Much of this is not about the con itself.
I was involved in quite a bit of external activity over the intervening
year, which is relevant enough to detail here for the perspective on how
it plowed into the con itself. So a long background is necessary,
even if it may seem like a lot of unrelated verbiage about carts and crates
and trucks and technical diversions and opinionated rants and the typically
narrow viewpoint I get on things.
[Gets narrower every year, evidently, as the con continues to grow.]
Those who only want to read about the at-con activities can jump
to here,
but I don't recommend doing so as the preliminary material builds a lot of
context and then like last year, covers some of the early logistics.
[Small images link to larger ones, as usual.] |
Shopping and building
In the early ramp-up to the con, a bunch of other shopping happened. With somewhat mixed and indeterminate amounts of hours on the lamps in my old Martin 918 moving lights and the outstanding fact that one had died rather prematurely, I decided to simply relamp all four with a fresh and uniform set. A bit of hunting around eventually landed at Microlamp's product page for some nice bright Osram units, that seemed to have the best lumens-per-watt, rated life, *and* the lowest color temperature I could find at a non-ridiculous price. [The alternative 7500K version would *really* piss off our tungsten-tuned video guys!] Once these arrived they all went into the lights, along with all the running hour and lamp-strikes memory reset to reflect that fact. I had also done the above-linked DMX "un-flip" polarity change for the previous year. | |
In the process of shopping other bulb suppliers, some know-it-all sales weasel tried to tell me that there would be a big difference in performance/reliability between arc lamps "rated" at 95 vs 97 volts or whatever. That's completely un-true, as the running voltage is approximate. Ballasts, even the old linear "iron" ones like in these lights, fundamentally regulate lamp *current* once the lamp strikes and let the voltage across the arc fall where it naturally may. It will also drift around as the lamp warms up, ages, etc. |
In the meantime David was off doing his lighting-design thing, improving the rig from last year, plus he'd also shouldered the task of general room diagrams because the two efforts are very tightly linked. It turned out that his approach was starting to look like the back-end of a more general purpose CAD system, generating layered .SVG files in which any set of features of interest could be displayed or hidden in a suitable browser. So all the information needed could be condensed into a relatively small set of docs, with some wrapping to enable and disable desired views. [Obviously displaying *all* layers like this, for all possible room configurations throughout the weekend, gets pretty confusing.] This all struck me as a nice effort, perhaps eventually worthy of having a more interactive front end. The only problem for the moment seemed to be that hand-generating the interim XML to define a lot of the image elements seemed a little tedious. |
About a week and a half out, our usual
scaffolding vendor
hit us with a nasty surprise.
New management or something had determined that they
wanted a $3000 or more deposit on our order, way above the order amount
itself and probably above the price of equivalent NEW scaffolding.
With everybody else horrified but completely out of time to try dealing
with this, it fell to me to try and find alternatives.
In the first year or two in the old Hyatt we had dealt with a different
one ... I racked my tiny brain, dug back into my notes ... yes, we had
rented from
Marr Scaffold
back in '09. And as I looked them back up it suddenly hit me that
they also were *right down D Street* from us -- this was irrelevant when we
were in Cambridge, but now it was clear that delivery would be easy enough
that perhaps *we* could transport a rental in one or both directions.
They don't accept checks or COD; we could just put the whole mess on the
organization credit card and any damage or loss would simply be added to
the final charge.
Done! I handed off the details to our working treasury department which managed to ram through a credit application and the order in jig time, we canceled with Lynn, and I floated the idea that we might be able to deliver and return ourselves and avoid the extra charges. |
I was somewhat surprised at the positive responses to the idea of trying
Enterprise for truck rentals this year instead of the old vendors, expecting
a certain amount of stodgy resistance from the powers
that be. Maybe I'm not the only one
disillusioned with those grouchy Budget guys up in Arlington, even if
they're a little cheaper. Janet talked to Enterprise on the phone,
and in the process of driving various routes in the area the next
day just to learn them [past the infamous Eastern Salt mountains!]
I stopped in. The folks there seemed *way* nicer and more
customer-service oriented -- the guy at the counter knew what a
convention was, referencing family members having been to
ComiCon in NY, and seemed interested in establishing a long-term
relationship with us. Said they had plenty of big trucks available
that could be brought to that site on fairly short notice. They
hand out a one-page list of the major known local low-clearance points,
so customers are less likely to pull one of
these.
I left there thinking "this is *awesome*" and reported back, and Janet
set up the orders soon thereafter.
Okay, so between Budget and Penske and Lynn we'd now severed relationships with three of our previous vendors. Let's hope that doesn't bite us in the ass someday. Logistics isn't just about driving a truck around, it's about handling freight safely and scheduling and interacting with all the possible environments and situations we'd run into. To that end, here's the list I had formed of stuff to bring along for support.
