Day 4

A rough panoramic: the "back deck" on the left ("Day 1" photo was taken by the tables and chairs towards the middle, and the stairs on the right photo lead to the upstage part of the main deck ("Day 3" photo was taken at the bottom of Wall #3 (by those extension cables)

It was cold again this morning, maybe I do need a comforter. I need to figure out how to sleep through the night, maybe it's the cold, or the restlessness of being away from home.

Or both.

One of my favorite parts of the day is talking to Caitlin. Just hearing her voice makes me smile, and we goof off and joke just like home. It's tough being two time zones and a few thousand miles away, and her patience and caring keep me motivated. I'm so happy to have her in my life!

After talking to Caitlin and getting into work, it was time to tackle the wiring issues we discovered yesterday. My main project was fixing the Stage Right wing video issues. The wing has a few individual video lines, and the stage manager's desk is in that wing, and it has several dedicated video feeds from the control room as well. One of the dedicated stage manager feeds must have malfunctioned last year, and one of the wing feeds was re-purposed for the stage manager. Unfortunately, we lose a lot of flexibility when we sacrifice a full wing feed, so I attempted to trace the malfunctioning stage manager feed.

I couldn't find the other end of the feed in the control room, either loose or patched into a video distro. I finally found it under the video rack with no connector on it. I put a tone generator on one end and tried to sniff the other with no luck. Somewhere the video cable is broken from the stage manager's desk to the control room. I've had to trace cable and conduit before, but this is a new venue for me, and it's so complex. I started pulling a track panel off, and received a call to check out the ELS audio monitoring system (ELS is Electronic Libretto System, every seat has it's own subtitle screen) in the ELS booth.  What do I do? I drop what i'm doing to check it out. And I leave all my shit out. No, I haven't learned yet.

The ELS guy (Aaron) and I take one look at this monitor system, and go "What. The. F." There's no documentation of how this works, or how it's wired. We spend about an hour trying to get signal from the overhead stage microphones, and it works, but we can't quite understand the signal flow. ELS also uses two more microphones for specific pickup, and they require power from the sound console to function.

I'm not going to go into crazy detail (one reason being I don't want to melt my brain again) but we were able to consolidate and simplify the entire rig, AND keep the flexibility, AND DVD playback (the conductor's camera is recorded for archive purposes). The redesign and rewiring took all afternoon, but i'm completely invested in making it work RIGHT, and DOCUMENTING the system.

I finally get the ELS system wrapped up around 5:30, in time to help set up the video/audio system set up for the safety meetings tomorrow morning. Simple projector and wireless microphone set up.   I got my (almost) last package today, which had my DVD seasons of "Weeds" (YES!) and my knife block. I celebrated by cooking some ground beef & mac and cheese. I mix fresh minced garlic when cooking the ground beef, and I think I used too much, because the kitchen still REEKS of garlic.

Oh well.