Friday, May 29, 2009
The AUMC tech team has always used the bulletins for our order of service. We would just grab one of the folded bulletins that goes to the congregation and we would use it to know what is coming up next in the service.
I hope to end that practice.
I have made a "breakout", a sheet that is designed just for the tech guys to know what is coming up next in the service. Take a look at it and tell me what you think: Link.
Matthew
Saturday, May 16, 2009
OK, yes, Friday I spent eleven hours cleaning the sound booth. What can I say? Not only am I a neat freak, but it needed it! We started installing equipment last summer and we have had 6 Sunday services in there (not counting Holy Week services), and the room has never been cleaned more than vacuuming and emptying the trash. So while you can argue that the 11 hours is a bit much, you can't argue that it needed it. Plus, I like to do a deep clean about once a year, just to shake out all the cobwebs.
WARNING: For most people, this post will be long and boring. It has no real information in it, it is just me talking about what I did for 11 hours, and it has a lot of purdy pictures. I am posting it here because I apparently have too much time on my hands, and because I enjoy reading about similar things that others do, so I assume that others will enjoy reading this. So read on, if you are so inclined. Oh, and of course clicking a photo will get you a larger version.
The "Great Cleaning of 2009" actually started on Thursday, before the Kingdom Kids (AKA: preschool) graduation. I zip-tied the wires going to the camera together so that they look all purdy. I have no before picture, but:
This looks great, and it will work wonders when you are running the camera, the problem will come in when I want to take the camera somewhere and I need a power source... I just need to buy a separate power source for occasions such as those.
Moving on to the computer. I wanted to move all of the wires that run to the computer from one hole in the counter to another (from the hole by the video rack to the hole behind the sound board, look in the second photo below, you will see the grommet that I wanted to run them through), but alas, several cords weren’t long enough, so I wasn’t able to. Here all I really did was wrap the cables.
As I said, I did the above Thursday evening. Friday afternoon I showed up just after 2 PM (I had to wait for Sonic’s Happy Hour) and I got to work on the main rack.
I spent time dusting off the rack and vacuuming under it. I also brought some of those pads that you put under furniture that makes it easier to move and put them under the rack, so it is now easier to slide on the carpet [we have to slide out the rack if we want to open the back door]. I took out the PC and used a can of air on it (it needed it!). I also put a left over pice of black poster board in the bottom of the rack so that now the PC sits on that and not the carpet... makes sliding around easier. After strapping a few wires down, it was done.
Next came the back of the video rack.
This was just a matter of grouping cables together and zip tying them together. Also, there are some extra cables for the switcher, IE: a VGA cable in case we ever need to hook up a laptop. These cables are Velcro-tied together for easy access.
At that point I moved to the other side of the sound booth and did the audio rack.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The one thing I did extra here was I moved all of the wires out of one hole and through another hole in the counter (note the hole in the above photo is in the corner, and the hole in the photos below is by the window). This allows the rack to be closer to the sound board, letting the sound guy have easier access to it. I was also able to remove three cables from this area (note two of them in the photo above) because when we installed the audio distribution amp we ran several replacement wires and the old ones weren’t needed any more.
Now you are starting to see how much of a neat freak I am. With each of the racks, I wasn’t just cleaning, I was doing a deep clean and re-orginization. IE: I am organizing wires, dusting everything off, cleaning the counter, and using my can of air like Bruce Willis uses guns in a Die Hard flick. In fact, I am such a neat freak that I had to reorganize the wires in the back of our audio board:
Did this need to be done? No. But it makes me feel better.
So at this point I had done pretty much everything above the counter, which left below the counter. And below the counter needed a lot of work! I worked each section (between each support for the counter) one at a time, down the row.
Of note: I had a great (well I think it was great) idea to help with cable management: I bought several dowel rods, zip tied them together, and they made one long cable support underneath the entire counter. So all down the line I zip tied cables to this support, and it helped achieve a great clean look. You can see the dowels in the photos below.
Not to be constrained to the sound booth, I also did some work on the choir mics:
The hard work was done, but I still had plenty left to do:
After a thorough vacuum and final dusting, everything was done!
(with the iMac running AppleJack)
I even had a visitor on my way out the building:
And THAT is how you spend 11+ hours cleaning a sound booth. I still need to do some work to the back of the TV in the foyer, but I need someone else to help me take it down and put it back up. Maybe next week...
Matthew
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Last week I ordered a My Book Studio 1TB external hard drive and it came in today. So of course I had to spend time today updating the firmware, formatting it just how I want it, and setting it up.
Right now I have it partitioned into two halves, one for backup and one for archiving, but while driving to my day job today I decided to change that up slightly. The way I set it up this morning there is no backup of the archive. If the drive in the My Book fails, then we loose our entire archive. (The "archive" being a folder with every PPT and audio file that we have ever used."
So I am going to change it so that one partition of the My Book is backup (using Time Machine), and the other is video storage for the many gigabytes of video that I am recording. (Compressed, each Sunday is about 10 GB.) This will allow there to be two copies of the archive folder (one on the iMac, one on the external drive). This doesn't provide a backup for our videos, but they don't need a backup as they are just a "novelty", they are just to have in case someone wants a DVD.
The other good part of this system: Once a year I buy a 500 GB hard drive (cheap these days) and dump the previous year's videos onto it. That hard drive now gets stuck in a back closet somewhere, and we never have to loose any of our information.
OK, I know at this point I am rambling, but can you blame me? It is 3 AM, and I need to get to sleep. I hope you enjoyed reading about the new hard drive as much as I enjoyed typing this post.
=: >
Matthew
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Hey all,
Sorry about not updating the blog more. I keep trying to normalize my life, and I am getting varying results... but that is a post for my other blog.
We got the new audio distribution amp installed. This will help greatly in... well, distributing our audio. See, we were having problems with our many audio needs in the booth, we have: CD recorder, hearing assistance device, camera, iMac, PC, and TV, all that need audio from the board. We were having problems getting the right audio to all of the components, so now with the new amp those problems are solved. Now, instead of having four mixes going to different components (and not really doing a good job at that), we now have one mix that goes to the TV (so that we can play a CD on the TV and not any where else) and one mix for everything else.
So as it stands, we only need a few more wires and the booth will be as complete as I can get it right now. The only other pice of equipment I would like would be a wall mount for our camera, but that will have to wait for now. I am getting excited to say "Done!" on the sound booth. I am thinking about having a pizza party or something, a guy's night out or something... I will keep you posted.
On a different note, I have a note for the sound booth volunteers, of which I already out e-mails, but an additional reminder: Please e-mail me your schedule until the end of the year. (That sentence was much harder than it should have been!) I am trying to create a schedule for Sundays for the next few months, and I need to know when everyone needs off.
Also, for anyone who would like to contact me, feel free to e-mail me at Matthew(at)ArgyleUMC.org. Other forms of communication:
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Or, check out my bio page at the Argyle UMC website.
Matthew