Arisia 2016 had been a fair success, but we came out of it with a minor
to-do list of fixes and upgrades needed in some technical departments.
There were also a few lessons-learned on the logistics side, with
improvements always possible in the movement of gear and people.
We started taking care of some items only a couple of weeks after that con.
A second base-cart was also purchased during the year, to split one
of our heaviest single load items into two moderately heavy items.
I took this board and a bag of our LED pars down to Relaxacon that summer, and set up a small but entertaining "lighting workshop" in one of the spare rooms for people to play with. And they did! We could even watch the DMX waveforms on the new digital scope I'd also decided to finally splurge for. As we neared the end of 2016, however, it didn't feel like a whole lot of planning was happening even though the con-committee meetings had started up again. Maybe I wasn't on the right mailing lists? Or maybe we had gotten into such a groove with how we handled the con and the Westin, that we didn't need to angst about it as much. It was only very late in the year that things really started to move, at least from my viewpoint. What was different for me was a changing situation with regard to the parental units down south, and before I left for my usual December southern hiatus I made sure that the gear *I* would be supplying was already parked in Storage -- just in case unavoidable family stuff hit the fan and I couldn't come back in time for the con. A hard possibility to plan for, but in such cases kin comes before con. However, that eventuality did not play out and I was able to have my normal visit and get rolling northward on time, even if I left things in a sort of indeterminate limbo in the rear-view mirror. My stay had been productive and we got a lot done in the interim, so as far as anyone could tell I was clear for the con as usual. [Major family events waited until just *after* the con to occur, but that's a different story.] A couple of tech conference-calls happened over that month, but serious planning on the Logistics side didn't really start until I was *on* my way back -- I was on one of the calls from a motel room somewhere near Columbia, SC. Once again I found myself being a bridge between tech needs and logistics needs and trying to remind both areas of all the inter-dependent concepts and subtleties, which later became a significant topic in some post-con discussion about need for more "cross-department integration". |
One item that I needed to retrieve from Storage was another batch of intercom gear, to add to the inventory I had reconditioned the previous year. Jim from NJ was selling out his production stock, and it made sense for me to continue being the Keeper of Intercom in general. This batch needed similar vetting, although it was generally in fresher shape already and didn't need de-molding or full DeOxit treatment yet. Unfortunately, most of the headsets in this batch are the newer but flimsier 310 family from Production Intercom, on which the mic-boom swivels tend to irreparably break under minor strain. And the included pair of older but much sturdier 210-class headsets both had, rather astoundingly, dead microphones. How do you kill those?? Simple uncaring abuse by unskilled volunteer "helpers", said the prior owner when I ran into him later at the con. In the short time I had to go through thise gear I pulled out eight working station/headset pairs, including one more dual-channel box, and that was enough that I could supply the whole wired ballroom setup without needing to augment with anyone else's gear or get into major repair here. | |
We would still need to borrow the HME wireless rig from z! for the convenience of roving stagehands. That was already in Storage anyway -- it had pretty much stayed on the east coast the entire year, with a brief jaunt out to MAC2 over the summer. |
I had included a brief but heartfelt rant at the end of last year's report on the potential benefits of having good quality radios available for logistics and tech work. I kept pushing that point over the intervening year, and it turned out that Gela had gotten more into event radio support in general and had built up a very nice little kit full of Baofeng dual-band units. We tested these across the hotel during one of the concomm meetings, and found that UHF on 4 watts could connect between pretty much any pair of areas we would be in around the hotel. We didn't test them long-haul between different places outdoors, for which VHF might have been better, but they could cover our most important scenarios without needing any repeater infrastructure. She passed the whole kit off to me just before all the truckin' fun started, having bulk-programmed up a few simple business-band itinerant frequencies as selectable channels. | |
While usage of itinerants is largely ignored because they're in fairly common local-jobsite use, we could run 100% legally under an FCC license that one of our tech people keeps current. So my little dream of being able to reach up to a speaker-mic at my shoulder and coordinate with people on the fly was realized, and greatly appreciated. The radio kit essentially reverted to Tech for con run-time and then back to Logistics for the loadout, and overall we didn't use a whole lot of different frequencies since the specific usage needs didn't really overlap. |
Closer-in planning and preparations were made, and as email finally
started to fly in the usual ramp-up volume, I was on *two* back-to-back
con-calls for tech and logistics and began to think that really, we
need the Definitive Cross-Referenced Checklist for anyone who takes
on the Logistics burden any given year.
We were fortunate to have a couple of people who essentially came back
out of "retirement" to tackle it this year -- Kim and Kevin, at least
one of which *built* a lot of our shipping infrastructure back in the Elder
Days, in fact, and already knew how it's supposed to fit in a truck.
In a continuing effort to bring them up to speed on my own experiences
and sense of volume I pointed them at past writeups and emailed in an
embryonic seed of a general checklist which
should live permanently on some accessible Arisia-owned resource,
to keep updated with each year's lessons and changes.
Something to maintain on the staff wiki, perhaps?
Not google, please.
But we could solve the long-term problem later; the point was to get
*something* in front of eyeballs now and get this year rolling, so to speak.
Many Arisia members have no idea what makes our backend infrastructure work. For all they know, magic gnomes set everything up in the middle of the night and poof, the next day there's a con. I was made aware of an amusing chat between a mainstream attendee and one of our crew, and given a transcript, which is a fine example of what happens beyond the cognizant scope of most people who come to Arisia. ## Chat Log excerpt, Tuesday, January 10, pre-Arisia 2017That last point about shipping containers is almost well-taken, except that it would be impossible to pack gear into those and still be able to rearrange things pre-con. And it would still need to be in climate-controlled storage. But this year we had worked a little closer to a "pod unit" concept for some departments in the form of the rolling Metro shelf assemblies with bins stacked into them, and we were about to see how that would work out. I made sure to advise people moving those that any lifting of such units needs to be done by the POLES, not the SHELVES, to make sure that a shelf doesn't pull up and release itself from the little plastic wedges. If it's shrinkwrapped, it's okay to punch fingers through that to grab around a pole -- the wrap is going to come right off again at the destination, so minor damage to it along the way is fine. The fun begins! One of the usual hard problems is how to move our helpers around in the process of renting trucks and getting crews to follow them around for loading and unloading. Besides a passenger or two in the trucks, the usual answer is to pack them into available cars -- but *whose* cars, and how can those cars be kept easily available in non-optimal South Boston parking conditions? Never any really easy answers here. With this year's logistics heads living in the north burbs it was determined relatively convenient for them to pick me up on the way in Wednesday morning, heading for our friends at Enterprise commercial truck rentals in Chelsea again. Meanwhile Rick, who had been handling mountains of stuff at NESFA and was sort of back in the loop logistics-wise, picked up the second truck from Penske. We used *three* different truck vendors this year, which seemed more complex than needed but someone else was handling all that paperwork. For the "out" we'd evidently decided to take advantage of the fact that the Ryder yard is within walking distance of the hotel. A major factor in getting enough load-crew volunteers is that the timeframe for main load-up has shifted much more into the daytime on Wednesday, simply because we have so much gear and we don't want to be working until 2am when people get tired and stupid. But finding enough people who *can* be available from about 10am on a pre-con weekday is tough. Many folks who would otherwise love to help are at their day jobs, and might arrange to take any of Thursday/Friday off to start helping build their con, but Wednesday is important because we need to have *filled* trucks to unload when we get our hotel spaces on Thursday! Previous years when the activities began around 5pm often turned out far less favorable by comparison. Since I'm able to help in this regard, I generally do. |
So bright and early Wednesday morning, after a not-too-bad slog through
typical inbound commuter traffic on 93, I found myself back in the ol'
saddle again just like last year.
And it was shaping up to be a stunningly gorgeous day, for January --
clear with expected highs in mid-fifties.
I think I decided about here and now that shoes were simply not going
to be relevant to most of my weekend no matter what, even if things
got colder later on.
Anyone who is horrified by this picture needs to go read up on the facts, and understand why this is a *safer* way for me to drive a truck. Sensitivity to what controls are doing is always far better than klunking through the process in little podiatric prisons that can't feel exactly what's going on. Those enduring MYTHS need to be dispelled. | |
And I needed that fine control, too. This ol' girl was *very* squirrelly
on the air-brakes, especially when unladen.
After a lurching nosedive or two coming out of the Enterprise driveway,
I settled into delicately feathering that pedal and popping into neutral
at stops, and moving this beast almost as smoothly as the Prius --
the Prius which was about to spend the rest of the week sitting still
at home.
