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[acidfree:414 align=right size=200 title=”At the Dog House on Friday night”] This weekend definitely stomped me in the energy department; I’ve crashed into bed so hard these past three days from physical exhaustion, it’s not even funny. The good news is I have been sleeping like a baby. And, come to think of it, I can’t say there’s really any bad news at all from this weekend.

Read on for news about the busiest weekend I’ve had in a long damned time…

Friday Night’s Karaoke Show

The weekend started early Friday afternoon with a visit to Starshine Karaoke to visit with friends and pick up a few last-minute adapters and cables. Naturally, I completely forgot about any kind of video cable of any usable length, and this will play an important role in the tale a bit later on; remember this nugget, for we will all laugh at Will later about it.

Around 6:20pm, I pulled into my friend’s driveway in Palm Bay to pick up the sound equipment (he stores it in his garage, since it’s compact, easy to keep it all in one place, is in a safer neighborhood (despite its seemingly alarming proximity to my hapless ex-roommate’s house), and closer geographically to all the gigs I’ve been gunning for since I moved here.

By 6:45pm, everything was loaded in the truck and ready to rock. I headed to the Dog House and arrived at 7:00pm — seemingly very early, but, as it would turn out, what ended up being the perfect time to show up.

I had all the sound and computer gear up and running within about 30 minutes of arriving at the Dog House, then I realized — no video cabling long enough to drive my television plus the one mounted up by the ceiling (for the audience to see). One frenzied trip to Radio Shack later (overpriced bastards, by the way … hope they don’t sue me for saying so), I had the cabling I needed, and it was back into the rigging.

By 9:00pm, the lights were up and running, the sound system was ready, and I was almost up and running entirely. The only problem that cropped up that couldn’t be resolved: the TV installed at the Dog House won’t switch inputs from its front panel controls, and they had no remote; I couldn’t switch the TV to any channel or mode that would actually display the signal I was feeding it. There was a coaxial cable connection available, but my notebook spits out NTSC over RCA or S-Video, and nothing else. So, we ran with just one TV all night (mine).

This had a remarkably interesting effect on the show, which I’ll get to in a bit.

My friend John and his wife turned up as well to catch my debut show as well, and that really boosted my spirits and gave me the nerve I needed to stand up in front of an entirely new crowd, at a new venue, with all-new equipment, all-new books and slips, in a new town (and state), and kick off a new karaoke show. I was also encouraged as I set up by overhearing some conversations among the crowd — “wow, just look at these song slips! And those lights! This is professional stuff, we never get this here!” and “these books are huge!”

I started the show with Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, which went over very well (lots of folks sang along). There were a few minor hitches at the start — some irritating buzzing/clicking from the notebook (it’s time to invest in an external, USB-based sound card that’s electrically isolated from the notebook’s main circuits a bit), a bit of feedback on the singer’s mic, and my absent-minded failure to bring a mic stand (d’oh!) were the only ones of note.

Display-wise and in the music department, the notebook performed flawlessly. I did note one little glitch in the software side of things, mostly stemming from how I was using it, not from the “design” of it — on two songs, about two hours apart, the rotation display appeared above the karaoke lyrics display, covering it entirely. In both cases, the singers (thankfully) knew their songs well enough to keep going and once I noticed it happening, I was able to fix it immediately. That little “bug” has since been fixed.

What interested me most was the impact that having my TV on a little pedestal had on the show; either the audience could see the words, or the singer, but not both. I’ve run shows like this before — generally you just put people on stage and leave the words for them; let the audience just listen. Friday night, though, I ended up doing something different, and people seemed to really love the flexibility (this led to more singers getting up to sing than otherwise would have) … between songs, I would flip the TV around so the audience could see the rotation manager (they loved it, by the way). Several singers walked up when it was their turn and asked me to leave it that way, so they could face the stage as they sang; they admitted being nervous about being on stage directly and felt more comfortable being down among the crowd.

Works for me — I had more happy singers, and I suspect the bar made a bit more cash since more people had a good time.

Today I got to talk with the manager who hired me to put on the show, and got a largely glowing review (the only hitch in the show that anyone actually noticed was the volume was a tad too high for about the first three minutes of the show, and that got fixed pretty quickly). The singers that night, along with the audience, were amazingly helpful and very forgiving of “first night nerves”-style goofs. Thankfully, I only pulled a few of those the first hour, then I really got into the swing of things and the rest of the show went off well. They even liked the videos I played.

I can’t talk much about what Friday’s show might mean for me, but let’s just say I’m very happy about how it went and how my client responded to the show, and how that could affect me in the coming weeks/months.

Saturday Afternoon: When Kids Attack!

The Saturday afternoon karaoke show at the flea market (right outside Starshine Karaoke’s storefront) was a lot of fun, too; I hauled the light truss and lights out and rigged the whole thing up, printed up a quick song book with kids’ songs, and flipped the switch. Setup was finished by 1:00pm, though the show wasn’t meant to start until 3:00pm. Amusingly, the flea market’s manager noticed this and said “why not just run it starting now?” Since we had people lining up already to sing, I figured “why not?” and kicked things off.

I am amused at what parents actually let their kids sing — two different kids sang Baby Got Back, at their request, and with their parents’ approval (I asked first). We gave out ribbons to every kid who sang (we let adults sing too, but we only gave ribbons out to the kids, since it was really “their” show), and I think they had a lot of fun with it. They were sad when the clock ran out and it came time to close things down.

Saturday Night: Beetlejuice!

Later that evening I helped (a little — I was the whipping boy, grabbing beer, tracking people down, etc.) get the halloween show the flea market was setting up get off the ground; my friend was performing and singing a bit in it (in a costume that was quite easy on the eyes I must say — I imagine I’m going to hell for admitting that though, heh), but once her set was over we all packed it up for the night and headed to another karaoke show run by another friend of ours.

Sunday: Singers, Compete!

Instead of getting to enjoy the extra hour of sleep Daylight Savings’ demise Sunday morning brought me, I was instead awakened at eight in the fucking morning by my phone ringing. A friend from our local haunt was trying to track down another; I later learned he “forgot” about the time change and decided that 9:00am was an okay time to call me on a Sunday. Grrrrr…

For an assortment of reasons I’m not going to bother explaining right now, I ended up running the sound gear and my karaoke equipment on Sunday afternoon as well for the karaoke contest the flea market was putting on. Despite an embarrassing goof right at the start (before the contestants starting singing, the same friend from Saturday night’s show was up singing a great song, when my notebook physically moved a bit, nudging the CAVS player’s [Pause] button, freezing her song in its tracks … sigh), the show itself went off very well. Short and sweet. For once in a contest like that I was actually happy with who the judges picked to win. The guy did a great job.

That evening we tore it all down, packed up my gear, hid the bodies (just kidding ), and headed up to another karaoke show (again hosted by our friend from Saturday night’s show); I banged away on code for a project most of the afternoon and evening (and was teased accordingly for having my notebook along with me at the bar; ironically, I got tons of work done during that period).

Monday: Back to Work, You Scab!

Today I’ve mostly been stuck at this console, banging away on code and trying to figure out exactly how with two 250GB disks and an 80GB disk in this machine I’ve nearly run out of space again. I’ve reached the conclusion that my habit of just buying a bigger disk, copying all my old data to it, and removing the old drives isn’t cutting it for system reinstallations; it’s time to actually start pruning old data I don’t need anymore.

I trudged through some of the data today, looking at the crap I’ve saved over the years. Mail and work-related notes and files from my days as a Support Director for a webhosting company (including tons of stuff about dealing with those god damned Cobalt RaQ servers … bleh), stuff I’d written for various iterations of my blog but never published, short stories, software projects, assorted bits of porn (heh! The stuff is everywhere! This computer is officially not safe for children ), and so on. Time for all that crap to go, along with the “old” /usr, /usr/local, /bin, /sbin, /var (much of it, anyway), /dev, and /opt trees; that system no longer boots/works, so it’s just wasting space now.

Sleepy Time

I am seriously stiff and sore from the weekend’s activities — there’s a lot of physical exertion involved in what we were all doing. I need another night of crashed, passed-out sleep to recuperate from all this junk before I’m back on full speed tomorrow. I have lots of calls to make (I’m researching some very interesting ideas that may make Willfe.com a very exciting place to visit daily in the next few weeks), stuff to fill out for my bank, rent to pay (yay!), and so on, along with the usual coding, coding, and more coding

I tried my hand yesterday at “design” … while I got it finished, I still really suck at it I need to stick to coding, methinks. Right now, I’m going to sleep like a baby.

Q: How do you play religious roulette?
A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck by lightning first.

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