Wednesday 03/30/2022
The big deal today was a rehearsal of the Colby memorial on Friday. At the AV committee meeting I had agreed to do this one, with David G’s help. I never met Jean Colby; she had moved to skilled nursing before I moved in. The daughter was to arrive at 10. I went to the auditorium at 9:30 and did much of the tedious and complicated setup for a zoom simulcast. One laptop as the host, and its screen mirrored on the big projector. My iPhone on a tripod, logged in to zoom providing a view of the audience. A second laptop which would have the presenter’s powerpoint slides, and share them with zoom.
David G arrived and we decided to use his laptop to show the slides instead of my spare. Wilma, the Channing House Grief Counselor (whom I’d never met) arrived, then Betsy the daughter and her brother. Betsy had broken down the event into a full-page timeline, very organized. We copied her slide show onto David G’s laptop, and the music she wants played at the end, onto my host laptop when (after 5 minutes of fiddling) we found there was no way to get music from his laptop, into the auditorium speakers, but we could from mine. This is the kind of shit we fight through to do these presentations: you have to get the voices from the room speakers to zoom, the voices from zoom to the room, the music from the laptop to the room, the slides onto the big screen and also visible to zoom attendees, a view of the speaker to zoom, etc. So many streams of content moving in so many directions.
After a couple of hours we had worked through it all and everybody knew what was what and everybody left.
Except as I was going out, I met Jerry coming in, carrying a mic of his own. He had a theory about the supposed failure of the mixer board, so I followed him back in. Long story short, he with my help verified that the problem was not in the mixer board but simply in some loose connectors on a panel. Major coup for the residents, major fail for the sound consultants who were going to replace the mixer.
Had the afternoon free, and I printed a couple more pictures to keep the picture rails on my outside wall fresh. I like to imagine people coming down the hall to check out my pictures, but probably very few do.
Patty invited me to have supper with her and Oscar and Margaret, two fairly new residents. Oscar had at one point in the 1980s, a software venture, his products were file-conversion apps for micros like the TRS-80, to write data on IBM-formatted 8-inch floppies. Ah the good old days.
Codgerville 