Friday 3/18/2022
Went for a standard walk; it was fine.
At 10am I had a rehearsal for the event Saturday evening. This will be a “Sunday @ Home” which is a series of talks by residents on their life experiences. Stew is the event manager. Sally is the speaker for this week. Lennie got roped in to help with the zoom simulcast from the auditorium.
This is the first one of these simulcasts I will be responsible for. I’ve seen David M. do two, and David G. do another. The stress level is very high because it is complicated to set up. In this case, more complicated because Stew had put out advertisements (on the email BB and posted in the elevators) with a Zoom ID that was based on Lennie’s personal zoom account. Which meant that she had to be the one to sign in to Zoom to create the meeting. So this is the setup:
I put my old Macbook on the control desk by the stage, and plugged into it, the USB with the room audio. Lennie creates the Zoom meeting from her own laptop. I join the meeting from my laptop. She makes me the host. Now as host I can “Spotlight” attendees, making them stick for for all attendees.
I have another Macbook, actually my newer one, on which I have Sally’s slides as a Powerpoint file. I open them with Keynote (which opens Powerpoints just fine). From that laptop I join the meeting with my OTHER Zoom account (because if I joined with my usual Zoom account, it would log me out of the other meeting, duh, ask me how I know). At the other laptop I invite that laptop to share its screen. At that laptop I share the slideshow.
Now I put my iPhone on a tripod, facing the speaker podium. From the iPhone I join that meeting, using the zoom name “PodiumCam”. Back to the host laptop, I “spotlight” that user for all attendees. Now what every attendee will see, is the speaker’s slides large, and beside the slide window, a thumbnail of the presenter at the podium. And they hear the sound coming from the auditorium mics.
Now we put a lapel mike on Sally and give Stew a hand-held mic for his introductions, and … it all worked. Took Lennie’s laptop out of the room to check, and yup, audio loud and clear.
So all that was working by noon, tore it all down and cleaned up.
At 4pm I joined John and Francis and Marcia in the auditorium. This was their rehearsal for the LaDoris Cordell presentation on Monday. Similar setup by John, with three (I think) laptops in use plus an iPhone on a tripod for a view of the speaker. And that all worked.
At 5, I and Patty got in my car and drove over to Maples to see the NCAA Regional. Got there for the second half of #7 Kansas versus #8 Georgia Tech. Kansas won. Then #1 Stanford played #16 Montana State and just obliterated them. Stanford’s starters held the Bobcats to a big goose egg in the first quarter. The score was 23-0 when, 1 minute into the second quarter, Montana scored its first bucket. With a 40 point lead, Tara put in the bottom of her bench for the entire fourth quarter.
Got home after 9pm and went to bed.
Codgerville 