We had agreed that Sandy's car could become one of the people-movers, as either one of us could confidently drive it if needed, and neither of us had too much more personal stuff to bring to the con. Her turn to do the Channelside parking-lot hike, or something [although I'd be happy to as well if it made more sense at a given time]. Once she headed in to join the fray I'd also have a convenient ride home Wednesday night, and we would probably even have time for a decent dinner on the way up. |
Rather than getting what would just be a duplicate of last year's shot from Marginal St, I waited a little longer to spot this dump heading out with a load of salt bound for some far-flung municipality or the like. But with no impending storm warnings on the way, truck traffic along here was significantly lighter than I'd seen in past years ... I didn't have time to stop and admire the Eastern Mountains in any detail today, but noted there are some weird formations along some parts of them and maybe it's worth going back for a more leisurely look and photo-study. |
Enterprise had given us this truck with a tank heading toward empty, so Storage and its crew would have to wait a little longer while I stopped to rectify this. | |
Λ \`=== I wanted to come up with some sort of wise-ass witticism about that "idiot light" in the lower left, possibly reflecting on the qualifications of the present pilot, but today I was feeling pretty confident about things. I assume it's a just a placeholder in trucks not equipped with a jake brake, e.g. the thing that makes the loud farty noises when a larger truck decelerates using engine compression to dissipate energy instead of the service brakes. Lack of one here didn't stop me from yanking the automatic tranny down a gear or two on some of the downhills, which definitely helped anyway. It's interesting listening to how the control systems *completely* cut fuel to the engine while coasting at any appreciable speed, making the diesel rattly noises cease entirely until just before a full stop. For anyone curious about more trucking terminology, there's a nice concise Wikipedia entry on it. |
Working my way over to Storage felt almost routine, and I found myself
incrementally less terrified of the truck's size as I kept an eye on
where I was in the lanes and left plenty of room out front.
I wasn't worried about my routing, as we'd worked it out in prior years, and
I remembered where to swing particularly wide on some tight turns.
I also developed a better feel for how fast to crank the wheel to complete
that "J-shape" path and not overshoot, as the steering ratio is certainly
different from a car.
Backing in and dropping the gate onto the Storage dock nice and straight
also went pretty smoothly with minimal external assistance, and we were
ready to start moving stuff -- art show infrastructure first, as this
would be the Galleria low-side load.
The truck from NESFA wouldn't be by for a while yet, but would be full
of mostly high-side stuff with minor low-side content to transfer
truck-to-truck.
The significant difference in destination-based loading this year was that
Program A/V would be running out of the Concourse area, so basically
*all* the Tech stuff had to go there.
The landlord's white sedan parked in next to the dock never got removed, and in fact had apparently been sitting there for *weeks*. Maybe it was dead. My plea to Corporate for a way to contact him fell flat, so we simply wouldn't have the luxury of pulling both trucks in together. My "curb ramp boards" were thus useless, and could simply go back home that evening. |
It turned out that some sort of, uh, transaction had happened
between the city of Boston and the
MCCA
regarding control of that little section of Fargo St, and as we checked in
with the hotel security staff they warned us that the BCEC seemed to have
no problem arbitrarily towing vehicles out of there without even trying
to find owners first.
They could not give us any confidence that the little sleaze we'd been
pulling for a few years would be reliable any more, e.g. putting two
trucks to bed on the street might now result in one or both missing in
the morning.
Unfortunately we'd only contracted to park ONE truck in the hotel's
dock areas overnight, so suddenly we had to find somewhere else to put
the second truck.
And the previous event had a loadout scheduled overnight into a full-size
53' trailer, so we had to be mindful about where we put our one truck
to leave plenty of room for getting that in.
