It recently came to my attention that a link featured in one of my previous articles now points to a rather lewd picture of some people engaged in an activity I do not wish to promote on this family-oriented journal. The offending link has been removed. That is all.

In this episode, we shall examine:

Stupid problems at work

Not being boring is against corporate policy.

Changes in the volunteer world

Wherein we learn that sometimes, people suck.

Becoming a better sound engineer

In which we discover that talent does not occur overnight.

A few photographs

With explanations. Thanks for work for the high-speed connection.

Stupid problems at work

A few months ago I got a ticket to go out and load some code into a label printer as part of a rather large project the hospital's IT department is working on. They're moving to an entirely new patient database system, and in order to make pharmacy labels print correctly, the serial output that the print job generated had to be captured and sent to the company that makes the label printers that we use. The excruciating details of my torturous time with this printer aside (Should any consumer ever have to use a "null modem cable"?), I did managed to accomplish this and a week ago, the printer company sent us the compiled code to print the new labels for us to load into the printer. It was here that we ran into another minuscule issue: nobody currently working in our IT department had ever loaded one of these files onto one of these printers before. Far be it for the printer manufacturer to provide any documentation on their printers or equip them with an intuitive file-loading interface, so naturally PC support was called back to figure out how to load the code. It took four hours on the phone, but when finally the answers I sought came hurtling towards me through hundreds of miles of space, like light from heaven, I realized that only one thing remained to do. Documentation.

I have to read a lot of technical documents during the normal course of my job. Most of them aren't written by people like me - people who think that reading colorless, uninteresting technical documents is not something to look forward to. So, naturally, when I get the chance to write something that another human being is going to have to read, I prefer to think that that human being did not wake up that morning thinking to herself "Golly gee, I sure hope I have to read several pages of mind-numbingly dull instructions today.". (That, and making waves is a sport for me.)

Anybody who knows the story of my self-evaluation knows how this is going to end.

I didn't get into trouble this time, though. I came right out with it when I handed my boss the paper, and informed him that I had created the documentation he wanted, and had done my best to make it fun to read. And it was at this time that I discovered a most remarkable fact: corporate types like conformity. Actually, I already knew this - but I (incorrectly) thought that maybe, just maybe, corporate stupidity would be rescinded for an inter-IT-world occurrence as banal as printer documentation. And I would be wrong. I was ordered to remove all the "funny stuff", with the official reason being that it "might offend somebody". How that might possibly occur is beyond me. Unlike my self-evaluation, I did not write it with the express intention of being offensive - in fact, I deliberatelyy re-read what I had written several times to make sure that my silly witticisms and jokes would not be likely to be interpreted as distasteful. But, no: we had to keep things "professional"...a term often abused by the corporate world - misconstrued to mean "monotonous; completely without any variety or creativity". The corporate types have it all wrong...the true professionals can be professional - perform above and beyond the standards of whatever they're doing - and still have fun. "Having fun" is not synonymous with being lazy or doing a shoddy, slipshod job. It takes an amateur to insist that everything conform to the rules.

Changes in the Volunteer World

As anyone reading this journal is probably aware, I put in a lot of volunteer time at my church, Point Of Grace. Most of the audio-visual staff is volunteers, all led by the technical director, Chris Timmons. Or, at least, he led until he resigned a week ago. It came as somewhat of a shock to me; I had no idea that he was considering leaving the church. The answers that he gave me for leaving hardly surprised me, though. Several of the reasons fall under one category, and that is a severe lack of respect for the position of technical director.

The TD does just what the name implies: the person filling the position is directly responsible for all of the audio / visual stuff that happens at a place - a huge, multimedia-driven house of worship, for instance. And many times at POG, I saw the pastors try to go over Chris' head and make decisions that were not theirs to make, or meddle in technical aspects of stage production that they didn't understand. For example, the two lead pastors recently took a trip to go look at / buy a new sound system for our new facility, and the TD wasn't allowed to go. Or the time Jeff Mullen (Executive pastor, and lead singer.) tried to make the monitor engineer make a list of the various levels for each person's monitors. (A stupid idea for several reasons.) There were other reasons, too: the musicians often play very loosely, making instrument separation a nightmare, the vocalists never knowing the words to the songs, the lead singer never knowing the words to the songs and insisting on a video monitor to remedy the situation. Jeff using the church service as a launching pad for his new Christmas music album, while trying to palm off the album as recorded live. (In reality, he sang to tracks recorded by a much bigger artist.) And so our TD left.

