really happening over on the "core" list, so rather than keep forwarding items from there, Chris just had me added to the core list and I got to see all the *other* discussion going on. It remained semi-quiet for a couple of months thereafter, which was good because I had several other gigs to deal with in the meantime. Then about a month out it started to ramp up, beginning with various angst about Verizon phone line installs, to reach a high-volume screaming pitch about *everything* right up until people headed to the con! But stuff got *done*, and people seemed to be fairly prepared in general. Nonetheless, I think I managed to inject a note of sanity early in the game, when it sounded as though initial plans included far more gear than was needed to support a few presenters. I tried to help whittle Chris's initial estimate down to basic voice-grade sound reinforcement and really minimal lighting for the conference areas, leaving only the music room to go a little crazy on. Really, one doesn't need an Expression 3 to bring six or eight lights up on a table so that someone speaking looks better on video! What we ultimately wound up with at the con was hilariously spartan -- some ancient dimmer packs that probably still use discrete SCRs, and a pair of really crufty analog two-scene consoles to drive them. Did the job just fine in that space, though. On the other side, we agreed that the music room wanted some moving lights and something that could handily drive them, for which we both knew that any of the Hog series control boards were eminently suited. Chris was going to settle for a Hog 500 or so, which fundamentally works the same way but has slightly fewer features, but since I had been studying the full-blown WholeHog simulator I pushed to rent one of those just so we would have fewer surprises and less need to dig into manuals. Chris managed to secure one, although it apparently took a bit of convincing the rental house. And I dug hard into my simulator and manuals again, to study up and think about how I would go about doing things, and tried to find out if anyone scheduled in the room had any particular lighting requirements. I threw together a largish checklist of things to set up or try to take care of, figuring I'd come up with even more stuff while traveling. For this trip I decided to splurge a little and try the Acela Express, as opposed to the Regional or other Amtrak offerings. Well, yawn, it's a train. The cars are a little more swoopy more sound-insulated and maybe the seats are cushier, and the fold-down worktables are generously sized. But that's about the only difference I could detect for the additional eighty bucks or whatever. Oh, and while it may or may not be a particular Express feature, some cars are designated "quiet" cars where passengers aren't supposed to yak on their cellphones so the whole rest of the car can hear. I was in one of these on the return trip and some pair of self-important idiots in ties with thick eastern-european accents were occasionally violating this, but otherwise it was a marked contrast to the normal car on the way down in which everyone but *everyone* was on their phones almost constantly. Except when their particular brand of coverage suddenly dropped to zero because the towers were desperately trying to track them at 120+ mph. I overheard many instances of "Hi, sorry, we went through a tunnel and I got cut off." And I *know* I heard a few confidential things go by even though I was trying to mostly ignore it all and work out something resembling a light plot. People are really bloody stupid sometimes. The best one was from the same guy who'd been yammering about his investing strategy with someone for about half an hour -- then he made another short call, which seemed to rapidly end with "... you just make it happen, or I'm not your friend anymore. Dismissed." Ah, the merciless world of big financials. Fortunately, I managed to push it all into the background and arrived at Penn Station with some useful scribbles to work from. The Hotel Penn bears a really striking resemblance to the Boston Park Plaza in layout, features, design, and general vintage/cruftiness level. The same architect may very well have been involved. It has the same sort of convoluted service-corridor and fire-exit passages on the first couple of floors above the lobby level that angle around oddly and then eventually sort themselves out as the fire stair columns going up into the guest floors. The layout has the same sort of parallel wings fed from a long common hallway, the elevator lobby is in roughly the same place, and all the rooms have those crazy old doors with the curved metal valet hatches that guests in some bygone golden age could hang laundry in and get it back clean later on. There are numerous cameras and bits of old alarm gear in the back corridors, but like the many doors with mangled holes where locks used to be, appear to be no longer security-relevant. And of course it has those annoying not-really-loading-docks where a freight elevator basically just opens out on street level, forcing delivery trucks to simply block a lane of traffic and shuffle everything across a crowded sidewalk into the 'vator. People have to stay down there and guard things until they're taken inside. The 'vator safety gates don't align quite right with the sense switches, requiring a bit of fiddling before the 'vator will move, and of course everything's filthy. Once upstairs, the paths to reach the various other spaces are also fairly non-obvious until explored, and likely pass through high-traffic employee areas. In the case of the Penn, there are two loading areas, on the north and south sides of the building, that can directly access *different* spaces in the place. The "Pavilion" area in the same building, which used to be a some uppity Sports Authority store, looks a bit more like trade-show space, and for H2K2 housed the main network area and the music room. The 18th floor, to whose ballrooms all the conference A/V gear had to go, seemed most easily reached from the north freight area on the 33rd St side of the building, where the music room stuff loaded in through the 32nd St south side and then was wheeled along a long narrow hallway toward the Pavilion area. The final step in that particular weirdness was a small hydraulic lift platform to raise things load by load [accompanied by horrendous squealing noises] up about 2 feet to the level of the actual Pavilion floor, which is built in a raised fashion with 2-foot-square tiles and the under-floor space mostly containing return-air plenum. A very odd sort of construction, but at least things didn't have to be hand-lifted up that final bit. Chris and I spent most of that Wednesday evening traveling back out to his place in Queens [with a minor, ah, detour due to subway scheduling weirdness and my native guide having a lot of other things on his mind] and bringing back a carload of his gear. Fortunately we had been provided with an extra night of hotel room, because we had to be up bright and early Thursday at 8am to meet the first delivery trucks, and for a while we weren't sure which side of the building they should head for or where they had been told to go, but Chris spent a good part of that morning on the phone sorting destinations for parts of orders. There were 3 or 4 trucks just for tech gear alone, and two from a party-rental place full of folding tables and chairs, and as attendees and other staff started arriving whole palletloads of computers started showing up too. Fortunately most of the essential infrastructure gear for the con had arrived before usage of the loading areas *really* ramped up. However, a couple of A/V loads got delivered to the wrong side of the building. All the truss pieces wound up sitting on the sidewalk near the elevator that couldn't conveniently reach the music room, with no truck there anymore that could have brought them around to the other side. We wound up simply hand-carrying them in pairs around the corner and into the front door of the Pavilion, and then riding them up the escalators [which were fortunately working right at that time] to the music space. But later on, the hotel people finally opened up the Magic Intervening Service Door, which connects the back corridors of Pavilion up with the back corridors of the main hotel service area and allows more or less full cross-passage between both loading docks, Pavilion, and the 'vators to the 18th floor. Having this done earlier would have made life much easier, even though it was sort of fun to scare pedestrians by coming at them with a pair of large metal objects. We didn't even realize that the connection existed or what it joined up, and I had even been right *past* it while exploring around the previous night and trying to get my bearings. The two areas, once probably a single facility, are nowadays separated by semi-permanent drywalled partitions with only a couple of doors through and some really convoluted routing around the fire stairs. This has had some interesting side-effects, such as a flight of two steps up into a wall, and other mysterious little architectural mistakes. Neither Chris or myself had a really clear notion of a layout or a light plot per se for the DJ space, except his very early sketch and my doodles from the train ride. All that was certain was that there would be a big structure built from truss sections with lights hung on it. I wasn't even quite sure of the final gear list. I didn't want to just walk in and take over, since it was still basically Chris's show, but he seemed to agree that I had put more thought in an actual plot and had things mostly in hand, and I should just go ahead and fill in the rest of the details and work from that. Everything else was sort of done on the fly, but at least I had enough time to document most of it and had sort of a magic sheet to work from. I also had several willing helpers at my disposal, and much as I hate doing the pointy-hair thing, I realized that I was now the Man with the Plan -- it was up to me to make this room happen, and I had to delegate an awful lot of stuff or it would never get done. Delegate I did, and found that some of the other people around were actually interested in this sort of thing, had done some of it before, and absolutely *rocked* at putting things together. One of the guys is a freelance stagehand who works around the city, and wound up hanging most of the instruments himself. Another went out and fetched my seat-of-the pants gel order. I set two more to sorting parcans and putting the c-clamps on them. The rest were generally clueful and fast learners, which is probably one reason they were at a hacker con in the first place. Even so, I taught an awful lot of people how to flip-coil cables that weekend... The first problem was of course the truss, which was nominally supposed to form a square 30 feet on a side and held 15 feet up in the air. We quickly figured out that 15 feet up would have it hitting the ductwork and big mercury lights hanging overhead, so we reduced the height to 10 feet and figured on using the extra four 5-foot sections as extenders for hanging a couple of things off the front and back. The room presented no pick points -- building steel was all hidden behind solid concrete ribs in the ceiling, and any hardware up there seemed adequate to hold up ductwork but certainly not a set of chain hoists and a loaded truss. So the truss would have to simply stand on legs made from more truss. How does one get a 30-foot square into the air to put legs on, though? Answer: build two whole sides lying on the ground, supports and all, and raise them up vertical before installing the two other sides of the square. As Chris predicted, as our sizeable crew lifted each assembled half of "trusshenge" and pushed it upright, it looked like a big ol' Amish barn- raising, except that barns are probably heavier. Then, partially due to a brainfart on my part and the idiotic fact that the connector-cubes don't have bolt-holes on ALL SIX SIDES, we had to wrestle both halves some more and swap them across the room so that there were holes to meet the crosspieces. We got pretty adept at team-hulking these things around, and I heard various references to Easter Island, pyramids, and Stonehenge while we were working. The legs also bolted into heavy 2-ft square baseplates, which helped stabilize the sides to free-stand in relative safety while a pair of rolling scaffolds were used to bring in the cross-sections. Once things were all snugged up, it was all *rock* solid and needed no safetying back to the walls. The result was something like ===[]============[]=== __ || || |s ||| || |t ||| || BOH, |a ||| || sorta --> |g ||| || |e ||| || |__||| || || || ===[]============[]=== occupying the full width and about half the length of the room, which was rather long and narrow itself. Each intersection point was a truss cube, connecting three horizontal pieces and a vertical leg. Once it was all up in its shiny aluminum glory it looked pretty impressive, in that sort of trade-show flashy/sleazy way. But it was *up*, and with a minimum of headscratching, and the larger crew temporarily needed for this could disperse off to other tasks. Along the way we were reminded of various truss subtleties, such as which pieces are clearly designed as uprights and have more cross-bracing and ladder rungs up the sides, and the proper way to orient horizontals so that the diagonal bracing is vertical and they don't sag. The power feed was fairly complex, since temporary feeders had to be run not only for lighting and audio but also the entire network area at the other end of the space. There were tie-in panels in a room across from the funny two-foot hydraulic lift, and somehow an authorized union electrician was conjured out of thin air [I'm still not clear on who did the work or what his credentials were, and probably shouldn't ask] and the hookups were done. One set of feeders was 4/0 and bloody heavy, that connected into a rather nice power-distro box to feed sound outlets, and then the lighting stuff came off the camlok feedthrough from that. Which probably seems like a bozo no-no that mixes up power for light and sound, but the panel was only 25 or so feet away and the 4/0 into a massive breaker probably ensured almost no voltage drop out at the distro -- so bringing sound off at that point was really no different than bringing them off a separate feed from the panel anyways. Delchi, who was pretty much running sound and coordinating all the DJs, seemed okay with all this, and in the absence of strange inputs the sound system was nice and quiet. Another feed from a different breaker fed looooong 150 ft or better jumpers down to another distro to feed Network, because they knew they were going to have a *lot* of machines powered on all weekend and didn't want to trust regular wall outlets [which were not particularly plentiful anyway]. Sometime after the power was all rolled out and tied in, the head engineering mucky-muck from the hotel wandered by and pointed out to whoever would listen that having the electrical room door open like it was wasn't acceptable because of safety issues and the fact that there were large disconnect switches in there for significant other parts of the hotel. Cyko from H2K2 security scared up a padlock and we managed to close the door against the feeders far enough to clip the lock through a somewhat beat-up hasp that was already on the door. [I managed to avert someone's cockamamie notion of unscrewing a vent panel and re-running all the wiring through that.] We figured that we wouldn't have to get into that room at all for the rest of the weekend, but that turned out to not be the case later... Next was to rig the lighting itself, which was just a fairly straightforward pile of 48 parcans and then the fun part: 6 Technobeams. I used eight of the pars for a generic set of warm and cool stage washes, six more for straight-on R/G/B punch-up, some for white or flesh side-stage fill, and the rest basically aimed down at the dance floor in the middle with fun saturate colors. I decided to basically originate a color per corner but all slightly shifted toward BOH, and spread out three channels' worth of each color across the other three corners of the floor. A row of brilliant pinks across the front brought the total saturate color options to five. I figured that in sequential chases, people on the floor would see each other lit from one side in one color, and then from another side in another color, and it would just all bounce around that way. I could also sort of isolate corners of the floor. There's just so much you can do with parcans, f'krissake. I tried to make sure all the beam ovals were aligned vertically and aim each twofered pair of them more or less next to each other to make a roundish spot of wash. All this neatly used all 48 pars. I took the inventory sheet and figured out most of the wiring lengths and determined that we'd need a few combinations of cables hooked together, and set some people to assembling those and white-gaff labeling both ends of the runs with channel numbers. This would make finding things along the truss much easier. Meanwhile I was frantically figuring out where to best use medium or wide flood instruments, and passing the appropriate ones up to the folks on the scaffolds and giving placement and twofering instructions. All the pars were top-hung, which with adding up the yoke height, the extra foot of vertical from the box truss, and the 10-foot uprights, had them all up over 12 feet in the air which was perfectly adequate. The lamp sockets on most of the parcans absolutely sucked and kept falling off, but such is the nature of old beat-up par-64s and I just kept cheating the lugs outward a little bit so they'd have a little more contact friction. All the pars were twofered into pairs, and homed back into a pair of these cute little 12 x 1.2k dimmer packs that would fit into 2u of rack space, which were simply lashed to the top of the truss near the USL corner. They had to be located right together, because their feeders were a short set of "minicam" twofers fed from regular size distro camloks. Channels got split 1-12, 13-24 in a fairly obvious way, with the longest wire from each pack run about halfway around the square. I placed four of the Technobeams around the rear corners, so they could also be used as spots onto the stage, and two on the extensions at the sides of the stage so they could provide some fun, moving side-light if needed. All the Technos could still hit everywhere on the dance floor, which was to be their main functionality. Even though I only had a quick sketch at the con, I have since made up a more official hang-chart just to permanently document the design. This is stored at techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/lighting/h2k2-plot.txt. Nothing really complex, although an