An idea of space heaters was floated, and while past crews have used the propane/catalytic types that sit on top of a 25-lb bottle, for most temperature conditions with everyone dressed warm and working their asses off there's really no point. Not to mention avoiding the fire hazard. Electric heaters? F'geddaboudit, you can't get enough btu/hour out of those. And the con was just about upon us! With the roles I'd agreed to I expected that it would be another full 7-day work week like last year. Sure, we'd go pick up trucks and take them around to selected points and load as usual, but there seemed to be a new general understanding that we'd take *both* of them to the hotel that night. Another difference was that we were trying to start the bulk of all loading even earlier in the day than last year, to maybe be able to get home sometime before midnight. The part that seemed most difficult was rounding up people to help on normal weekdays *and* who would hopefully have cars and could ferry some crew around -- to the truck place, back from the hotel, etc. Most of that was just about impossible to work out in advance, it once again all had to be done on the fly. That was probably the most frustrating aspect of logistics in general -- planning movement of our *people* as well as the gear. What we really need is one or two dedicated "crew shuttle" vehicles with drivers, which transport bodies rather than stuff and are available at all the weird times we wind up needing it. I recalled the Enterprise guy mentioning that they also rent 12-passenger vans... I've since peeked inside one of those, they look pretty comfy. |
And here we go ...
Someone generously volunteered a car and her time for Wednesday morning,
however, and we arrived bright and early at the Enterprise place.
Our two gleaming white beasts of burden were waiting right outside the
office door, and they had been recently run a bit so the fuel systems
weren't stone cold.
I went back out to do a little pre-trip checking while Lucky finished up the paperwork inside. One International Durastar like last year, and one Freightliner, both full-size 26-footers with dual-reservoir air brakes. One had a DEF tank, which I asked about the necessity of filling and they said it had been topped up and probably wouldn't get appreciably used for the short mileage we would be racking up. |
Having acquired both trucks at the same time instead of getting the second one later in the day, we had a little more versatility on scheduling. Lucky sent me toward NESFA with the Freightie, and he headed off to start loading Storage in the IH. A message with some pictures of the NESFA load had been sent around, and it didn't look like that much stuff and I'd seen most of that same stuff last year too, so I didn't ask anyone for loading help other than whoever would be there to open the doors. I fully intended to *not* do any lunch stop over there, because I wanted that truck to be in and out as fast as possible without stopping up the whole shared driveway for hours. |
Rendezvous and docking
While we've done transferance via tail-to-tail "truck sex" in the past, that's just useless movement that takes time away from the main loading process. As with last year I figured I'd just put my truck in right next to the other one at the dock, and we'd just hand stuff across between lift gates. I even marked the relevant slot early in the morning with a couple of pallets tented together and a "don't park here today" sign since various building occupants do tend to put their cars there. But I remembered having to negotiate a significant bump-up to get into that space as the curb-cut doesn't extend far enough, and thought to construct a little helper for the wheels this time around. I scrounged up a small bunch of 2x6 pieces left over from the house renovation, and arranged them in an appropriate way to aid the transition. |
I extended the lift-gate of my unit and continued backing in until it was
within about a half-inch of the building wall, which snugged the two trucks
nicely together at the tail and put the two liftgates fairly close
together. The pivot point for this back-in was roughly the other
truck's side mirror, to avoid that but still get the tails to almost
touch. Now, I should qualify that by affirming that I had no idea
where "half an inch from the wall" would be, so a couple of cycles of GOAL
were necessary. In each one I gauged the remaining distance and
then went slightly less than that by spotting it on the *ground*
just outside the driver's door.
For other precision backing operations, a person visible in the mirror giving a realtime interactive distance indication works well too [e.g. *not* the useless binary handwaving of keepcomin keepcomin keepcomin keepco-- STOP! which is very likely to go too far with potentially destructive results]. | |
Once I was locked in, it was easy to shuffle the "triangle" stuff from NESFA across into the truck that would actually head for that side. I guess the ability and willingness to come up with useful hacks like this is part of why I was listed in the program book [PDF, link may go stale] as "loadmaster". In past work for Logistics I've often wound up being the Tetris Ghod in the back of the trucks in the process of loading, compacting items into the least possible space and stacking to the ceiling, but this year I had some excellently competent help in that regard and I have confidence that the legacy of Tight Truck Packing can be continued with or without my help. |
Thursday: hittin' the hotel
So here I am, halfway through my opus and only now reaching the
part that most of the other volunteers are even aware of.
If you skipped to this point, you missed a lot of leadup context.
By now our gear was already at the hotel waiting to unload, and it
didn't walk there by itself!
See, a lot more happens in the run-up and "shoulder days" than some may
think, and you're encouraged to get involved in that part if you have the
time and wherewithal to do so as clueful help is always needed at such
critical times.
Arrangements for morning carpooling with Janet back in from our mutual hometown fell through as she had fallen ill, so I figured I'd just suck it up and pay for local-ish parking. A relatively new option had come into existence in the form of Standard Parking's Channelside lot, a little farther away from the hotel but substantially less expensive than the Laz lots from a couple of years ago. And attended 24x7 by an actual cash-accepting human, which subjectively has higher value than an impersonal box that can only read a credit-card stripe and probably gets a skimmer attached to it on a regular basis. <Insert stock rant about how we need to deploy EMV in this country like *yesterday* here> |
The walk over to the hotel wasn't too onerous even in that somewhat cold and raw day, and there I ran into Paul who'd been at the hotel overnight and we went up to his room to poke at some amp racks and parts. From his window I could see some of the Channelside lot but not well enough to spot my car, even with trying to use my camera as a telescope. I figured I was behind the smokestack someplace but upon expanding the shot on a real monitor and scanning over it I realized the car *was* visible. Select the big-picture, and then select the blue rectangle within that for the original detail. The hood stripe nailed it. |
During the con run-up,
a big hairball had erupted on the mailing lists as to exactly where
we were going to stage stuff in on the Grand side. Last year it was
a quick ad-hoc adaptation of ballroom E because nobody had thought about
it in advance and we had to pre-clear the setup in that room
ourselves. Now the advance discussion was whether to use
Commonwealth because it's a little closer to the docks, except that
weren't they going to start dropping the dance floor into there?
Or would the hotel have cleared D/E and opened the airwall from their
last event to accomodate staging there? etc, back and forth with
no solid answers for some time.
I'm not sure what was done in historical years before that, but I suspect
that many items were taken all the way to their final destinations which
would certainly waste a lot of extra time with the truck still in
the dock. We needed nearby
buffer space, to just quickly shift the truck contents into and do a fast
pre-sort, so the trucks could get *out* of there for additional runs that
afternoon. Fortunately we found that D/E was open and clear and
someone had again brought all the big "departmental" signs to stick up
around the walls and assign drop areas, so it worked out well.
But knowing that this was all set in advance would have been nice.
This year we also had introduced the new classification of tech gear that needed to stay thermally stable, e.g. not sit in a cold truck overnight, so that batch still needed to be fetched from Storage. I wound up doing that run, taking just two more people with me in the truck cab to make it simple from a personnel-movement standpoint as the "warm load" wasn't particularly large. Rush-hour traffic on the way back in from that was a total mess as one might imagine; that's what we get for having to do all this on normal weekdays. We were nonetheless back in reasonably good time, with Storage pared down to nothing but the crap with the red "do not take" stickers on it. D/E was already almost empty, with the buffered content having been moved farther along to its final resting places all over the hotel. All as if by magic, but now you see more of the complex reality behind it!! I only hoped that all the volunteers doing that movement had managed to read my "gear handling advice document" that I'd tried to send around, but many of our staff and departmental mailing lists were having *serious* delivery problems precisely the week when they needed to be reliable so a lot of folks may not have seen that email in time. It's basically the same stuff I was saying after last year anyway. Logistics done well really is a flow art, even if it's something that most people never see. It's about timing, spatial relations, and anticipating movement and weight transitions. It's knowing when to be smooth, when to be abrupt, when to be rough or gentle or fast or slow and for just the right amount of time or distance. I'm finding that I enjoy the mechanics of it quite a bit. |
SupahTruckah tackles a different rig
Text is worth a thousand ...
While I spent the bulk of the con time itself doing tech of one sort or
another I got hardly any pictures of what was going on.
I'm sure other folks did -- please post them!
So you'll just have to put up with more big blocks
of descriptive prose here.