Longish painful discussion-in-Ops story short, Kevin decided to simply take the Penske all the way out to his house that night and park it in his yard. It would put quite a bit more mileage on our rental, but while he was okay with doing the drive out and back it was decidedly suboptimal. So, *Note for next year*: It would be nice to either contract for officially parking two trucks at the hotel on our shoulder nights, making sure to be out of the way of their other morning deliveries, or find some *local* place to stash an extra truck overnight even if it requires a little more convention-budget outlay. None of our usual drivers live locally enough or have appropriate parking space available to provide an easy free solution. With that problem nonetheless solved for the time being, Sandy and I headed out through the trailing edge of rush-hour, had a nice dinner to reward ourselves for a day's work well done, and took the opportunity to hang around on the internet for one more evening and catch up on the day's flurry of mail before we'd be offline for the rest of the con. I reflected several times that day on the large responsibility entrusted to our crew, in which we not only have to safely transit all of Arisia's critical possessions through an arguably risky urban environment, using all volunteer hands and drivers whose experience mostly boils down to doing this once a year ... we also have to interact with the hotel staff and be aware of their larger-scale needs so we can avoid impeding their non-Arisia day-to-day. Shipping and dock activity is a big part of that. With both trucks full at Storage that afternoon I paused at one point while walking past and just looked up at them, thinking "wow ... big toys, big job". It's the kind of thing that can give someone those weird little micro-dreams while just dropping off to sleep, which for me often involves vehicles anyway and is one of the things that keeps me humble with respect to roads and driving in general. More than once this week my brain would randomly construct some horrible traffic eff-up scenario involving an Arisia truck and its contents, whereupon I'd jerk back awake with my heart pounding. |
Load-in, or "a miracle happens"
But the hotel folks very nicely tried to accomodate this, and decided to move the dumpster somewhere else for us. This turned out to be far more difficult than they anticipated, mostly due to all the water on everything. |
I finally found my way back and into the ballroom, this time so late
in the day that the PSAV-call truss hang was close to done.
I had barely touched the thing at all, but things seemed to be well in
hand and running
on schedule.
[Just as well that I wasn't on that whole shift, I guess, as the tech crew was still under orders to play the same meaningless charade with PSAV again -- despite that their guys on the ground have certainly known about some of our working preferences for years and are fine with it. Personally I hate trying to work in china-flats, as they *hamper* my agility and I won't even try to do any complex climbing with them on.] |
For the most part I busied myself with building intercom instead, wrangling
up another couple of folks to help run cable.
The design was roughly the same as
last year's
but the branching could be a little different this time, because I had
put together
more splitters.
I made sure to install the "rehearsal table" feed along with, and
to lay in most of that bundle that could be quickly fished out from under
center stage and flopped onto a table in the house when needed.
Again, the triple shot over the door woodwork was done so it could
just flip off from the ground at strike, saving time.
I made a minor screwup here, failing to look carefully at my own diagram, and ran the MC "blinky-box" feed the wrong way. Fortunately I had a couple of turnarounds to sex-change it after the fact. |
I got very few "runtime" pictures, having wearied of carrying the
camera around and finally put it aside.
But the con was soon in full swing, and I'm sure that petabytes of
pictures by other people left the building over the course of the
weekend.
[Where are they? Send pointers!]
I took some minor tech runtime roles here and there, on a video camera
for a couple of events, and busked some fun lighting for Minus World.
I made sure infrastructure was in place to get Masq rehearsals going,
including re-gelling the followspot boomerangs that were still sitting
around unloved Saturday morning and then listening in on intercom long
enough to make sure things were running smoothly.
[The booboo *I* made that morning was failing to put David's gel crate
back in the Depot afterward, causing him to have to run around looking
for it. Sorry 'bout that!]
