Friday 03/10/2023
Took a walk over to Town & Country to buy a pound of coffee at Peet’s. Then got to work on three projects, two I’d been putting off, and one that just came up.
The one that just came up is, an email from Zoom noting that our pro account we use for resident-sponsored events was coming up for renewal. We got this account a year ago, when we had conflicts with staff-run events. We needed a paid account so that we could have meetings run any length (the free account cuts meetings off at 40 minutes) and we paid a whopping $800 extra to host meetings with more than 100 attendees.
This account has been used heavily by everyone on the A/V team. But as far as I know, we’ve never had more than 50 participants on Zoom. So I put out an email to the A/V team asking if anyone knew a reason to renew that large-meeting option. By evening several had replied saying, dump it.
Second pending issue was to update the event-setup checklist for showing movies. I’m going to help Chuck H show an opera DVD Saturday. I have hopes of getting him well enough trained he can do it on his own. To that end I need a clear checklist. We used the previous checklist last month and I noted several changes to make.
So I edited that and sent him a PDF so he could review it, and I printed a paper copy and put it on a clipboard ready to use tomorrow.
Finally I turned to documenting our stage lighting. We have a black box for controlling the lights on the auditorium stage. It is literally a black metal box with lots of buttons and sliders, and also figuratively in that nobody understood it. Last month it stopped working, or seemed to, and then only four of the eight sliders worked. Bert investigated, and found some info. He tracked down the manual for the box online, and figured out that the non-working sliders were due to a breaker that got thrown during a power outage last month.
I did some more research, I read the manual, figured out the technology, and today made up a three-page document with photographs and a diagram explaining it so the black box is a mystery no more. Here’s the diagram I made. There are eight sliders and these are the lights they each control. I used Open Office Draw.
Codgerville 