We were pretty busy, but it was a tight ship -- everyone knew what they needed to do when, and part of that came from an improvement in the tech meetings. This year part C of the main ballroom complex was allocated specifically as a "tech depot" for most of the weekend, where routinely-accessed gear and supplies were organized and stored *without* being buried under 100 pounds of other roadcases, and there was enough room to hold our meetings. This space didn't have the distractions and poor sightlines of the tech suite and it was right down by most of the workspaces, handier than trying to cram everyone into slow elevators just to have a meeting on an upper floor. This is how the "tech hole" at Worldcons is typically set up, where the punchlists and runtime assignments and such can live on big pieces of paper that stay posted on the walls for the whole time. There was a meeting each day sometime before the major blocks of activity, where roles were chosen and problems brought to light and caveats issued to one and all. It worked well. Kudos to Persis and Abby for running this [and getting many of us keys to that space] and to others in the larger collective that likely floated the concept for us. I say "organized" above somewhat guardedly, because for a while the space looked more like a tech *dump* with things scattered about in inconvenient ways. I don't think there was a specific person designated to be sort of a quartermaster for that space. I did a little tidying up once in a while and a fairly major compaction later on. One of the key things was that the truly dead cases weren't here, but instead again tucked behind the big curtain in Grand A because for the most part nobody needed to get into those anymore and all the "live" gear stock was in the depot. Again, good system -- let's see if we can even improve it for next year. Several ideas have already been floated. Friday Call for light hang was oh-bloody-early AM the next morning, but I was good for it and showed up wrench in hand and shoes on feet. We again worked well with the guys from PSAV, and I think we made them sit around watching us hang and wire for less time than last year. But then came a somewhat killer surprise: they wouldn't let us use the scissorlifts this year. We were just fine in them and they were fine with us using them last year, what the hell happened?? Apparently their administrative structure now required everyone using their lifts to have gotten "certified" by their preferred training agency and carry a card to prove that, and they weren't willing to bend despite the facts that a> we'd clearly used them safely last year, and b> their guys all knew perfectly well that many of us are already well versed in driving them. They *could* have told us this up front, though, instead of springing it on us at the exact moment we expected to head up and start focus. And it's not like this "certification" comes from anything official like the City of Boston or the state or anything. Like the company's logo implies, it's a checkbox -- a course completion from one of thousands of worksite training outfits and has far less bearing on someone's real competence than they'd like to think. And PSAV's riggers certainly weren't up there with hardhats and fall-arrest. In desperation we cleared paths for the scaffold towers and rolled them to either side of the rig and eventually accomplished a slower and more cumbersome focus with those, but that ALONE set everything back some amount of time because a lot of other tasks were waiting on lights to finish. We managed to get it done regardless, and then moved things the heck out of the way so sound and screens could go up and the rest of the drapeline get built. With the overall move to flying truss we've lost a certain type of build concurrency, and I'm not sure how we're going to fix that. It's in the grand tradition that lighting is usually first in, last out at almost any production, so maybe we're just hosed and just have to make what we do as efficient as possible. I was then sent over to dance tent to help debug a DMX problem, which was a little wacky because our test mechanism turned out to be watching a blue "DMX OK" blinky-light on a particular piece of gear across the room for either a sporadic pattern or steady heartbeat, and in fact subjectively noting *how* sporadic also helped. Turned out to be a bad chunk of cable, but with about seven people swarming all over the room and shouting conflicting directives it wasn't exactly an efficient search process. I started by swapping in test jumps of my known-good brown UTP stuff and carving each entire truss-tower or large group out of the loop at a time until the problem was localized. Then seph who happened to be up the now known-ailing tower was able to plug-n-chug to find the bad bit. I'm relatively convinced that when ALPS sends out a 3-pin "DMX" cable, it's just a piece of beat-up microphone hose which generally is *not* 100-ohm impedance or rated for data transmission. *Always* do such searches in a binary or large-chunk-to-small-chunk way, or you'll be there all night. There was also a question of whether the Colorblaze units have a buffered or direct-fed output from their XLR5 to RJ45 connectors, as the DMX run effectively split there to feed the little wall-wash units. A quick "impedance test" by watching the happy-light in the terminator while someone plugged and unplugged that piece didn't really reveal anything, but that can't show subtleties like data reflections. |
As Angela sat down at the board in Dance Tent she found that she was
having the typical static-shock problem that we often find in hotels
and other buildings in wintertime -- a nice big ZAP! to the console
chassis after sliding against the chair and tablecloth. There's
plenty of background on dealing with this -- I suggest a read through
this and its subsidiary
links for mitigation strategies.
Problem was, there were no readily-accessible grounded surfaces right at
her table! So I pulled out one of my shorter cords with a grounded
metal box on the end and re-plugged the UPS through that and placed it on
the table next to the board, and she labeled the setup with an appropriate
"touch me first" directive. I think this board might have been a little
more immune to static problems than the old Leprecons, but why push it.
And that's about the extent of what I did in Dance Tent this year. Funny how things change, huh... |
We were pretty much ready for when events in the build spaces started,
but it always feels to me like we just barely made it in time.
Maybe it's because the work is never really done, as changes continue
getting made to turn over between events, and minor stuff that didn't get
completed at build can often get finished up at those times too.
We'd had our meeting just after lunch that day and assigned runtime
and assistant positions for roughly the next 24 hours, and response
was fairly lively -- that's always good, because if the question "so,
who wants to do X?" gets asked at the meeting and there are crickets,
that's not good. It's happened, but not for a few years now.
