As we swung into the leading shoulder of another Arisia, the governing
theme of this convention had been set forth as "whimsy".
Which might help explain the background graphic for this page, but it had
also been an interesting year in between with some amusing notes along
the way.
Some of it was toward advancing our individual and collective abilities
and solving past-year problems, and some of was just weird fun.
So to first jump back through the year's high points a bit...
Lift cert
DMX everywhere
Analog again
My immediate logistics-hat question at this juncture was, "how is all that getting to the hotel??" knowing that Storage was well on the way to being even more loaded-down than last year, and it turned out that the loaner gear would be separately *delivered* and picked back up. As gear-tagging progressed, that meant Video's load going out of Storage would be slightly *less* this time around. Yay!
Sea of green
|
This drawing also reflects some fairly radical changes in our overall room
layout, and the topic of several intensive conference calls.
With video's big move to the other side and behind the airwall in
ballroom E, sound also decided to move the mix position to house left
and dispense with the idea of delay stacks, so all that remained on
house right was a spot tower and the show-caller throne.
Thus, the only wiring that had to fly over the big door woodwork this
time was two intercom lines and an MC go/stop signal.
Everything else could stay at ground level and run around house left, and
generous amounts of "yellow jacket" cable ramp were planned for to
protect it.
Having a second room with intercom extended into it was also a bit novel, as
it usually only serves only main tent, but video wanted the ability to shoot
some small-tent events with full switching.
With a possible total of 17 or 18 stations in play, I had to coordinate
additional gear supply from some other owners to fill it in and even
then it seemed like we were a little short.
Silly skills
|
Down to work
The usual "omg here we go" Wednesday morning arrived, which did not begin on a particularly auspicious note. One of the trucks had been delayed getting to the Enterprise yard and wasn't available quite yet, but they were hoping for it sometime before noon. That was actually okay, since in general I'd rather wait until after 9am to fight my way down 93 among all the commuters. I figured I'd just leave my car at Enterprise for the day [which they're totally okay with] and get a ride back to it somehow that evening after we were done. But the truck showed up sooner than expected anyway, and by 10:30 or so I was there independently picking it up while Lucky was already off at NESFA loading the first truck. Once he'd taken care of the paperwork earlier, he didn't have to be present for me to just show up and take the second one. Commercial rentals are nicely versatile that way. And what Enterprise handed me the key to was an almost brand-new Freightliner M2, with only 9000 miles on the clock. Very smooth-running, and the liftgate parts were actually *shiny*. My first challenge was to get the beast turned around in their yard without trashing half their remaining inventory with its big butt, and then figure out which way I was heading next. |
There are basically two straightforward ways to get from the Enterprise place in Chelsea back into Somerville/Medford. The somewhat more car-friendly way is up Eastern and Broadway to hop on 16 west to 99 down past the Schraffts building, but there's one tiny problem with that way. It's funny how one generally doesn't notice "no trucks" signage until it actually becomes directly relevant ... but there *is* one little no-trucks section along that route: the on-ramp onto 16 itself, highlighted here in pink. 16 and the roads leading up to it are all truck-legal, but that one short segment isn't for some reason. | |
The more common truck route goes down along Marginal and the other names that road turns into as it heads westward, because most of the industry and waterfront is along there. That road gets pretty beat up and bumpy as a result, and of course is full of trucks, and the wait at the light at the end of Beacham onto 99 can be long. One of the notable industries is Eastern Minerals, which supplies the road salt for hundreds of municipalities around the area. Boats arrive with holds full of it and cranes with big dredging buckets stockpile the stuff in giant mounds right there at dockside, "visible from space". |
It's somewhat ... whimsical, perhaps, to think about how we go into these
nominally "adult" activities with all the associated responsibility and
can still retain a certain childlike sense of wonder about it.
Not just wheeling big trucks around through daytime traffic, but heck, all
the other stuff we collectively do ... coordinating with vendors, writing
hotel contracts, juggling all the financials, and even our own relatively
orderly governance.
And it's all for a science-fiction convention, where the weird turn pro!
The fact that we can take on and even welcome this giant bubble of work
under a heck of a schedule is kind of amazing, and certain elements of
perpetual youthful enthusiasm may very well be one of the forces that
make it all go.
Even the fact that I can write about basically the same crap year to year
but fill it with new discoveries and philosophies is lots of fun, and
let's face it, ultimately all this is for people to have fun.