added methodology is to use the "dimmer" field to indicate the starting DMX address of an intelligent instrument, and the "channel" field to indicate what unit number the board thinks it is. That same info is used during hookup and patching, which is mostly what those fields are for. Of course most intelligent lights need non-dimmed Edison power run to them, as well as a DMX loop. This made wiring somewhat more interesting, but Chris had accounted for them and the eight Dataflash strobes in the order by ordering two socapex multis with edison breakin/breakouts, and a weird little camlok-to-12- edison-circuits distro box. We put the fan-in on the ground and the two multis went up the truss and fanned out on each side, where ordinary Edison jumpers filled in the gaps and everything got power. Because the regular dimmers took 5-pin DMX and all the "intelligent" stuff took 3-pin, I had to split the line out from the Hog, for which we had one of those optoisolators from Doug Fleenor Design, and run two feeds up to the truss. I initially didn't hang any of the strobes, but while running the 3-pin XLR lines around, I hooked together a bunch of short jumpers to leave connectorized places to plug them in later. [Didn't quite see the value of strobes yet, especially since the Technos can "strobe" using their mechanical shutters.] Several more trips around the ring then occurred, which was made really easy by the fact that the scaffolds on wheels were just the right height for working on things. The first round was to gel all the parcans with the color that more volunteers had cut up and preloaded into frames for us, and get them mostly rough-aimed. Next was to bring up and re-address the Technobeams, and check all their lamp-life stats. [I observed anywhere between 100 and 950 hours.] Around this point I fired up the Hog and plugged up the DMX feeds, figured out that the dimmer packs wanted about 6% to just barely glow the parcans, and ran them all up to just visible to go around once again and find dead ones. Our boyz in the grid were good -- there weren't any miswires, and the parcans that didn't work were because of crappy sockets, and after fiddling with them and un-smashing a couple of twofer pins and more rough-aiming, they were all working. We aimed the stage washes a little more carefully, tweaked out some dark spots on the floor, and declared it Good Enough for the nonce. It was then time to go make the Pig fly. To have all this make a little more sense, the curious reader who has not yet done so should go snoop around www.flyingpig.com. Flying Pig, nee Jands [as mentioned in the rant from two years ago!], is now owned by High End Systems, who also market the Technobeams and numerous other industry-standard moving fixtures. At this point the Wholehog III, swoopy successor to the II, has just been released for general consumption. The Wholehog is one of those boards on which you spend almost as much time setting up the UI and handy presets as you do actually programming cues and things. It takes a while to set various options and defaults and to move and resize the display windows between the two touch-screens, and we also scared up an external VGA monitor that I could drop *more* windows onto. In the process of studying the Hog simulator I had come up with a layout that made sense to me -- the stage output and programmer on the right-hand touch-screen over the keypad and wheels, and the cue-lists and such on the left over the playback sliders. I also wanted wheel response speed at 200% of normal, a default fade time of zero, some basic "palettes" for quick access to various groups of lights, and some other non-factory settings that made sense. I had brought this and some other presets on a floppy, which loaded in nicely and advanced this bootstrapping process somewhat -- not that it would have been hard to do by hand, since I also had copious notes on how I wanted to design the environment. Now I could put the stage-output on the external monitor and then also have other screens like the position presets handy. Three or four window-layout setups can be saved for instant recall by some soft-buttons, and I wound up using almost all of them by the end. However, I had to jack the rear of the board up on a small road-case lid so I could actually *see* the LCD screens... One of the other early tasks was to format up more floppies on the *Hog's* drive, to minimize potential data errors. Floppies are always happiest read back on the same drive used to format and write them, since there's then no amplitude variation between the sectoring info and the actual blocks of data. But that's a different rant. Patching instruments was a quick and trivial task, but only because I knew how to do it from the simulator -- otherwise the methodology is a bit obscure, and of course the board defaults to a blank patch and does *nothing* until you tell it what kind of fixtures you have and assign them to channels. It was during this initial setup that I discovered that the touch-screens *suck*. Even careful presses often hit the wrong thing, even after several attempts to re-calibrate the dimensions, and at one point the right-hand screen stopped accepting any touches at all and I had to reboot and start over. I eventually discovered that poking the screen areas with the butt end of a plastic pen and cheating slightly up and left worked way better than trying to use a finger, so I just kept such a "stylus" handy for programming. Besides, many things are equally accessible through the physical keys -- instead of touching the "bouncy pars" cue-list button, I could just type "LIST 21" to access the same object. But some other things can only be gotten to via the touch-screen buttons, so they do have to work accurately. The Hog and other recent consoles in its class represent a fairly long leap beyond the traditional theatrical board, but by the same token loses some of the advantages that board ops may be used to. There are no channel sliders, and not even any submaster sliders -- just eight completely reassignable playback "master" control sets, and everything else is done through the keypad and parameter wheels. It is certainly possible to turn the eight playbacks into dimmer submasters, by adding the desired channels to each of eight single cues within eight cue lists, and then running those lists on the playbacks and sliding the intensities up and down. But eight subs usually aren't enough, so using this board requires thinking about the whole problem a bit differently. Nonetheless, one of the first things I banged in was to assign the channels for the standard warm/cool/cool/warm set of parcan stage washes, the RGB punch-ups, and a preheat, and attached these to some of the masters so their sliders would work like a traditional board. That took care of page # 1, where pages are simply definitions of what cue-list is currently assigned to which playback. An interesting quirk is that if the cue-lists in question are set to be HTP [highest takes precedence] instead of LTP [latest takes precedence], there is no need to "go" all the lists after changing pages -- all the HTP lists just activate their first [and in this case only] cue immediately, letting the simple action of typing "PAGE 1" instantly turn the playbacks into those stage-wash submasters. So this would be useful to avoid some of the related problems I observed at H2K and make reasonable defaults in case someone else had to use the board. I also turned that page 1 into a "template page" whose assignments become the default on ALL other pages if another assignment doesn't specifically override them. Thus, cue-list 1 would always be connected to master 1 for par preheat, regardless of which other page was switched to. All well and good, and enough to fake things up quickly if someone needed to be lit on the stage anytime soon. [There's also the more expensive brute-force approach for more subs -- an outboard "wing" with many more playback sliders is available.] But the really interesting stuff was yet to come. The lighting was primarily intended for the dance floor, really, and needed as much "bouncy club dance" treatment as I could throw at it. With something like 30 pars still left to deal with, I had a bit of work to do on making them look festive. Sort of like Arisia all over again, and not only that, this time I had wiggle lights!! -- which after a little testing all seemed to be working well and producing that characteristic very cool white HMI output. The Technos only have 250 W discharge lamps, but are fairly bright and produce very pretty saturate colors with their built-in gels. [They're a bit weak in the deeper reds, though, leading me to wonder if anyone makes a light that combines HMI and tungsten outputs for a fuller spectrum??] I inverted the pan channel on only one of them -- the one hung on the truss extension at stage right, so that "pan up" for both side-stage Technos meant upstage. The rest out over the floor remained at their defaults -- why make it any more complicated, I thought. These were a slightly later model that includes a controllable iris, but nonetheless the Hog's fixture library knew all about them. So I played with the Technos for a bit in a somewhat analytic way, starting with open white beams straight down on the floor and bringing in the other attributes to see how they'd look, and programmed up a couple of really basic motion routines just to get them all swinging around. It seemed a fairly