I wound up doing lights for Matthew Ebel in main tent that night -- it seems like any time an act is described as "energetic rock band" my hands goes up, but this would be a chance to try and work up a little busking on the Ion. Fortunately, David had a bunch of the basics already banged into the board and linked to faders. I managed to define a focus-palette entry and a fader referencing it to drift the front wiggle-lights across each other on the cyc from their default 50/50 positions, but couldn't find how to make a self-running effect out of that let alone a random ballyhoo. I also set up three color-only subs for three relatively pure red, green, and blue positions on the color wheel for the Lustrs -- but these aren't pure RGB units with three channels, and as far as I could tell I wouldn't be able to do the equivalent in HSV mode, so most of the interim colors went to the default pinkish-white. The other squirrely thing about Ion faders is that each one is essentially a little mini-cuelist, more often referred to as a "playback", which asserts itself when the fader comes off the bottom and crossfades between any relevant others and itself over the travel. So I could start a color fade and then back out of it or go to completion or whatever, but couldn't manually crossfade to another one without dropping one of the other sliders to *zero* first to let it take control. Eventually I found that for the livelier pieces of music, it was easiest to grab manual selections of the Lustr groups and then poke points on the color wheel on the touchscreen, which gave some nice bump color changes on the band in rhythm with the music. So mostly I was there with one hand on the cyc sliders and the other one tapping the screen ... klunky, but it got me through the show. I didn't think at the time to try setting those color subs to HTP mode, maybe that would have worked better and let them all effectively stay asserted together. I was also desperately trying to find the continuous-spin mode on the rotating gobos, and failed in this endeavor as I couldn't sit there reading manuals and messing with one little thing while the show was running. David may have actually found how to do that later. But for the moment I'm not too thrilled with what an operator might have to either go through or put up with for rock-n-roll "fistful of subs" style busking on this board -- it just doesn't really seem suited for that, which seems to be the general feeling echoed around the industry forums. But I'd freely acknowledge that I'm probably missing some essentials. Matthew was opposite the Drum Circle in A, which actually wasn't a problem. I probably had the best ear to A sitting on the scaffold right back by the A/B airwall gland [which had gotten sealed correctly and the bleed wasn't particularly loud]. The B/E connection, however, hadn't been and the crosstalk through the narrow slit was *killing* the play in D/E. I went to look at it; the gland piece wouldn't close right, it was retracted too far or something and I didn't have the magic tool. I tried to hang some stage-skirt I found back there over a drape pole and gently stuff it into the gap, which didn't help much, and eventually the right people from the hotel were summoned to put things right. After that show I handed off to the Teseracte guy, for whom the basics were entirely adequate for what he needed. He had his stage wash and cyc RGB, he was happy. We left them to it and went to relax with a couple of quality libations before bed. Saturday First thing to do was set up for Masquerade rehearsal. Moving an Ion console with two screens, fader wing, keyboard, mouse, *and* a UPS is a fairly involved operation. Too many wires! I could wish they'd made it with more built-in displays like the Hog or MA. [I think my own tendency would be to just run from the scaffold nest, especially since there was a video confidence monitor up there.] I didn't have a real Masq runtime again so as rehearsal got going, I quietly did a little more tidying around the room, deployed more of my dim blue backstage safety lights, tried to look up a couple of board questions David came up with, and actually wandered out to see some of the rest of the con. Whoo, that never happens! My second Lively Rock Band was a group I'd never heard of, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, who showed up in D/E thinking they were going to load two vehicles' worth of gear from the circle driveway up top down the escalators and through a fairly busy prefunction area. Heh, no. I told them how to drive down to the loading dock, fetched them some wheels, and helped them load in. They certainly did have a lot of stuff, including a heavy rack of effects and sequencers, a whole acoustic drum kit, and even a little "ego box" for the lead guitarist to hop up onto. I would be doing their sound, and was anticipating something fairly complex and hopefully relying on Dan's help with that, but they said they only needed to send me three outputs and had their own locally sourced in-ear monitors. Well, that made things easier. But then the problem became that they not only had the drum kit, they also brought four of their own PA speakers to line up across the front of the stage facing the room. Listed as "high energy contemporary rock" or the like, that was no lie, and they were LOUD. And I couldn't do a damn thing about it. And they were opposite the bellydance in A/B. Good thing that airwall gland had gotten fixed ... As they soundchecked