Chris Espinosa:
The interior angle of the pizza slice emoji in the Apple emoji set 🍕 is 48.5556º, implying that the pizza was cut into a very awkward 7.4 slices. (Or that somewhere there exists another 48º slice and two corresponding 41.4444º slices)
It has been a while since I've hung any new posters. I was kind of paralysed by choice: what to put up, and what to take down. We're kind of in a one-in-one-out situation at this point. Though there are a few spots left where new frames could go, those are mostly up high or in shadow. In fact, quite a few of the posters are already in places where you can hardly see them.
Well anything worth doing is worth overengineering, so the first thing I did was make a map. I built a little web app, and manually replicated the sizes, contents and approximate positions of every frame for the 418 posters that are currently hanging.
From there, I can flag them as being candidates for replacement, and what I might replace them with. This also let me do some data analysis on what's up there, telling me things like which artists appear multiple times (do we really need 5 Nina Hagen posters, and 7 Thrill Kill Kult posters? Maybe not, but they're pretty good posters!) And it can show me a list of small posters in too-large frames, and so on. Plus, this histogram of which years' events are most represented on the wall:
The drop-off in that graph after 2014 is when "ad mats" really took over the world, as I complained about at the time. We basically never commission custom posters for shows any more, because it's expensive and we no longer have any go-to artists for that anyway, so we end up using the promo images sent to us by the bands' agents. And those almost always suck, making me not want to hang them.
Another thing that had been a big roadblock to updating these things was printing them out at larger than letter-sized, which used to require preparing and formatting a CMYK TIFF, uploading it to a print shop, waiting a week, sending someone to pick it up... But it turns out that these days it's possible to buy an inkjet printer that can print at 11"×17" or 13"×19" for under $300, and at shockingly high quality! This is a game-changer.
Anyway, now I've got a long list of candidates that are hanging up that I wouldn't feel bad about replacing, so as good posters arrive in the future, it will be easier to give them a home. But currently my list of "posters that are not hanging that maybe should be" is a pretty short list.
Dear Lazyweb,
Our webcast setup is incredibly flaky and it has proven to be beyond our ability to diagnose and fix. Further, everyone here absolutely hates dealing with it: "Go figure out why camera 7 has no signal". "I looked at it sternly and now it seems fine again for now?" It is not rewarding.
I would like to hire someone to Make It Go.
I suspect at this point we just have to work down the list:
So I'd like to hire someone with experience installing and diagnosing SDI cameras, particularly for the annoying "re-run miles of cable" part. Maybe someone who owns and knows how to operate relevant test equipment.
I am aware that the problem with hiring someone who knows what they're doing is that their experience is likely to be, "Well, when I did the installation for 50 conference rooms at a convention center, the first thing we did was buy cameras at $5k a pop, and a $90k video switcher, also there's a tech on site at all times, nothing ever runs unattended". So they may not be experientially amenable to my dive-bar IT department budget of "concert tickets and free beer". Fortunately, though, several people who sound like they know what they're talking about tell us that for the things we're trying to do, and the distances involved, SDI "should" work "just fine", so why we have to much trouble is a mystery.
If you want to volunteer, that's great too, I'll take it. But if I pay someone, then I get to say, "Hey, you said it was fixed and it's not."
Any suggestions for how to find this person?
And for those of you who are not inclined to crawl around in the rafters pulling cable... Just a reminder that our webcast -- which has been broadcasting 24/7 for two decades, and is at this point probably the oldest continuously-operating video stream in the world -- earns us zero dollars. Negative dollars, really. So if it is a thing that you enjoy (or dare we dream, would like to see improved) feel free to kick in a donation...