Toward similar ends, I am sometimes tempted to sink some coin into one of those "CDL mill" training schools, that for 3 or 4 grand will turn candidates into class A truck drivers. Just to do it, and learn about handling the full-size rigs. I've read up quite a bit on the subject and understand a lot of the mechanics, it would just be a question of the hands-on practice. Such a ticket would be of dubious real-life usefulness, however, as I'm not sure I could ever actually work *with truckers* many of whom aren't exactly the brightest lights on the tree. Regardless, a yearly opportunity to pilot the biggest type of truck one is allowed to drive without a CDL is a little exciting and terrifying all at once, but we're getting a little better and more confident about it. Reining in my brief self-congratulatory interlude at being entrusted with such things, my next destination was Arisia storage. Lucky was still at NESFA dealing with the substantial load there, which seemed like quite a bit more than last year and has raised certain future thoughts about common storage space shared by both entities. Hopefully our volunteers were reading the Twitter updates to know when to head over to Storage and help. My truck would start loading artshow and the other Galleria-side stuff, and as usual, some of the load coming from NESFA would also have to go into it once Lucky returned. It's kind of funny how Logistics has developed this two-sides/two-trucks model; if we're ever back in a venue with one loading area we're going to have to re-think a lot of this process. |
I had brought along my set of curb-ramp boards again to help bump a second truck up into the spot next to the dock, but we couldn't do the same slot-in trick as in prior years because the building manager's car was parked in the way [red arrow] and we couldn't find him. However, the handicap space and the one next to it on the other side were empty at one point and Lucky figured we might be able to wedge the rear of his half-full truck in next to the dock and still get the liftgates close enough together. The handicap-parking sign and some shrubbery were in the way of putting his truck in straight, but a 45-degree angle seemed more likely to work. |
Loading continued until just after dusk, and Lucky pointed out that
we couldn't actually head for the hotel *too* early because random BCEC
employee cars would be in the way where we wanted to snug the trucks
in for the night.
There's apparently a bit of contention for the space at the end of
Fargo Street these days, and the Westin security folks have started calling
for towing a little more often because the convention-center workers really
aren't supposed to park down there anyway.
Again, it's a City of Boston jurisdiction but basically nothing's going
to get towed out of there unless the Westin folks need it done.
Naturally, once we clear our own presence with them they're not about to
have our trucks pulled out of there, but it's all still a bit of a hack.
Lucky and I traded trucks for the hotel run so he could try the nice new one, and I took the older International he'd been given. That one had a much growlier diesel and a slightly wonky transmission, and seemed very sluggish on engine starting. He had just come back from a lot of lift-gate usage with it at NESFA ... nobody can blame us for being rightfully paranoid about batteries after last year's fun. But that truck was going to get returned after unloading the next day anyway, and perhaps Enterprise could then check it over. |
In we go
More design
Other than the intercom I didn't expect to be responsible for any significant design work or drawing production, but things got a little weirder in the week before the con. It turned out that David was still counting on me to captain the build of the floor-level power infrastructure -- he'd tentatively asked me about that back in April, but at the time seemed to think I'd be up to my ass in logistical alligators when that was needed and thus he'd have to ask someone else to pick it up. I later determined that I could move back to Tech as soon as the trucks had gotten meaningfully unloaded on Thursday, so his assignment wasn't that surprising. Daniel would handle the master-electrician aspects of the truss in the air, so it was a reasonable split of delegation. We had a text list of all the circuit allocations, but I again wanted something immediately visual for myself and others to work from. |
On the walk back from the Channelside lot I discovered a very cool bit of public art stretched under the A Street bridge, the deep blue of which isn't done proper justice by this picture. There's a better shot at the project's webpage, which also details some interesting history. The entire array gently twinkles, i.e. random LED nodes briefly fade up to full white and back down. |
Parking kept me offsite for about half an hour, and good progress had
been made on getting the truss rig put together when I returned.
Translating a design into real-life wiring always seems to get a little
confusing in the thick of things, and in an effort to study up on the
basic layout I had hacked up *another* drawing just so I could better
understand the routing.
Taken from David's
original SVG diagram of the truss layout,
I had moved all the unit numbers outside the outlines for better readability,
turned all the bottom-hung unit numbers red to see the upper vs. lower
chord assignments more easily, and then tried to lay in some q&d notion
of physical circuiting.
I wasn't intending for anyone to work from this, but printed a few to bring along anyway ... and they actually came in handy, as did having the text circuit list printed on the flip side, to augment Daniel's more formal large-print plot. I like having the visual representation of wiring paths, as it seems to allow better eyeballing of lengths, where others are comfortable enough working from lists of dimmer numbers and DMX chains. Even with all the cross-checking we'd been doing with each other pre-con, we still seemed to run a bit short on supplied jumper cables. | |
I had also given the whole rig a ballpark load calculation, and determined that our heaviest point would most likely be "B4" at around 600 pounds, well within the limits of PSAV's half-ton motors. Their guys didn't see any issues with the slight asymmetry from the center truss, and the hoists didn't show any signs of excess load. But it's still kind of amazing that those skinny little chains can safely hold all this up. |
Series 2 (new) | Lustr + (old) | |
We could work autonomously on large sections of focus, because the LED
fixtures have the handy focus-mode menu to turn them full on.