and played, I couldn't even *tell* if any of their main mix or bass was even going into our house PA -- all I seemed to be controlling was her vocals into the house. And then the objections started rolling in. Various convention heavies wandered in and out, telling me it was too loud, and sometimes went up to talk to the band when I just shrugged. Persis brought me an SPL meter and reviewed the Sound Policy. By seriously reining in the normal energy of their performance to a bare minimum after several entreaties to do so, they actually managed to do most of their set just nudging 92dB on the meter -- right at the limit but not too ridiculous. But they weren't too happy about that, as their normal venues allow far more stylistic cutting-loose. I felt bad for them, really, because I found myself liking their stuff. It's rowdy but in a sophisticated and almost orchestral-metal way, with lots of nice open-chord harmonizations and tight phrasing. Even if I couldn't hear it very well in that silly barn of a room, especially with earplugs in -- they've got lots of media availble at their website and Youtube channel, so I was able to go fetch the studio versions of their songs and get all the detail. I also helped them load back out afterward and we had a nice chat out by the docks, and they said while the sound thing was a downer they *very* rarely got anybody to help them load into venues so they were profoundly grateful for that. So they were reasonably happy as they tooled off back toward Connecticut. Oh, and one of their haul vehicles was a Prius. Subtle tech note from that event -- the keyboardist/guitarist of the band had a large stomp-board in front of him with a bunch of effects wired together and a power strip holding their wall-warts. This rig had a ground fault in it somewhere, probably due to all the two-wire power running around, and because all of the outlet boxes from the hotel's small PDU behind the stage were GFCI, we could *not* run that part of his rig from PDU power at all. Without that piece he would be dead in the water, so in desperation I took its power from the wall. You can guess the rest -- this split the audio ground reference in some odd way, with the expected result. It put a noticeable but somewhat tolerable hum into both PA paths [which they'd easily mask out when they were playing and thus went ahead], but then I found that I could *not* bring up our stage lights at all or the hum got ridiculous and overrode everything. Even with the dimmers at full, when such problems tend to level out again since the middle range of triac phase chopping is the worst case. Not so here, they had to just stay completely off. So they played in nonoptimal room light, and didn't seem too concerned about it. Clearly, their usual venues don't provide GFCI power because he'd never run into this before and didn't really get what was going on. I told the guy if he has one of those "outlets with the two buttons" in his bathroom or basement he should plug the stomp box into that and see if it trips out, and then try to fix the problem. That all ate a chunk of my Saturday evening, and the tech party was about to start a little later where I'd be able to rant about it to various people. In the interim I took a much-needed shower and a short snooze, just for a break from my own otherwise nonstop activity. Many of us could sleep in a little bit the next day, as not a lot of tech would be needed until midday. Sunday We had our meeting in the morning and dispersed, some of us getting masq rehearsal going again, and then I had some downtime in which I decided to make it easier for the blue crates to get used. The stack of empties was still sitting in Ops, so I went around to various key departments like food functions and artshow, asking their lead people roughly how many of what size they thought they might need on the out. With some notion of numbers I then played "crate fairy" for a while -- loaded batches of them onto a flatbed and took them around to the different areas, so they'd be right there for them in the thick of teardown when nobody would be thinking to go look in Ops. I'm convinced that this was useful because as things came back into Storage, I saw that all the crates had gotten used fairly well and nicely distributed across areas and even labeled intelligently. Next question, of course, is do we need another batch of them... Then it fell to me [sort of by design, I just couldn't seem to stop *working*] to vastly compact our "tech spew" in the Depot because it was about to be incorporated into the Masquerade greenroom across C/D/E and we needed to make as much room as possible for that. By the assigned time that other people were supposed to come help with wrangling that project, it was done, poof! So at that point we still had lots of our supplies in there [and still reasonably accessible, I made sure of that] but our cozy little private hole was about to vanish. |
The intervening airwall was opened and the entire space got set up as
the Masquerade greenroom, complete with photo area and Sandy Middlebrooks
doing his usual thing with the usual bad backdrop. [I've given up
on ripping
his site
for the bigger-pictures link nest; it's just not worth it.
Change *t.jpg --> *f.jpg in the thumbnail paths if you care.]
At this point our stuff was at somewhat greater security risk but there
were people monitoring things in the greenroom, who in theory could help
keep an eye on our scary-looking wall of tech lining one corner.