I debugged some DMX issues in dance-tent, and helped change out some color and gobos over there. My board seemed to be managing the lighting control in that room up quite handily, as they set up some fun wall-wash and truss-warmer sequences. And the infamous pony got to come out of retirement and proudly ride again, still looking as good as the day it was cut. I did a decent amount of LED staff spinning at the drum circle. Kat organized a "squee mob" surprise fan party for Greykell in the lobby, which was hilarious. I took note of the people handling program A/V running in and out, apparently happy to be in radio contact with Depot dispatch, but nobody poked me to help with any of that [although I did offer and suggest early on that our tech-community folks usually on main-stage and second-stage roles might want to fill in on program A/V once in a while if needed]. Perhaps we need to think about assigning PAV shifts at the meetings? I was on split-time video duty for the Geeky Bellydance, and managed to capture a few pictures during the first half [presented in a separate page, not here]. There were the usual evening parties and exotic libations, providing good opportunity to kick back a bit after our workdays. The hotel staff continued being generally awesome for us throughout, although Saturday evening I did receive rumor of some objection from on high to the *many* bare feet happily running around. Origin of this seemed indistinctly attributed to the hotel's new incoming corporate overlords, rather than the local staff. Source aside, it was rather reprehensible to start pulling this on our members as a *mid-con* surprise, not to mention flat-out discriminatory human rights infringement. While I wasn't specifically targeted, such arbitrary and unfounded nonsense has to simply stop across the board, and I've got some constructive ideas in that direction which will require Marriott/Starwood/whoever coming up to speed on some basics first. It is high time for this, because many more of our harmless lifestyle choices and values are becoming solid social memes. The *last* thing we need is for Arisia to turn into another Balticon, after so many years of our constructive working relationship with the Westin. |
I took a camera-op position for one of the "Mrs. Hawking" runs, which made it a little interesting to try and keep track of the plot while watching most of it through a 4-inch monitor with one ear covered. But this group is fun to work with; they're very dedicated and energetic, and put on a high quality production without much help/intervention from our crew. They build and move all their own sets, and getting their lighting sorted out was all of 15 minutes of their production manager sitting down with Daniel to whip up and record some scenes. It was interesting to listen to their intercom chatter during some of the show runs; their cueing is tight and accurate and their backstage folks were clearly adapting competently to our stage environment on the fly. |
It didn't take too much gear-Tetrising to clean up for the airwall opening
when C/D/E became the Masquerade greenroom Sunday night.
A little pipe-n-drape got wrapped around video again, and a nominal wall
of cases lined up in front of the Depot, leaving the Masquers plenty of
room to hang out and watch the show on a big screen.
Things were a little rough with both a new show-caller and a new MC involved
in the Masq itself, but they got through it with reasonable recovery and both
the live event and the replay later looked gorgeous over Arisia-TV.
The official Masquerade photo repository appears to have landed here:
|
After the Masquerade was over, we needed to do some token bit of strike to get
our stuff out of the way of PSAV bringing the truss down in the morning.
But when I took a quick tour through main-stage later that night, nobody was
around and things like the drape-line hadn't been touched yet.
Our official call to clear the path was something like 8:30 am but PSAV
often came on these calls early, and they'd still need to work around
our setup to hook the motors up again. I went ahead and pulled down
the relevant parts of drape and moved the PA speakers aside and generally
made sure things would be clear for them before heading for bed.
We also had a larger-scale idea in the works -- in an example of early attempts at better integration between Tech and Logistics, we [a very loose "we"] had cooked up a plan for the Monday strike and loadout. The intent was to collect as much of the *large* tech gear that could be packed quickly and get it onto a truck as a "short load", to be taken back to Storage on a quick trip using a skeleton crew -- just to get some large-volume stuff out of our way before the main truck-loading. |
The man behind the short-load plan was Dan, who was going to be the main
loadmaster and a driver for the "out" but had fallen rather badly
ill over the weekend.
We didn't actually have an explicit plan B, but it seemed to fall to some
combination of JWeiss and me to become the "stunt Dan" and step into
that role.
JWeiss kindly did the walk down D St to Ryder that day to fetch
the second-second-truck which would handle the NESFA load, and I stayed
on the Storage push.
I still had to get the tech gear under my direct purview all counted
and packed before I could really break away to play with trucks, and I
would still need at least one of our leaders who had studied the Storage
layout in sufficient detail to come along and correctly route things
back in over there.
So my weary brain was being pulled in several directions that morning,
and some minor too-many-cooks disagreements were going on about optimal
paths of action -- which left our otherwise well-intentioned volunteers
distractedly cross-conversing or sitting around socializing instead
of being efficiently directed toward work.
Eventually the Storage truck was full enough and we scraped up a crew with a couple of cars available and headed over there, and it was difficult getting into the dock because someone had left an extra car in the Green Cab driveway across the street that we *have* to nose our trucks into to get aligned properly. I managed to come up alongside the obstruction and take a couple of wiggles to line up, but it was dark by then and not particularly easy. Perhaps we should notify Green Cab and the farmers-market folks in the same building of our target activity days too, so they can try to keep things clear for us if they can? By the time we got back to the hotel there wasn't much left of the Dead Dog, which I hadn't really counted on making anyway, but Noel semi-forced Sandy and me to actually sit down for a while and eat. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing. Our next problem was where to park the now-full NESFA truck overnight, with one idea being to coordinate with the neighbors and get clearance to simply park it in the NESFA driveway until morning. I don't think that happened, though; from what I understand Rick simply dumped it in legal non-metered parking [!surprise!] over on E street and walked back. Is that A Thing?? I asked, and the answer was that it was legal albeit a little sketchy and without any guarantee of available space. We really need to codify the truck-parking issue for next year, because all this guesswork is eventually going to screw us. Bigger trucks than ours constantly serve events all over Southie, and they must have some workable solutions even if it involves throwing a little money at the problem. I did find one potentially helpful document with some info about which local parking facilities can accomodate trucks, but they'd have to be specifically researched in advance. One idea floated post-con was that the scaffold could be one early short load, and save us a few bucks with Marr on pickup. It would require knocking all of that down first thing in the morning and getting an appropriate brute-squad to run it out to the truck, but it sounds reasonably doable. We *did* do our own return in 2015, but had loaded it the previous night. Oh, and for the record, Marr had picked out a *beautifully clean* set of work-tower parts for us this year -- it all looked brand shiny new, in fact, no construction grit at all ... even the wheels were still in their original shipping boxes and outgassing like crazy, like the ones for that gridwall cart I bought a couple of years ago. Cheap chinese rubber formulation, full of VOCs. |
I opened my eyes Tuesday morning and beheld this out the hotel window, which just struck me as sort of aesthetically artsy even with the translucent sun-blocker screen in the way. It would be another nice day for our remaining load-out, albeit a little chillier, with a mild threat of rain much later in the day. The hostess at the in-lobby restaurant understood my quite honest plea that any shoes I owned were packed into crates and miles from the hotel at the time, and let both me and Sandy in to join the rest of the crew for breakfast -- not an issue. I got a little food in me and then started getting restless -- it seems that the non-operationally-related chatter over these breakfasts always goes on too long, when people need to get moving on finishing up the con. | |
We were down to the little leftover dribs and drabs left to collect from
around the hotel, and once again the radios were reasonably useful in
getting that done.
There was a bit of cellphone chatter when needed, but it was a decent
balance and once we started getting off-property and more scattered,
radio usage tapered off.
The Enterprise truck made one more disgorgement at Storage and then
Sandy and I returned it, and whoever was left converged at NESFA to
finish putting that load away.
Rick was there overseeing, so last year's disputes over proper
disposition would be avoided, and we made sure to bring back all
the loaned-out bits like padlocks and ratchet-straps.
Thought was already going into the Boskone load the next month, which is
something else to remember as another factor affecting Arisia logistics.
Really, like I discovered with lighting design over past years, logistics as a department is well over 50% a people-management problem. That's one reason I could never do it at that level, as the frustration I always feel from seeeing people working inefficiently or not at all would not end well in a leadership position. I'll deliver plenty of hints and knowledge and energy from the ground, where I'm clearly at my personal best for the benefit of the con, but I'm still quite certain that others need to shoulder the realtime administrative roles. Still, I also want to see institutional memory preserved better than we have been, so things like checklists and summaries of prior experience really need to be maintained and available on Arisia-specific resources for anyone who expects to become a knowledgeable leader. The issues we continually face are clearly reflected in several prior-year reports visible on the staff-wiki Logistics area [requires login], through which runs a recurring theme of understaffing, unclear direction, poor communication between departments, lack of crew-shuttle vehicles, per-department delays in packing and tagging, and desperate half-ass eleventh-hour solutions. Our stuff eventually gets where it needs to, but too often due to extraordinary measures. These are the factors that rapidly burn people out who try to hold Logistics together, and we really need to get a better handle on that in general. Small isolated improvements seem to happen each year but along the way other key points are easily forgotten, and there's no concise well-organized repository of all the collected information that doesn't require tedious digging-around to find. I'd like to work toward improving that, pulling from extant info on the staff wiki and elsewhere and consolidating it -- several years' worth of debrief notes, and elements from my own reports. The official, one-stop "Arisia Logistics Manual" would be nice to have as a well-maintained living document, available and accessible to everyone. |
[Background theme inspiration is twofold:
by Pink's continuing development as a determined barefooter, and
by all those "pussy strikes back" hats at the inauguration protests]