So, it turns out a gig of swapfile is what WordPress needs to not crash SQL all the freaking time. A GIGABYTE.
I was approached today at Ugly Mugs by a reporter for Fox news, who wanted my opinion on some people at the EPA who racked up $20,000 in frivolous purchases at various places, and wanted my opinion on that. “That’s distressing if true.” I replied to her question of how I felt about it, but I hadn’t heard of this, and declined the interview, because generally I’m not really comfortable commenting on something until I have all the facts available to me. So I did some checking, and it seems that this transgression actually happened. What I wish I had said at the time was that the $321 billion dollars of military equipment that the states of Tennessee has acquired over the past few years distresses me far more than being on the hook for $20,000 spread across the population of the entire United States. But given Fox’s particular political leaning, I doubt they would have aired my segment. Oh well. Hopefully The Tennessean asks me instead of Fox next time.
This week marked my very first shows at the Grand Ole Opry, though it wasn’t for an Opry show per se, it was a private event that my main client was playing at. The first show went very well – I rolled in, programmed some punt pages for the songs that I thought he’d play, and everything was fine. Then – horrors – he decided that he wanted his media content at the second gig. And that’s when things went all to hell.
Bit of backstory. This particular artist has a long history of making music videos, and was sort of pioneer in the field of country music videos. All of his content is his music videos, and he’s singing in most of them, and part of my job is to make sure that the video content is synched up with what he’s singing on stage each night, to prevent the videos from looking like a poorly-dubbed Japanese film. How difficult is this? Predicting how protiens will fold is probably a little harder, but not much. Syncing video like this, manually, without SMPTE timecode or a click track – is the video world equivalent of a Millennium Problem, except without the million-dollar prize or national math-geek acclaim. It’s important to note that during my show, because of the difficulty involved, I programmed the show so that lighting cues fire the video cues, so I don’t have to keep track of two cuelists at once. I also have an audio feed that goes to my com headset by way of a custom-made dongle so I can hear the drum count-offs and hit the cues at the right moment. Now the problem with doing this at the Opry was…I could not use my console and my cuelists to fire the video. At least, not directly. The grandMA console is large and unwieldy, and it wouldn’t fit into the control booth that I had to control the house rig from. I couldn’t network the house and my console together, because I was running the latest software and the Opry console was not, and they weren’t willing to update their entire MA network just for my show. Patching into their system would have required that I patch their entire rig into my desk (some 100+ fixtures) and make them take their desk out and put mine in, since all their conventional fixtures were on a separate desk. A giant hassle for one show. So, my solution was to network my laptop into my console – which was sitting next to the media server in another room 20 feet away – and fire the cues that way. So picture this: controlling a full-size grandMA from my laptop, next to another grandMA controlling their house rig, with the conventional ION desk sitting beside that. Also, there’s a lag in their video system AND a lag in console network from the time I hit GO+ on my laptop to the time it actually fires from the desk. I have the drummer in my ears, and also a radio on my collar so the production manager can scream at me, and also a spotlight combined with the camera guys com headset, and also no freaking set list. Asshole firmly puckered for the inevitable shirtstorm to follow, I call for house lights. Oh, and to match the house screen, I had a cuelist that needed to be restarted for each song to resize the video properly. Because reasons.
This is a lighting recipe for disaster.
So five minutes before the show I get a set list, and also I knew what the first song would be. I nail the first song perfectly, Artist Guy’s virtual and meatspace lips in perfect synchronization, birds are singing, all is well in the universe. Then the next song does what we in the biz refer to as “calling an audible”, or as a less-polite person might say, “veering wildly fucking off course”. Luckily, the next two songs he called were two of the few songs that doesn’t require synchronization, so that drifted by perfectly, though I was a little bit late getting the media started. But then came the question: would he do the number of songs he was contractually slated to do, or more? More importantly, would he skip the one he already ignored, or do it anyway? Turns out, he did it anyway, and it’s one of the songs that I have to hit on exactly beat 5 (though in this situation, 4, to compensate for the combined delay in the various systems) to make work. In a tour situation, this is very feasible – he normally sticks to the set list, and I set up my macros in sequential order so that they make sense and I can recall them very quickly if something goes off-course. Here, I’m shoving a mouse around a virtual representation of my console – muscle memory is worth exactly zero – and I’m hovering over the two songs I think he’ll do. He calls the aforementioned must-hit-exactly-one, and without any of the preamble he normally does, launches it. I had no chance to start the video on the right click, and in my haste, panicked. Panicking, you see, is bad, and though I rarely do it during a show, everyone has their off days, and this was mine. Track starts way, way off time. I call into the headset for the house guy to take IMAG instead of our content to the screen, simultaneously my manager starts yelling over the radio, asking why our video just vanished. While trying to answer him, I realize the lights aren’t up. I actually made a cuelist for this song, but I’m panicked, so finding it takes me longer than normal, and by now, he’s already on the chorus. I punch the proper cue number and the lights swing wildly into position, while the manager has started yelling at me about the lights. Finally, during the second verse, the song actually looks like what I programmed. And I am furious. I feel as though I’ve been set up to fail. To Artist Guy, the media server is like a magic box that video just…comes out of. He doesn’t understand that in special situations, I need more time to make adjustments on the fly, and the syncing thing is very, very difficult, and I rely on memorization to hit things correctly, and all that was simply not possible in this situation.
Thankfully, while somewhat yelly in production situations, PM didn’t actually give a crap when I went to talk to him about what happened after the show. If I could do it over, I’d probably just bust my ass to reprogram the entire tour using the house rig and shoehorn my console into their system somehow. This would take days of time so I’d have little sleep, but the results would probably have been much better. Live and learn, I suppose.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks