Wednesday 03/27/2024
Since I needed to meet someone at 10, I took a fast 2-mile walk on the treadmill in the gym. But a walk nevertheless.
At 10 I was to meet with Barbara to train her in the use of the lecternette. The reason was, that she wants to schedule five, count ’em, five “fireside presentations” in the month of April. For these events in the lobby (by the fireplace, yes) she wants an amplifier and mics. And I just couldn’t see adding five events to the AV team schedule. So I more or less told this intelligent, mobile, ex-grade-school-teacher, she could learn how to do it herself, or do without.
So before we met, I thought through and printed up a step by step checklist of how to get the device out and set it up and put it away. The checklist had like 25 steps. Which seemed like a lot, but I told her, you’ve been doing laundry all your life, right? Well imagine you have to teach a smart person who’s never done their own laundry, how to do it. There’s a lot of steps if you think about it. This is like that: simple once you know it, but long to explain.
So we went through the process, checking off each step, and it all worked well and she said I was a good teacher and she feels ready to do it on her own.
Then at 1 I went in the auditorium to set up for our monthly AV team meeting. There was a full agenda. I set up to show the new lighting for the podium, and how to show DVDs and Blu-Rays right from the AV desk, and how to set up a monitor speaker — I had presented on that last July, but nobody claimed to remember and there’s a concert tomorrow that might need one — and then we sat down and debated what I should ask Rhonda for, when we meet in 2 weeks to discuss how to spend Heritage Circle money on the auditorium.
This was a lively discussion, with plenty of opinions. But one really good idea emerged. A long standing problem is that, because our auditorium has a flat floor, when they show movie or opera DVDs, with the closed captions on, people back of about the 3rd row can’t see the captions. The heads of people in front block the lower edge of the screen. The solution proposed for this in the past was what we referred to as “side screens” — large monitors that would be mounted — somehow — on the walls. Rhonda has expressed opposition to this idea mainly on the grounds it would be ugly, but also on the grounds of expense: mounting a jumbo screen above the side-aisles and running wiring to it would be pricey.
The idea that came out today was, why not replicate our existing mobile TV. We have an 80-inch Samsung on a rolling cart, with ZoomRoom hardware, and it gets frequent use. If we had one or two more — and if their carts were a foot or so taller — we could position them in the aisles and show anything on them. Particularly, the ZoomRoom, which we are very familiar with, would allow us to put content on them wirelessly.
Codgerville 