Hmm. These two shots might have been easy to stitch together into a fake panorama... And my reconstructed "tech wall" is behind where I'm shooting from; I didn't even think to swing around and get a picture of that. [Anyone else??] | |
Pre-Masquerade cleanup in Main Tent came next, yet more box-stacking to neaten up the bit of a tumble behind the curtain in A and finish prepping that room. We've learned through experience to have a split crew on Masq -- the runtime people who were trapped in rehearsals all afternoon are sent to GO EAT, and alternate [and possibly already fed] shift attacks the room to get it ready. Once the Masq starts that second crew is free to either stay and watch or get dinner or start striking other spaces or run-crew any parallel events that need it. |
We intended that I would swap in for Bill to shade for the halftime, so he showed me the basics and then let me go at it. Shading is remarkably like what I do when processing still pictures -- muck with the black point up and down to either "crisp it up" a little or let some range of black become not-so-black to pull out more dark detail, and ride herd on overall brightness to not let things bloom out. Pretty simple in theory and highly subjective as far as aesthetic decisions, and of course with changing light levels continual adaptation is needed and there's a bit of response delay since the shader is controlling a physical camera iris out yonder. Part of the halftime was a Firefly shadowcast lit mostly by followspots alone, leaving much of the stage dark and a rather stark, contrasty look on the actors. [Is that why they call it a shadowcast?? nyuk nyuk] For the sake of the video I pushed the blacks up just a little, matching the level of revealed detail across all four cameras as best I could, to sort of "de-harsh" the overall appearance and let a little more of the actors be seen. Bill behind me someplace didn't dive in to correct me, so I figured I was doing an acceptable job. | |
[I wasn't at all familiar with the whole "Serenity" thing but since the con have watched a few episodes just to catch up. It's a space western, full of gratuitous posing and violence, and little in the way of scientific believability. Yawn. Why couldn't the crew just sign up at a load board and haul legitimate freight, instead of a few dusty pickle barrels and little black crates of moldy Federation cheese?] |
Fun on the out and then some
EMC had been the event, or one of the events, in the hotel before us, and they'd left a ton of crap behind. Besides all kinds of banners, charts, and sales rah-rah promotional stuff they had a couple of large set pieces like this -- blown-up-huge photographs of buildings in London adhered to some massively structural half-inch foam-core board. This one was left in our tech-depot space, and was thus a continuing presence in our meetings. It had a roulette-wheel kind of thing stuck over the clock face which eventually fell off because it was just glued on, but while it still worked it got a few funny mods and turned it into the "wheel of unwanted tech jobs" that eventually got filled in by various contributors. Select the big-pic here for a 'shopped reconstruction that puts the wheel back where it was originally mounted and shows the hacked labeling detail. You can easily guess which sector I scrawled on. | |
Another section of these props about 12 feet long *and* the box it had
come in ended up cluttering the loading dock over most of the weekend,
because it was way too big to fit in the cardboard crusher and nobody
felt sufficiently authorized to simply fling it off the dock pending
the next time trash removal arrived.
Most of these displays were really quite well done, and it was clear that
someone had gotten paid a ton of money for this stuff. And all just
for a single event, after which they simply left most of it at the hotel
for its staff to eventually dispose of. That doesn't seem very
fair, but that's corporate waste for you and one of the primary reasons
I got *out* of doing those gigs. Also kicking around in C was
an almost full box of regular foam-core board, about half of which had
been arted up on one side with obviously professionally-drawn charts
and process flows and whatever else in sort of a comic style. The
remainder of the box was brand-new unmarked, uncut stock.
Hating to see all that go to waste, I brought the stuff out of C where
nobody would have found it otherwise and tried to offer it to the the
general con populace to take away for free, and then someone mentioned
that the art show might want it for signs or backing so we hauled it
over there, and when that failed to usefully pass it on someone else
suggested that Boskone might want to make signs out of it.
In the end I wound up putting whatever was left back in the original packing
box it had come in and marking it to go to NESFA; hopefully it could find
a good home and beneficial re-use there.
Turns out that all of this material was provided by a business-development outfit called Peak Teams. Their website is the usual "leadership" muck you'd expect out of any such, but they've got an interesting treatise on multitasking and its downsides that is worth a read. Trying to go in too many directions at once really does impede learning, but that's apparently rather non-obvious to a lot of people. |
Return home
Well, perhaps not so gaping in that case. Due to a bit of confusion
one of the 26' trucks had been returned to Enterprise prematurely as it
turned out, as Janet had set up two identical full-week rentals but
nobody else seemed to actually know that.
So the Enterprise guys were a little perplexed
that someone came back with one so early but accepted it, and then when
we wanted to "re-rent" for another day all they had was a sixteen-foot
Isuzu cab-over instead. Functional, but felt like an ice-cream truck
by comparison! It was nonetheless capacious enough for the
tech load from Grand, although we had to pull a few things back
off the end when I happened to notice the rear tires looking pretty squashy
and realized the rear axle was sitting firmly *on* the bump stops.
We unloaded heavier bits until there was maybe a half-inch of clearance;
not optimal but it would be okay for the short run. A truck's rear
suspension gives you a convenient spring-scale to gauge the weight and
distribution of your load, but one must remember to actually go check it
before tooling into the distance with a serious overweight condition.