It bothers me when people in technical leadership positions aren't given the respect they deserve. The technical leaders in any field are frequently adroit, talented people who give a lot of themselves; sacrificing their time and energies for the greater good. These are usually people who believe that the people coming to watch deserve the very best that our technology can give them. It seems, however, that many pastors either aren't willing to listen to their technical people's advice, or simply disregard it. Stuff like going shopping for a new sound system without taking along the TD. Now that Chris is gone, I wonder what new responsibilities I'll take on - and what new problems I'll have to deal with.

Becoming a Better Sound Engineer

I received something very wonderful the other day. A compliment from Don Morris - who said that I had a good ear, and that I was listening to things much, much better than I was when I first started. And that started me thinking about the way I was when I first got into this field: naive, insecure, and with no knowledge of sound whatsoever. I think my greatest strength is my refusal to be daunted by the cold, hard, facts.

I credit my greatest weakness, my inability to even recognize a cold, hard fact, as the reason I've come this far.

When I first started, I was very insecure, and very stupid. (I'm probably still stupid, it'll just take me ten more years to realize it.) I had no concept of listening to what I was hearing. Of course I heard it, but active listening is a skill only acquired with time. In fact, most of the sound engineer's skills are only aquired through a lot of time, a lot of practice, and a lot of patience on the part of the person doing the training. I say "training", but that's not really how you make a good sound man. (Or woman, but I haven't seen too many any of those.) Training is useful, to be sure, but the only kind that matters is the kind where you're getting experience. Any training or theory provided in a class is just that - theory. It's important to teach up and coming sound techs that the only instrument they can rely on in their ears. (Early on, anyways. RTAs become incredibly useful after you've mastered the basics, but you shouldn't become reliant on them.) And there are so many other things to learn about before you can even be considered halfway competent: instrument separation is a great example. If you have no seperation between instruments, instruments bleeding into other instrument's mics, what you're going to end up with is an icky blur of aurally unpleasing mush, like a three-course meal thrown into a blender set to puree.

You must also know what not to do with the sound. Too many sound engineers I've seen (and heard) have only been interested in one thing: generating a wall of sound so loud that small woodland creatures explode, and pushing the bass guitar and kick drum lines to such terrifying levels that they literally feel like a punch in the chest. In music theory you are taught about something called "dynamics", and a sound mixer should not ruin the natural rise and fall of the music's volume. In fact, that's the number one thing to drill into the head of a sound engineer: it's about the music, stupid! The technology should be transparent.

A sound engineer / TD should also posses administrative skills, and be a good leader of people. This is another problem with many sound people in the sound industry, and especially front of house engineers: they're dicks. Yeah, they have people asking them stupid questions all the time ("Them Peavy speakers you're using?") and offering unsolicited suggestions about the sound. (For those of you who do this: it's almost always unwelcome, because we sound guys are so insecure.) But that is no reason to treat people the way many sound engineers do - condescending and thoroughly insulting. People deserve to be treated with respect, even if they know less than you do.

I seem to have meandered from my original point, which was this: becoming a better sound engineer is a process, and what I thought when I first started, that it was just pushing buttons and ordering people around, was incredibly ignorant.

A Few Photographs

I originally meant to post more pictures here, but I ruined half my roll of film on accident. I'll be posting pictures much more often, now that I can.

[sparky's rocket] This is my unfinished rocket sitting on my desk, waiting for a coat of paint. I have no idea what those white spots on the sides on the photo are. [Pretty colors!] A picture taken in Margo Frankel woods in autumn. I may end up using slower film - it's less grainy at high resolutions.

Also, Photobucket is very slow, and I am sorry.