obvious notion, as well as being mentioned in the Hog manual and supported by several articles I found around the net, that the right way to program stuff on these bad boys is to separate all the attributes into different cue-lists or sequences, and then play them all back together overlaid differently in time for maximum diversity of looks. So I split things up into motion, colors, and gobos/effects respectively since that is the natural grouping of such things in both the instruments and the way the Hog deals with them. The Hog records its cues in such a way as to only save any values that were actually *changed* during programming, i.e. if a cue only brings intensity to full and tilts the mirrors up a little, then it contains *no* information about gobos, color wheels, prisms, irises, or any of that. Those other attributes can be individually stored in *other* cue-lists, and then when they are played back together, all the motion and color changes and gobo-games happen at once, but likely time-shifted apart from each other depending on when they started. I believe that most moving-light controllers take a similar approach for the same reason. It is possible to split things up even more fine-grained than that, but once I got a few things going I saw no particular reason to do so, especially considering that two different gobo/effect lists can run at the same time in last-takes-precedence mode anyways, and the visible effect of the two lists duking it out for what happens to the instrument is rather entertaining. And with things like Technobeams and other modern ML instruments, the Hog doesn't even have to do all the work. Certain DMX values sent to the light allow it to control motion itself, such as gobo spin speed and direction, or cycling the colors in either a continuous "sliding" manner or snapping through the gels one by one around the wheel at settable rates. So some cues could let the lights do things by themselves, and others faded things around under control from the Hog, and the mix thereof lent some nice diversity to what hit the floor. Yes, it would be possible to run these from a traditional board given enough channels, but programming would be much more arduous and single-threaded. That's why modern boards have fixture libraries, and can abstract away a lot of the grubby numbers that can slow a designer down. So once I had some basics to throw at the Technos I turned my attention back to the parcans, figuring that they should try to play an almost equally complex part of the whole. The Hog doesn't really offer the usual sort of "effects-sub" or "chase" as a single entity -- one either has to write up a whole cue-list and then turn it into a chase, or use something called the "effects engine". The Hog has some basic waveform generators, sort of like a synthesizer, where one can select an attribute and make it vary over time as a sine/cosine wave, ramp, on/off, triangle wave, etc. This is usually used in motion cues, where adding a sinewave to X and a cosine to Y at the same speed yields the beam moving in a circle, but the effects can apply to other attributes such as intensity just as well. So bringing up a bunch of parcans and applying the "sawtooth" aka triangle effect makes them all go bright and dim together -- in a *single* cue within a cue-list. Then it gets even more interesting. The effects generator also has a concept of "offset", which really means phase, so if that same bunch of parcans have the triangle-wave applied to their brighness all at different phases, they all go bright and dim in a time sequence. Presto, instant fading ripple chase across a bunch of channels! But it looks a bit better and snappier using the "inverse ramp" where channels snap on and then fade out, or "mark off" which appears to be a narrow pulse generator that remains mostly off and just pops on for a short time at the beginning of the cycle. [Some of these effects-engine waveforms are *not* documented in the manual, and you just have to run them slowly and watch what they do.] If the phases are all spaced about equally through 360 degrees of a conceptual unit-circle, the end joins up to the next beginning and the effect is very much like the traditional sequential chases that other boards produce. By applying such effects in various ways to single cue-steps, one can produce a whole cue-list of chases and then let *that* run slowly as a random chase to output all kinds of different stuff. In the end I wound up with some lists like this, and other lists with manually-entered cue steps. Since I didn't want any single step to include information about channels in the previous step, I had to unset the default "keep state" flag on almost all of these cue-lists, or they'd behave like "build" chases and leave too many things lit. Realizing that people would often want to do evenly-distributed effects across various groups of lights, the fine folks at Flying Pig also added a way to "fan" attribute and effects values across a given "selection" of fixtures. Normally a wheel will move a particular attribute's value up and down equally in all relevant fixtures, but in "fan" mode, moving the wheel causes the deltas to be spread proportionally across them from a conceptual center point -- values for lower parts of the selected group go down, while higher parts go up, and the middle entities remain almost unchanged. This does the obvious thing when applied to position in a bunch of parallel ML instruments -- all beams either spread apart evenly or converge to one point, which is why it's called "fan". And it all gets divided up depending on how many instruments are currently selected. The caveat with that is that the correct fixtures have to be selected in the correct order if they're not numerically and physically sequential, or fanning goes all visually weird. Applying this to offset and speed allows very interesting time-domain things to be programmed quickly. However, it gets a little dicey when trying to fan timing and offsets in the effects-engine screen -- here's where I noticed some significant UI confusion that didn't really seem to match what I was trying to do. The screen layout doesn't really allow for showing *everything* that's about to change in some cases, and fanning values seems to very easily go astray sometimes. There's also no indication at that point what the current selection really is, so one has to remember what fixtures are being affected. This arguably buggy behavior could sometimes be worked around with careful selection and fanning and then going back and fixing up offsets by hand. But later I stumbled into what I'd consider a genuine board bug: changing the chase rate of a cue-list with effects in the cues also changes the running speeds of the *effects* themselves! They really should be completely separate things, and I do intend to poke Flying Pig pretty hard about this. The nomenclature for rates is also rather inconsistent -- given as "beats per minute" in one place, and something arbitrary from 0 to 100 and beyond elsewhere -- and I'll be damned if I could figure out what any of it really meant in plain ole *seconds*. So I had to compromise here and there by giving up on some of the chase-style cue lists if they also included effects, and go back to just giving the steps therein a fixed follow time so they'd still run by themselves -- which is at least easy to do in "bulk" across the whole cue-list when needed. 'Sokay, things were looking pretty flashy and bouncy at this point. The next question was how to get *all* of this -- the combined parcan chases, wiggle-light motion and colors and beam-effects -- all running together but all changing by itself such that I could just walk away from the board and let it run through all the possibilities without someone having to stand there and push buttons all night. Well, yet more Hog features to the rescue. There's a feature called "comment macros" that can be typed into the comment field of a cue [yes, a place to enter arbitrary text], that in all seriousness are about as intuitive as Sendmail rules. An otherwise blank cue with the string >J21>25:L23 in the comment field really does cause any of cue-lists 21 through 25 to stop running if they are, and then starts up cue-list 23. As gnarly as this seems, it was the solution to self-running. For example, all the parcan chase cue-lists were numbered 21 thru 25, and yet another interesting Hog feature is that it can run a cue-list even if it's not assigned to a playback master in the current page. One simply has to punch the list's little box on the touch- screen, or type LIST nn , or call it via these wacky magic-cookie comment macros, and it runs in the background and does stuff. So I could have meta-cue-lists full of macros to alternately drop any running lists in the relevant group and then start a particular one therefrom, and then chase through this "outer" list in random order with a step time of anywhere from 15 seconds to a minute. Thus, I had a couple of meta-lists for pars, a meta-list for Techno motion, a meta-list for Techno colors, one for gobos ... you get the idea. Then, a particular page bound only the meta-lists to the playbacks, whereupon the "go" buttons for those respective playbacks would start things off. I labeled the final set of these go-buttons "shit happens", because I couldn't describe the final results any better than that. Punch all four or five of them, and suddenly the room would come alive with blinking, swinging, flickering, fading, spinning, bopping, color-changing lights, and kept doing lots of different stuff -- some nicely symmetrical and some completely random. I set up four small cue-list windows to watch the main meta-cues run so I could tell how long until the next switch or when they were in their "null" spots if I wanted to halt them, and saved that as a "show run" layout view. In watching it all run out on the floor, even with only four or so cue-lists per meta-list, I saw very few repeats of any particular combined effect. Happy lights! Next problem was to douse the regular house lights in the room, consisting of a bunch of huge mercury lights hung from the ceiling and long rows of fluorescent sconces around the periphery. It was entirely too bright in there, which had been great for setup work-light but now it was time to make it go away. We had no clue how to go about this, there being no obvious switches, and neither did the hotel. There are a couple of key-switches downstairs near the door that apparently turn the entire *floor's* worth of lights on or off -- this was entirely unsuitable, since the whole network and hang-out area would have also been plunged into darkness. The best answer I heard seemed to go randomly flip breakers until we found the right ones, which I *really* didn't want to do since it very well might donk some things over in Network still running off wall power, and would take a long time to actually find the right ones. I went to find whoever in security had the key to the electrical-room padlock, just to keep things on the up-and-up, and they were nice enough to just entrust an extra copy to me for the weekend. Since our supposed Union Electrician had long since left the premises, I went in and started scanning panel labels for any hints, but then Brunie, our tireless and unflappable coordinator for the space, remembered how the Sports Authority had been laid out and recalled that the area in question used to be "apparel". And lo and behold, several breakers were prominently labeled "apparel" and even had some extra white gaff tape next to them with arrows, so someone else had clearly run into the same problem before and was kind enough to document his findings. I flipped off the six labeled "halides" and heard "that's it!" from the doorway -- so far so good, and more breakers with various "apparel perimeter" labels [which even indicated compass directions!] took care of the rest of it. Network and the rest of the floor could stay lit, because there was a line of black drape between us and them. So I was more or less all set to control house-lighting, even though the procedure was a bit klunky. None of the lighting or sound boards had really come with work-lights, but one random clip-on light had shown up in the room at load-in and never been claimed, so I gelled it and hung it on the truss over the sound and light control tables. So now the DJ room was nice and dark and had music and basic funky lights, and I was starting to seriously wonder where all the *people* were because the floor, and in fact the whole room, remained almost completely empty despite the best efforts of that evening's DJs to spin up some good stuff. A few obviously impaired kids showed up at some point and started rolling around on the floor, but left shortly after we chastised them for slamming into the road-cases we had gear up on. Duh. Later on some people showed up with a weird Japanese video game that seemed like a cross between Simon and Twister, with little floor mats to drive input to events on a cartoon projected from a computer and there was a bunch of fairly frantic techno music that somehow went along with this. But in general we were all playing to a mostly empty house -- not that I really cared one way or the other yet, because I was still sitting there striving for technical excellence for its own sake. By keeping most of the programming close to that half-second beat interval that seems to go well with most dance music, the lighting kept mostly in time with whatever was playing. It's really amazing how often transitions in the lighting would match up with transitions in the music, with no intervention by a board op. Of course one could force it by hitting one of the "shit happens" buttons again to advance the meta-cues, which I did some of, but for the most part it just took care of itself. There is also what they call a "rate thruster" mechanism to slide the effective timing speed of the entire board up and down, from a slow crawl up to a switching pace so frenetic that all the changes can just flatten out to a half-on state with a barely visible flicker. Small variations from the "100%" rate actually allowed me to beat-match with the current music, or make everything go half speed for slower stuff, etc. After that all I needed to do was add a few more sequences to the inner lists as I thought of how to design them. The Technos have internal capability to run in a semi-random "demo mode" by themselves, and lot of users at clubs and such probably just set them to do that and don't worry about it, but it's a lot nicer when they *all* do the same thing at once and things look more obviously coordinated. For example, some of my gobo/effects lists threw different things up in each Techno, making what was on the floor look more random, and some lists pulled up all the *same* gobo so a little army of the same shape would march across the floor, snap change, march back, scatter and swirl around, change again, all come to floor center and then when the gobo cuelist indexed, fly off all doing their own thing. Same deal with colors. Similarly, some motions were effects-driven and some others rigidly ordered through hand- selection of the next positions and a speed to get there. In the middle of all this, a guy named Ben from NYC who *owns* a couple of Technobeams and runs them with an Avolites board wandered by and we got to chatting and playing some more, and he pointed out some entertaining games to play with focus and noodled up a couple more interesting overlays that looked really pretty, so I saved those into cues too. He does the "trance party" circuit, which he says is lower-key and cooler than raves, and mostly tries for slower but visually more interesting effects from his units. He mentioned fog, which reminded me that we *did* have a hazer too, so we fished that out and got it going, but it seemed to want to put *way* too much fog in the air as opposed to the light haze it's supposed to, and I was vaguely concerned about plenum-return smoke detectors and didn't use it that much. A short burst here and there did make everything look *very* cool, nonetheless. Later on I addressed and hung a couple of the Dataflash strobes and confirmed Chris's assertion that they could indeed go *bloody* bright for a short time until their overload protections kicked in and kept them down for a while. This is an intentional feature, and many users thereof use this in the big end-of-show blast after which it doesn't matter if the strobes refuse to work for a while. The flash duration can be set fairly long, as opposed to the normal very short motion-freezing flashes most strobes deliver, but cranking that much energy through the discharge tube tends to leave the ends of the glass envelope visibly orange-hot. In theory they take this into account. But I started having other trouble with the things being flakey and unreliable, where they'd just go deaf to the DMX line or slowly blink their "status" lights and not recover, so I mostly gave up. One mostly stayed working so I just used it occasionally during some musical interludes, but didn't count on adding them to anything important. For it, the intensity bump button on one of the running playbacks was useful as a "groove-along-with" button, or I could try to beat-match the strobe's own rate value to whatever was playing. The other six strobes just remained un-hung the rest of the time. I probably could have gotten a lot more nuts about it all, but I had some other things to deal with. Given that I had sat there almost unmoving for *hours* in a chilly room, one of those other things was an attempt at a night's sleep, so I saved the evening's final work on to a floppy and headed up to the room. The next morning I helped with a couple of other minor things but then soon returned to hogging the Hog. Fortunately, everyone else on the A/V staff was either too busy or uninterested, so it remained pretty much my toy for the entire weekend. Some more tweaks happened on the clubby stuff and I worked past some of the timing quirks I was running into, but then I started thinking about other functions we would need to fill. What about the cDc presentation, which would be the one real show-like event of the weekend in this space? They hadn't really given any lighting requirements other than "whatever nifty stuff your artistic side comes up with". Fortunately, Swamp Ratte came by and gave us a small preview of the movie skit they were going to run, and a better idea of what they'd do on stage, so I could start from the basic washes and go from there. Their stuff would be in yet another set of cue-lists. I wanted to use the rear Technos as follow spots, except that manually grabbing one or more wiggle lights and trying to follow someone around on stage with a pair of separate X/Y controls is *damned* difficult. But it was easy enough to set a couple of fixed positions on the stage such as where a pair of musicians would set up some drums and keyboards, fugly purple and green lighting on whoever was standing at the DJ turntables, and a slow two-spot ballyhoo simply waving back and forth [at slightly different rates, to give it that "human-powered" look] across the stage. Other relatively simple stuff followed -- a couple of tight spots on the cDc banners hung from the truss [yay programmable irises!], then some strobing thereof, a slow wandering spray of small dots over the whole stage done with 3d-blocks + prism + the right speeds of counter-rotation, etc. The Technos were marvelously stable and repeatable even on long shots and 16-bit fine positioning, and I could jump to these cues in any order and not worry about hysteresis effects. There was no given overall sequence to any of it, so I simply labeled the cue comment fields in a couple of lists as to what they were and could just do GOTO to bring in the looks. This would either crossfade at the cuelist-default speed, or I could grab it manually, or I could start with the slider down and then bring it up as slow or fast as I needed. Or whatever. I was really starting to appreciate the Hog's versatility in this regard. A little more thought could likely produce a simple setup geared for more traditional events like masquerades and other contestant shows, wherein the show caller asks for a look on the fly and the board-op can grab a quick preset to produce that and be ready with a few specials if needed, but still make everything be smooth. It was in the middle of updating a cue-list and fiddling its timing in a relatively non-complex way, that the board completely *crashed*. The room suddenly went all dark and I found myself staring at Fault at 500DDF64, Opcode 86046000, Type 0 D86188FC 1104 20002 Trace 0 500DDF68 500CF0E8 500B3ED8 500A70FC 50000C4C 50140E78 50000070 splashed across all three screens. After the initial amazement and then being thankful I had saved to the floppy again relatively recently, I decided it was time for a break and went to find someone with a digital camera. Geoff Flash came to the rescue, and the relevant bits can be found at techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/pix/dead-hog-1.jpg. An overall view of the board [still in this state] is in dead-hog-3.jpg, in which my labeling is just barely *not* readable, argh. I don't have any idea what might have caused the crash, between trying to deal with fanning, messing with macros, or recently editing a cue-list called "cDc!!@$". [Wouldn't *that* be ironic..] Anyway, hitting the magic blue reset button [which is located fairly prominently on the rear of the console under a flip-up cover, evidencing that it is likely often used] and reloading my last state and re-fixing up what I had changed since then didn't take very long and managed to avoid crashing the board again. The new updated state got saved off, and I finished working on the cDc stuff without further incident. The problems with the board itself were relatively minor, but not the only symptoms of breakage. At one point we started to smell something fairly bad in the room, and I finally tracked it down to one of the Technobeams -- the smell was definitely coming out of the rear air vent where the fan exhausts, and something inside had clearly released its magic smoke. The smell dissipated soon after, since whatever burnt had probably finished burning. The electronics were apparently still alive -- I could move the mirror, but the lamp was irretrievably off and wouldn't restrike. I figured it was something in the lamp power supply. But the next day the entire unit had evidently gone completely Tango Uniform and wouldn't power on at all. I took it off the truss and Chris called the rental place, and later I received rather mysterious instructions over the cellphone to bring the unit down to street level and just hand it over to this random nondescript guy named Diego who would take it back to the shop and either fix it or get us another one. I must have looked pretty funny striding through the hotel lobby and out to 7th Avenue with this large heavy odd-looking black Thing and giving it to someone waiting near a car. After all, this is like a $3500 item or thereabouts. It all turned out to be on the up-and-up, and later in the day Diego brought it back, claiming that it had only blown a fuse and that they'd replaced that and run it fine for a while in the shop. I didn't quite buy this, since fuses don't smell like that when they do their job, but I re-hung it and tried it anyways, and it immediately popped the fuse again. Oops. All I can think of was that it must have been a position-dependent problem and they had only run it lying on its back at the shop, so the problem didn't recur until it was facing downward again. I took the front cover off and found the tiny little fuse in question, but nothing else obviously fried in the parts I could see. Getting any farther into the thing looked inordinately hairy since most of the other works were down underneath the fairly complex array of wheels and shutters and it wasn't really our job to rip the thing completely apart. Still, the internal workings of any of these units are *very* cool, and a total orgy of those same little cube-style stepper motors as found in old floppy drives [and, non-coincidentally, in my old laser rig]. They have full microstepping drive for smoothness and fine position control. And the color dichros and gobos are actually very small -- about an inch across each, some mounted in rather elegantly engineered bearing-rings that eventually connect to yet another stepper that drives the rotation. The gobos in the Technos are all image-glass, not metal -- so they really project a picture like a slide, even from the high-contrast black-and-white gobos. Some of the images are color, that do interesting things when combined with other colors from the wheel. Some of the gobos are interesting, especially the one they call "ripwheel" which looks like spinning fan blades. And the "lenticular" filter, parallel humps in glass that spread light out in one direction, makes some very nice 3d-looking tumbling object effects when combined with gobos and focused and rotated just right. But none of the colors are what you'd really want in a "theatrical" setting -- one CTO to try and sort of warm up the HMI output, but everything else is saturates and there seem to be a couple of almost-duplicate shades. Ben and I both noted a distinct lack of certain things we would have liked to have in the Technos, such as generic small dots/stars or that nice hard-edge hollow triangle gobo that for example many of the Martin units have. Then again, other types of moving lights have more and better gobos, designed to live in *two* wheels' worth of sets and produce interesting superimposed rotation effects. No one type of instrument seems to "have it all", at least from reading various specs, but of course any of them *could* be modified for specific uses. I think that given a choice, or if I owned any such things myself, I would try to find some different colors and effects to put in. Or use an entirely different unit with full CMY subtractive color mixing. Anyway, despite being down a Techno I went back to programming and found that I could do just fine on five instead of six, and that I could still account for where the sixth unit *would* point by setting its pan percentage on the other side of 50% from its corresponding opposite unit across the room. I never got to test this theory, but it seems likely that thinking about it that way and envisioning where things point would still allow good progress on show design within the simulator without having any physical units on hand. And nobody else really noticed that a unit was missing and the symmetry of the hang was off, so it wasn't really that much of a problem in this case. I still had plenty to cover the dance floor, to give me those stage-spots, or whatever else I needed them to do. And the cDc people who were around seemed to be liking the stuff I was preparing for them, so it was going well. Eventually the time for the "extravaganza" itself rolled around, and that's when everything started to get weird. The conference areas were separated by over 18 fairly tall floors and a short horizontal distance, but needed to be linked together in various ways for networking and media transmission. The network guys had successfully run a fiber cable all the way down one of the fire stairs columns, carefully preserving bend-radius wherever it had to turn corners, and had gig-E connectivity between top and bottom. But Chris also wanted to run sound and video along the same shot, and got some volunteers to start running a piece of expensive low-loss coax down the same route. Except that once that much cable is extended down that far, it's bloody heavy. It apparently got away from them, and lashed its way down past the railings and all landed in a hopelessly tangled heap at the bottom of the stairwell -- all wrapped *around* the fiber. This was the first of several snafus related to trying to pipe video from the music room downstairs up to the various screens upstairs. Chris in his infinite dedication to Making It Happen had his folks try again the next day just before the Extravaganza, with a different piece of coax along with a thinner shielded cable for balanced audio, and while that appeared to get run successfully and fastened down so it couldn't fall, the feed just didn't work. Theory is that the inner conductor broke