These were the new
Series 2 Lustr
units, a significant upgrade from
the ones we rented two years ago.
And they do the same fun trick when the lens barrel is removed.
While the shot of the old unit's matrix on the right is a bit washed out
by room light, it's easy to compare and see what changed -- the white LEDs
got replaced by something called "lime", and everything seems generally
brighter and punchier.
Note that where the array seems to mirror-image itself radially *is* its
edge; the image outward from there is from the hexagonal kaleidoscope
mirror inside the "light engine".
ETC claims they're getting twice the lumens out of these, making me
wonder what everybody [ALPS included] was supposed to do with the
Series 1 units they likely sank significant dollars into.
[Well, so I checked. ALPS wound up selling off that inventory, which still commanded respectable pricing, because the original series units are still fine for smaller venues that don't need top-of-the-line CRI. There was no low-cost "upgrade" path from ETC, as too many things were different about the new units -- everybody had to just buy new stock. That's the downside of how fast the LED industry changes.] |
The channel assignment chart seems to confirm that white turned into
the "twist of lime", and in certain color ranges they're getting more
lumens out of the LEDs than conventional lamps.
Best-case seems to be about 45 LPW plug-to-snoot, but that's after
all the drivers and optics and thus rather respectable.
And they don't throw video into fits; the incandescent emulation
looks fine on camera too.
Maybe we'll be able to use them with the cyc heads someday too, which look pretty sweet. |
After documenting the intercom layout to hell and gone such that anybody
with moderate clue could go build it, I wound up deploying most of it
myself anyway.
I suppose the more I talked about it the more others assumed that I would
handle it. That was okay, it didn't take all that long and I
kind of wanted to debug the process anyway.
I used several more Y-splitters than I'd brought, because z! made more
available, and I *hope* they all got back into his stock because being
black they could have looked like generic sound widgets and gotten
mis-packed.
Someone else set up the main power supply and wireless base on top
of the video racks where we'd talked of placing it, so I popped the
fancy head-end [also a station] onto the table by the video switcher
and brought all the other runs up to it.
The wireless system, a HME setup from z!, needed a lot of TLC as there was a bit of corrosion on the contacts of the beltpack battery-sleds even though they'd shipped empty. Perhaps from prior storage where batteries had been left inside? Anyway, I eventually got them working fairly reliably via scraping and doses of DeOxit, and loaded 'em up from the generous box of Procells someone handed me, but then found that one of the packs couldn't transmit back to the base and another channel was getting random motorboating interference once in a while. Well, two fully-functional wireless packs is all we technically need for the Masquerade, so this was manageable. Further minutiae about intercom inventory and battery management are in some email I sent about it post-con. Overall I was very pleased that the whole system worked quite well with no major issues over the weekend. What I missed noting down, despite z! asking at one point, was the correct switch settings on the wireless base for best clear-com system type compatibility, but it didn't take that long to work out by brute force. |
I didn't get any notable run-time pictures of anything for the remainder
of the weekend, in part because I'd stashed the camera in my little dump
of stuff in the Tech Depot and didn't think to pull it out too often.
I'm sure there are gigabytes of media from the rest of the con floating
around on the net by now; happy searching.
I will make a few minor observations here:
|
Things began to flow back out of the building.
Vendor pickups arrived, and our folks were steadily loading the
Arisia trucks as packed stuff appeared on the docks.
I switched back to my Logistics hat upon being asked to take a first load
and small crew over to Storage, which seemed all fine until we got there
and docked.
It took us a little while to remember that the "dome light" switch in
these Freighties is also the liftgate-enable, and that it also helps to
have the key turned one click over to the *left* -- apparently some sort
of "accessory" position that prevents the gate and the lights from timing
out in a couple of minutes.
Then we started to bring stuff upstairs, and I had the sudden and
dismaying realization that I wasn't qualified to lead this crew.