Among our crew that day I probably had the most recent mental snapshot of how Storage had been arranged, so I needed to be over there to handle the initial routing of stuff coming in. Our official on-paper Storage governance person was still busy at the con, so with no other guidance it seemed to fall to me. We shanghaied some crew and I drove that leg over there, and found that the building management *had* actually gone in and cleaned the room over the weekend! That must have been a pretty big job and I have no idea how they went at it. Most of the dust was off the floor and they'd squirted a fat bead of caulk at the floor-to-wall junction all the way around where they could reach. The suspicion was that the plentiful dust we were getting from the Diak cabinetmaking shop next door was mostly coming in through there; we'll see if that's true long-term. But lots of our items had been randomly moved around and the building crew's ladder and tool bucket were in the way, so it took me a while to basically reset the room and set up the spaces to return our gear into. Which then went pretty quickly, as I encouraged the part of the crew working the truck and elevator to just push crap into the hall and go down for another batch, not try to bring stuff all the way in themselves. Handoff and the natural flow control it creates makes things much more efficient. Lucky called and wanted that truck back to the hotel fairly soon to grab the stuff for NESFA, so when it was empty we sent Angela back with it solo and kept a small crew at Storage to receive the other truck whenever it would arrive. Then it was a lot of hurry up and wait, as loading the other truck at the hotel was taking longer than expected. Part of our remaining crew popped out for dinner since they had the bit of downtime. I stuck around to continue neatening up a bit and re-think some deployment and stack the things we'd already gotten back tighter and higher, but still leave various personal gear exposed for later recovery. The Galleria truck *finally* showed up over an hour later, by which point I'd almost fallen asleep lying on a wagon. But now we were getting all the artshow stuff back, and I had a slightly different arrangement for storing it that I wanted to try. Eventually, and I'm still fuzzy on exactly how, we all got back to the hotel to pop in on the dead-dog and relax for a few. The NESFA dropoff had happened in parallel somehow, fortunately still early enough in the evening to be reasonable for their neighbors, so the small truck was also back. Now we still had one more task to do before the morrow -- to load the scaffold into said small truck, since we'd decided that returning it ourselves Tuesday morning was totally doable and I wouldn't mind getting up early to do that. Our last burst of collective energy got all the scaff parts strapped and wedged in, and in theory we were finally done for the night. I then went to move the truck out of the dock, and got the next surprise. Click, ka-chunk-a, ka-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-chunka, ... with the entire dash frantically blinking on and off, but no engine cranking. Ut-oh. Pulling the battery-box cover revealed that this was a 24V system, which we weren't about to try jumping from a regular car. I now realized that it had already been weak when I had started it earlier, as it was doing a little of the odd clicking then, but I hadn't driven that truck yet so didn't think of it as a warning. And there had undoubtedly been a lot of engine-off liftgate usage over at NESFA. I let it rest a bit but the more I tried it the worse it got, just plain dead. The folks at Enterprise's main "roadside service" seemed quite uncertain that they could get a local resource out to us in some reasonable time and all of us were crispy critters by now, and we decided that the best thing would be to call the local office in the morning to see what they could do. I broke the bad news to hotel security, e.g. one of their dock bays would be blocked up overnight through no willing choice of ours and I'd be on the phone to Enterprise at 0700 the next morning to address the problem. Tuesday Which I was, and even got a reasonable amount of much-needed sleep in between. The guys there continued their trend of customer-service awesomeness, as we discussed options and then the guy on the phone said "ya know what? I'll just zip over there myself right now." Soon he showed up with another small truck and after we figured out where the actual metal parts of his side-mounted battery terminals were, the stuck Isuzu finally roared to life. I was out of the bay and on my way to Marr shortly after 8AM, and a good thing too as several other trucks were already piled up on Fargo St waiting to get into bays on that side. In retrospect it was likely that only one of the two units in the battery box was the weak one, and we *might* have been able to jump that one from a car or just get more charge into half the setup at a time ... but none of us had enough brain left that night and I didn't have a voltmeter handy. We didn't even have jumper cables, with which we might have been able to bring the other truck over for a boost. Clearly, this thing was just plain toast and Enterprise tagged it right out for repair once we got it back to them. My next discovery came because I'd failed to heed some emailed warnings about D Street braindeath that had gone across the lists. It has this completely gratuitous, nonsensical part in the middle with two mutually-opposed one-way sections, and the surrounding should-be-obvious bypass route streets are marked "no trucks". So it's not a straight shot down D after all. I guess the city wants to keep trucks generally out of that more residental section and send them the long way round. I didn't have a GPS or map with me and thrashed around a bit trying to find a way through, bumbling my way through odd byways around A street but I finally got down to Marr and backed up to their warehouse to hand the stuff out. Which is where I learned, far too late, that by being a little more insistent in the ordering process we actually *could* have gotten all clean workplanks instead of the beaches of concrete dust we found on some of them. There seems to be a deep chasm of disconnect between their office and warehouse sometimes... Following that and an equivalent confused routing battle getting back to the hotel, noting in the meantime that no, a box-truck is not the optimal vehicle for exploring quaint local neighborhoods, I figured the Isuzu had run long enough for a good recharge in the battery. Fully realizing the potential[!] fallacy of this thinking, I swung into an out-of-the-way spot and did an experimental shutdown. On restart it was still doing some of the ka-chunk-a stuff and *barely* able to restart on a warm engine, so I was like "we need to just return this thing *now*" to Lucky on the phone and kept the truck running until we could. Leon was kind enough to accompany me over to Enterprise and then drop me back near my car. Out of Channelside for $90 instead of the $140-plus it would have been over at Laz, so that was pretty reasonable. At that point it was noonish, time to check out of the hotel and head for the last bits of load back into Storage. |