under the weight, or something. Meanwhile, people were starting to pile into the room in anticipation of getting a good spot to see the show, so the ability to rig things was rapidly getting constrained by time and just too many people in the way. I tangented into another effort going on to get a camera person set up on one of the scaffolds just inside a rear corner of the truss, where he needed power and an audio feed from the sound board. Since I didn't know he needed the audio and thought he was just feeding to upstairs over isolated links, I plugged him into a spare non-dimmed outlet *on* the truss. But this turned out to produce fairly vicious hum once he was wired into the rest of the local system so there was another flurry to get him powered from the same source as the sound board. The feed to upstairs was run to his stuff anyways, and some fairly brutal modification of cable-ends occurred to connect up to the DAs which for some obscure reason had little screw-terminals instead of normal jacks. Oh, and I had to make sure to *not* light the pair of parcans right behind his head. At this point one of the DJs was spinning and there was fairly loud music playing in the room, I had my earplugs in [which stayed in for quite a bit of the weekend], so I started to not be able to track the chaos going on behind and beside me. There seemed to be about ten different people all buzzing around the sound board making adjustments and replugging things and who knows what-all. Finally Delchi started the video to kick off the show, except that it only had sound and no video. Someone had apparently stepped on and unplugged one of the video output cables in the flurry and they had to find *that* and fix it. Finally things got under way, but in the background Chris and Delchi and others were still running around trying to get other things working, notably the 18th floor feed. Apparently they gave up on this soon afterward and just went upstairs to make the announcement that no, the cDc feed wasn't working and anyone who wanted to see the thing had to go downstairs and pile into the back of the music room. Boom, instant elevator logjam. However, I only heard about all this after the fact, since at this point I was concentrating on what the show was doing and which lighting to throw at it. Despite no rehearsal, I managed to figure out from context which cues were needed when and pretty much did the right things, fading slowly from wash A to wash B and punching up a little color as needed, spotting the musicians, and managing to throw in the ballyhoo at the end even though they didn't bring all of cDc up on stage like they usually do. Unfortunately they seem to have lost a large fraction of the audience as things progressed, because apparently with the standing-room-only room design, a lot of people just couldn't see. Or maybe it was all those White Castle sliders they threw out into the audience... In general, though, I observed that there were a lot of cooks into the sound side of things, and it was fairly chaotic and dysfunctional for a while as a result. Delchi was on about how if *one* more person so much as *touched* the goddamn sound board, the integrity of their limbs was in dire peril. Eventually one woman sat down at it and took over and apparently is a long-time theater geek and held it together through the rest of the show. By contrast, there was ONE cook in the lighting soup, and that all just worked. But really, I still think the cloud of techs whirling around fixing and tweaking things during the show is just another part of cDc's act. Seems to happen all the time, and keeps people amused in a sort of twisted way. Still, and once again in the HoPE context, several lessons to be learned here. Anyway, after all that was over we cleaned up the large amount of detritus and got back into regular DJ mode. The DJ station had been moved from where it was up on the stage the previous night down to the floor and to one side, where it happened to be in the line of fire from one of the speaker stacks. Amazingly enough this didn't create feedback through the turntables, but one of the DJs did mention that it made it damn hard to hear in the headphones. I thought the speakers were set way too far upstage, but Chris insisted that they were *very* directional and would produce almost no sound onto the stage itself. Well, a couple of mikes had been observed to feed back when sort of mis-aimed, but in general it wasn't as bad as I feared. [Each stack consisted of a Clair Bros. R-4 full-range concert cab and a Radian dual 18" sub. Fuckinheavy cabinets -- took four people to lift the R-4s up on top of the subs. The specs from clair-audio.com say 280 pounds...] Anyway, all this was thumpin', and the lights were blinkin', and once again there weren't any *people* showing up. Now, it was Saturday night by this time, supposedly the major party night of the con, but everyone was either still in sessions upstairs, or drinking offsite, or hax0ring something over in the network area, or something -- wherever they were, it wasn't anywhere near the music room. It also didn't help that some of the scheduled slots had people who weren't really doing the usual DJ thing. One such called himself "pimpdaddy supreme", showed up in a *bright* red jacket and proceeded to do a mostly-noise culture- jamming sort of thing that had some funny bits, but overall was mostly jarring and certainly not club-dancey music. His gear also buzzed like crazy, being all single-ended and powered by ungrounded wall-warts, and Delchi and the other sound-crew folks couldn't seem to eliminate that. Generic stage wash, and time to go off and get some food. Later on, Gweeds and crew piled onto the stage with what looked like lots of toy instruments and went at various kinds of, ah, "experimental" music for about three hours, the downside of which was that they didn't keep any sort of real rhythm going for more than 20 seconds at a stretch. I had *no* idea what to do with the lights during this, so I pretty much threw some side-stage gobo stuff on them just to fill in that kitchen- floor-trippy feeling, and slowed the board's "shit happens" output down to about half speed. It probably still didn't look very exciting to people passing by the far end of the room, so I guess they didn't wander in. At this point it was pushing midnight, and finally a DJ with some real *energy* [and a very cute girlfriend who *did* dance] took the turntables, and that started to get fun because now I was able to beat-match to him, throw in strobe hits, transition in and out of cue-lists along with when he broke to the next piece, etc. We were actually starting to look at each other and get some synergy going, although I had to wave him *off* the road-case he jumped up on at one point. But still, nobody else really wandered into the space. We had built it, but they didn't come. Regardless, I was fairly proud of the work I'd done up to that point, considering that it was my first time ever touching the physical Hog, only the second time dealing with moving lights in several years, and I managed to pull it all off without needing to consult *any* manuals at the gig. Finally, Delchi and I were discussing the rest of the schedule, and he wasn't sure any of the people supposedly showing up on Sunday would be there, and was mostly inclined to blow all of them off and not bother. I pointed out that the earlier we could start teardown the better, since there was a metric assload of work to be done in the music room by itself and we'd probably have far fewer volunteers for teardown than setup. We more or less agreed that that would be sensible. Meanwhile, the next DJ started playing really bad rap, so I said "awright, that's when I'm outa here," showed Delchi how to shut down the board out of full-auto run, and went off to sleep. Then, Sunday morning arrived and I wandered back into the music room with my big ol' coffee and of course there was *nobody* around except one of the security people tasked to keep an eye on things. The security people, by the way, completely *rocked* in how they handled the convention in general, make no mistake. No, their coverage wasn't perfect and a few personal items went missing, but given the circumstances they did a whole lot better than some of the goons at, ah, that other convention. And in New York, yet. The music room experienced *no* problems with theft or tampering to our knowledge. At any rate, there weren't any DJs to be seen, and Delchi wasn't around either. Nothing to do, and further board programming would probably be for naught. I went off and finally caught bits of some of the sessions, but then by noon or so I decided screw it, teardown starts *now*. Cleared it with Chris, found a couple of the excellent volunteers who had helped before, and we started pulling down instruments and wiring. We all busted hard until about 6pm, by which time the truss was clean, all the clamps were off the pars, most of the pars loaded into hampers, all the cable coiled and stacked in sorted heaps, the Technos carefully put away [with the bad one labeled], most of the audio gear collected and stacked, and the area under the truss completely cleared. But the whole conference was about to end, after which major teardown would happen on 18, so the I and the few people left all trooped up there to watch the end in which prizes were given away, gratitude expressed, kleptos lambasted for stealing laptops, etc. I noticed various small