Here's an excerpt from the mail I later sent to Logistics: Monday night, however, I was on one of the early runs back to Storage and found that I had very *little* concept of how to route stuff in. My brain just sort of froze on it. Lia was mostly guessing and getting it wrong here and there that I managed to correct before it was too late, but for stuff that isn't tech or fast-track whose areas I might know the clear delineation of, I had no effing clue how to start on it. That's why I needed Lucky and/or Rick over there to send things in directions that wouldn't have everyone pissed off at *my* bad guesswork or make a total jammed-up mess. It also felt like we were way behind on Monday. As midnight approached we still had a boatload of stuff in Grand, and the next event had already started loading in next to us. I thought we should have been 100% out of there three or four hours before we were, but perhaps someone else was considering the midnight deadline and planning within those constraints. The other half of that problem was that it was mostly NESFA stuff, two or three times the volume therefrom than last year, and I *barely* managed to convince all concerned to *not* go over there Monday night and bang around with that large unload at 1 in the morning and keep the neighbors awake. I can't quite figure out why we seemed so righteously effed on Monday night -- maybe we weren't, but it all definitely had a less controlled feel than last year. It's really hard to not feel partial responsibility or flippantly think "not my circus" even if I *am* one of the monkeys, but I figured that guidance would eventually come. I dunno, it just felt like everything got done much earlier last year. Wrapup, and owww A nice sit-down buffet breakfast the next morning [high kudos to Lucky for pulling that together] had everyone in better spirits, but there was more work to be done. A few things still had to be pulled out of the hotel, but the NESFA truck was ready to roll and Lucky sent me off with it. Here's where the plan got weird: I needed someone to drive *my* car out of the hotel deck and over there too, as the most sensible thing seemed for us to drop off at NESFA and then simply continue up and return the truck to Enterprise. There are very few people I'd trust to pilot my ship, especially with the "video game" of the extra instrumentation in play, but fortunately one of said people was with us! Sandy had previously received her alternative CDL, aka Curmudgeonly Driving Lessons, and after a quick map review she then handily extracted the car out of hock and met us over at NESFA. While my truckin' chops were still in good form and the cold soda bottles had thankfully not exploded, the rest of that day didn't go quite as smoothly as I might have wanted. More from that same email ... So the Tuesday-daytime NESFA trip seemed okay to me, and gave me another crack at the birth-canal back-in to their driveway [got it in one!], and would have all ended up great had I not whanged my kneecap really hard on one of those heavy Pelican projector cases with all the goddamn little hard flanges sticking out on the exterior. So I'm about good for nothing until that heals up, if anyone was thinking of huffing a lot of things around at either location and wanted my help. |
An old idea made new again
While thinking about some of the past cons I've been involved with,
I remembered something that seemed to work really well for the jobs
at hand there.
Radios.
Not cellphones, and not cheap-ass unreliable FRS toys, but good
commercial grade units with a solid local repeater infrastructure
and multiple selectable channels.
With robust accessories like earphones and speaker-mics to make their
usage seamless and easy without having to fumble around.
More importantly, push-to-talk type radios would enforce a particular kind
of useful conversational dynamic that works best for these situations,
e.g. one in which someone talking can't be interrupted, and *everyone*
hears the results.
Cellphones or texts don't work because it's a single-point to single-point interaction that can take a leader's attention away from directing a group for too long, after which they have to relay the information to everyone else and hopefully get it right. In-person discussion often breaks down into too many side conversations with people talking over each other or ignoring the main flow, which *I* find profoundly annoying when we're actually trying to plan. Tuesday breakfast, for all its merits, was like that and I felt like we *didn't* have a solid plan for the morning until I forced people to go carefully back over it without interruption. Another great example came later on, after I'd fetched the Storage-bound truck off Fargo and bumped it into the dock. It would have been nice to just key up smoothly and easily while walking back in -- the present-day equivalent of tapping the Starfleet-emblem communicator on my chest -- to tell Lucky that it was there and ready to load, and everyone else on the channel would also hear that and could respond with additional information if they needed to. For example, perhaps an informational response like "great, Hale's almost packed and we're starting to move that stuff down now" from whoever happened to be in that area. You can't do that with a phone call, and when people working a job are scattered all over a facility it's a great help to still be in immediate and *brief* communication with them all. The ubiquity of cellphones has influenced our conversational styles in an arguably bad way, luring us farther away from a dynamic that would actually work in these settings. Them infernal little machines really is gonna kill us. Tech has had radio infrastructure in the past but generally just for larger spread-out facilities; when we're all in the same ballroom the in-person method works a little better but once in a while radios help there too, such as when trying to focus lights while sound check is going on. [Although wireless intercom may be a better specific choice for that]. For an area like Logistics or even Program A/V, I could almost see good radio infrastructure as an essential efficiency tool. The equipment and parts would have to be designed to not get in the way or risk getting damaged by fairly rough activity, and would preferably work in remote locations either via the same repeater or some selectable simplex channels for localized coordination. We totally *need* this. We need good radios, but more importantly we also desperately need the way that they force us to interact. I'm going to do a little looking around, and would be glad to hear any wisdom from others on the topic. Many of the hotel's own staff wear small voice communicators from Vocera, which are also quite popular in medical facilities, although they depend on local wi-fi infrastructure and thus likely wouldn't meet our more long-haul requirements. I'm sure outfits like Bearcom could offer us several options, but they're not the only player around either. What's available in modern rental systems, and what sorts of useful advantages and features do they have over older ones? Is the efficiency boost that radios can provide worth the costs in dollars vs. non-wasted people-points? I'm convinced that it is. Let's get a serious conversation going on this. |