audio-related items still sitting exposed on some nearby road cases, and started bundling these up just to hide them under the sound platform so they would stand a chance of still being there after the mass exodus. Once it was all over, I headed immediately for the mikes on the front table and collected them all so *they* wouldn't walk either. Fortunately, Emmanuel had mentioned to the roomful of people that we did need volunteers for teardown, so a surprising number of people stuck around and started helping with strike. I taught yet more people how to flip-coil, and neaten up source 4s for travel, and rip up gaff so it *doesn't* wrap itself around the wire in question. Despite using good gaff and trying to peel slowly and carefully, a certain amount of paint was pulled off walls here and there -- Brunie said not to worry about it in the Pavilion space, that's what the facility gets for using cheap paint. As the 18th floor neared completion and all the stuff was staged near the door ready to roll to the elevators, a large pizza order arrived and everyone dug in. This was accompanied by a bit of a rest and yak session, and I started to realize that our fine volunteers were getting tired and starting to think about wandering away. I did my best to help get everyone back to useful work and keep them focused. Stuff still had to be gotten down the elevators and through the Magic Intervening Door over to the loading area, and there was still the truss to take apart and move! It was pushing midnight by this point, so while some people kept busting on rolling gear, I herded another team over to the music room and found the truss wrenches. By then people were getting pretty punchy and distracted, and I was starting to be fairly concerned about safety. I was still in that sort of hyper-efficient mode I get into at teardowns, and possibly tried to task people a bit more brusquely than I should have, but at least I managed to keep them mostly moving and the inverse barn-raisin' thing happened without too much difficulty. I left a couple of people there unbolting the rest of the sections [an almost single-threaded operation, so to speak, because we only had the one wrench set] and went back upstairs to help Chris wrap up the last bits of 18 and take final idiot-checks. Finally we were just about done in both areas, and then realized that a lot of the network area still had power run all over it and *that* had to be coiled up too. Those that still had any brain cells to rub together stuck around for a while longer to roll most of it up. I think we finally quit and got to sleep at 3am or so, with the prospect of starting final loadout at 8am, but according to Chris we were *way* more ahead of the game than they'd been at H2K with almost no help. And as it turned out we didn't have to load out at 8am after all, and could sleep later. Apparently one truck showed up at 8 and nobody was around, including our union guy to officially operate the elevator, so it gave up and left again until later. Loadout took most of Monday afternoon, including people having to collect the HUGE pile of dead and abandoned computers left behind. The driver for the sound rental place is a Mac fancier, and almost wet himself when he realized that there were perfectly still-working old Macs being thrown away. He plugged a bunch of them in to test for good ones while we were waiting to use the elevator, and wound up taking a couple home. [This same guy has a hilarious take on his job -- says he can't stand being in an office anymore, and *wants* to come home exhausted and frustrated from an honest day's work. We chatted a lot -- he's full of good touring war-stories.] Most of the other stuff had already been pretty-well picked over, and was total junk. I think they got some salvage house to take them, or some place that rebuilds old boxes for schools, or something. By the time Chris had rescued his car and we had loaded it, it was just about time for me to go catch the train back. I actually managed to remain awake on the return trip, by noodling some ideas for different types of gobo indexers that could move various effects *across* the focus field instead of spinning within it. I think such a thing would be a nifty addition to some type of moving light. I suppose if I'd had another day on the system, I would have tried for more coordinated motion cues, played with overlaying pairs of Technos with different effects, and assigned Techno intensities to the meta-cue-list masters so I could fade them slowly in and out while they were doing stuff. I probably would have started working toward a more slower but more visually intriguing environment to muck more with persistence of vision and various perceptive boundary conditions, just like the laser shows of yore. But of course the accompanying music here wasn't really geared toward that. The core group is already thinking that maybe the all-out loud and flashy DJ room could be phased out, and possibly replaced with a quieter, more comfy hangout space that could still have music and some funky lighting but of a more trancey, cerebral quality. From what I understand, the "competing con" is already trying that route, but I'll try to find out if they did or not and how it went. Something like that would probably be fun to design, and I have a couple of notions on where to find people who might want to help. So overall, H2K2 was a ton of work, but I got to turn it into a seriously in-depth training exercise in new-to-me types of lighting, educate a bunch of other people in some basics, handle being on the spot to make stuff work, sling many heavy things around, and do all of it barefoot! This apparently amazed some of the staffers, hotel and con alike, especially in filthy ol' NYC and especially when we were wrestling hampers full of four-ought feeder up and down ramps, but they didn't hassle me about it. Usually trying to transit a hotel's kitchens and staff areas barefoot is *the* way to get pegged, but while I got a few funny downward looks while back there, nobody actually mentioned it except in a somewhat congratulatory manner. In some of my infrequent uses of the normal guest elevators, the room-key nazi stationed in the lobby would occasionally gripe, and of course when outside the building I got at least one or two of the typical "Yo bro, wheah's yo' *shoes* at?" from idle randoms with nothing better to do than criticize passersby. I was way too busy to care, and helped to extend a large "out of the way, we have a JOB to do" field around myself and the other people I was working with. Apparently this caused several folks to assume that I do theater/production professionally, and I had to describe how it's really just a sideline hobby, but does gain me more skill with each passing gig. It was interesting to see the large *scale* of event that H2K2 has grown to over time, and I say that after dealing with any number of SF conventions. None of it happens without a lot of people pitching in -- and looking just at my involvement in the music area itself, huge kudos to Doug, Josh, Duane, numerous other techs whose names I never caught, Binary, Geoff Flash for the crashed-Hog pix, Roadie, Cyko, Kerry, Rop, Cheshire, the whole rest of the core staff, Brunie for putting up with me, Delchi and his amazing spreadsheet, Chris for letting me come play in his yard again, and of course Emmanuel for being the prime instigator of this whole thing. Many people put in ridiculous numbers of hours both onsite and off to make the con happen. I know a lot more went on behind the scenes than was brought forth on the planning core mailing list, when people just went off to deal with the things assigned to them. Since my own particular part turned out to be way less essential than expected but involved most the bulk of the lighting budget, I figure the least I can do is make up for that by describing my own lessons learned in the hope that someone else can put them to good use -- even if it's mostly a lighting rant that doesn't have anything to do with hacking. But wait, maybe it could... The nature of H2K2 demands *some* discussion of network security in here, so be afraid: A quick skim of the documentation indicates that the the Wholehog III and related gear communicates over *ethernet*, using address range 172.31.0.0/16 and by default sending UDP packets to port 6600. The Hog itself acts as a DHCP server to hand out IP addresses to slave ethernet-to-DMX converters, and/or can DHCP for its own address, and multiple boards can run multiple different shows across a shared 100Mb network and the protocol is supposedly able to sort out which board is running which show and keep them from interfering with each other. The marketing claim is "extensive security features" to keep board-ops out of each others' shows, but it's already evident that none of this traffic is encrypted or authenticated, because the designers of this stuff expect it all to be "isolated". Except that the next obvious step is to run a lot of it over wireless. Modules already exist for various controllers, some Palm-based and some custom, that a lighting designer can just wander around on a stage with and aim things and program cues without trailing a long wire around. So we can expect to hear lots of good stories about how some yutz with an Ipaq and an 802.11 card goes to a Metallica gig and makes their lighting go all wacky on them, as a way to strike back at the RIAA or something. You heard it here first. _H* 020731