A whole bunch of people left, and a whole bunch of new ‘uns joined.
The crazy Swedish dude left my AV team and headed home, after two years on board, and now I’ve got a new American the team. It’s fun training him, although kind of strange. I’ve taught AV stuff to so many people now. It’s hard to remember what I’ve taught to whom. I’ve got a basic Doulos AV curriculum, finally, but it’s difficult to get it all together. Theres so many little bits of randomness.
So now the team is one Korean, one Brit, one American, and one confused-not-quite-sure-ean(me).
Amongst the new recruits is one of my friends from the UK, which is very cool. She seems to be enjoying the ship so far, and is working in the “Accomedation” team, cleaning the inside of the ship, doing the laundry, running the bookshop cafe, etc.
Anyway. So. This was intended to be a short post, and mostly informational…
Yeah.
It’s my girlfriend’s birthday tomorrow. The whole present-buying-birthday-celebration-rituals-cultures-thing terrifies me. Like, I dunno. Something about my INFP/TCK nature, I guess. I want everything I do to be meaningful, and genuine. Especially with those who are really dear to me. That’s the INFP side… But also, I feel like so many things (such as buying presents on birthdays, putting up signs, cards, etc) are very superficial, and just a crass part of some culture.
I want to buy presents that are really real - not just bought “because” of the birthday. Yet I don’t know if buying presents *for* the birthday, like, “doing the birthday thing” is also a way of being real, within a culture?
I don’t totally relate personally to any culture, really, and find almost all cultures have things which offend me, and which I don’t fit into.
Also, on the other hand, more practically, I know that there is an element I also probably ought to have of simply “Daniel, just grow up, accept the fact that you’re not all that great at buying presents, so get over it, stop making all these stupid theoretical excuses and work harder than everyone else to actually do it well, and on time. Stop being so lazy.”
I was walking past a sign today, I don’t remember what the whole sign was about, but it contained the phrase “love makes you blind”.
Does it?
It’s a weird concept. I know what it means, but isn’t it kind of antithetical to what we would want to believe?
We say love (in it’s purest form) is the highest of virtues, biblically, it’s one of our main goals, God uses “love” to describe himself, Paul waxes lyrical about it, and almost every page of the scriptures are saturated in it. Songs have been written from the beginning of time about it.
Surely love does the opposite of blinding. It’s only in love that we are actually able to see. Without love, we are blind.
If what we call “Love” causes us to no longer see (flaws, problems, sins, etc), then is it really love? Or infatuation, idolatry?
Ever wonder what a stainless steel bolt looks like when it completely rusts into oblivion?
Well. Now you know. This fell off one of our lifeboats. Makes you feel very secure, right?
This is the latest addition to the AV room:
It’s getting quite full, these days. Well, it has been for YEARS now. Any time we want to change anything, it gets quite major and complicated, trying to shuffle things around. Basically, I was fed up of having our stationary drawer jam because of too many tools inside it, so had the carpenters make us this. Makes me feel all reminiscent of the keyshop. *sigh* good old days.
Here it is, in place. As you can tell, the room isn’t all that tidy, still. Just SO MUCH STUFF! Other additions, the mug hooks on the wall, the per-day form hooks too, and also a removable wall-mount for the fan (which always used to just sit on the floor and get kicked…)
and lastly, we’ve FINALLY got the slot on the door for request forms!
exciting! I’ll post pictures of the opposite side of this amazing slot soon. It’s small, subtle, elegantly engineered and discreet. You’ll love it.
I’m somewhat tempted to leave the post at that, but feel a little elaboration may be at least polite.
We are finite individuals. We cannot know completely, comprehensively. We can only know in part.
Modernism claims that we can know definately. That our knowing something to be true can be true, and right, and accurate.
I don’t believe that. Our finite, human perspective is so limited, so small, so warped, that how can any one human’s perception be absolutely comprehensively true? It could, in theory, be an absolutely honest viewpoint, but a small, finite, limited and warped honest viewpoint, nevertheless.
So then. Where does that lead us?
Claims of truth being relative.
Counter-claims by modernists that not believing in God as absolute truth absolutely denies you access to Him.
Declarations of nonsensical “Pan-Everythingism” as Francis Shaeffer would call it.
Refutations by absolute logic.
Definitions of logic as equally relative and therefore meaningless.
I dunno.
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There is a road, and along the road there are signs pointing along it. Some travellers wear green-tinted glasses and so say “The Signs are Green! Unless You Believe In the True Greenness Of The Signs, You Will Never Reach The Destination!”
Others have red tinted glasses, and so say exactly the same, “The Signs are Red! Unless You Believe In The True Redness Of The Signs, You Will Never Reach The Destination!”
Others wear glasses where the tint is red at the top, green at the bottom, yellow on the left, blue on the right, and purple in the middle. “It depends which way you hold your head!” They say. “Everyone has their own perspective on the signs. There is no absolute colour of the signs.”
I have several sets of glasses, and I can put them both on. Neither of them really fit my nose, but without them my sight is so poor I can barely see anything. Everything looks distorted, confused, and wrong when I wear the glasses, and I don’t want to settle on any one of them.
I want the sign maker to come, take my hand, and lead me to His home: the destination at the end of the road to which the signs point.
I trust Him. I don’t know fully where I’m walking, but maybe that’s enough.
Our main pulpit/lecturn mix suddenly for no apparent reason completely died. No signal, *nothing* any more.
About half the outputs of the audio distributor. Why? I dunno.
The door request form box (as of about a month. The carpenter finally came around yesterday, and said maybe he’ll get a chance to fix it sometime in a few weeks time…)
Two more of the TVs in our “Main Lounge” auditaurium seem to be going on the blink, just a little.
The main desk connector for the camera control unit doesn’t seem to be able to last longer than about a month. It’s broken again.
The door between our main and forward lounges. This time the carpenters don’t seem to know how to fix it or what to do.
The main stage floodlights dimmer knob has become suddenly wobbly and probably the whole unit needs taking off and fixing.
The port side BOSE speaker is making funny noises. It sounds like it’s bust a cone or something. Fluttery. I need to investigate that as well sometime soon.
The main rack preview monitor is (I think) giving out some kind of weird electrical/magnetic/radio/something interference on to every other video signal in the vicinty. As soon as it’s switched off, a whole bunch of problems go away.
The AV room amplifier/speakers are distorted.
Almost all of the mics seem somewhat wobbly on the ends of all the cables, and occasionally drop out.
For some reason I’ve not been able to get our usual wireless bodypack to connect to the violist’s pickup/bodypack, and so have had to use a SM57 for him for about a month. It always worked before, and I can’t see anything that’s changed. We only ever encounter problems like this during a 10 minute line-check and so don’t have time to fully explore what’s not working.
I’ve only got 3 mostly working DI boxes left.
I’ve got 4 VHS tape players in the rack, because they are all only capable of playing some kinds of VHS tapes correctly.
All of the amps have been dropping out occasionally, randomly.
The book shop sound system is falling apart, I fear. The fan in the amp sounds about as loud as a whole fanroom is supposed to.
The main computer VGA->composite video scan converter is distinctly unhappy, and takes about 10 minutes to turn on.
The computer sound input is *very* noisy. I don’t know why.
I have two wireless mics in the UK for repairs right now. Hopefully they’ll make their way back here in a fixed condition at some point.
The video distributor for the Book Ex screens seems to be glitchy.
All of the jackfield/patchpanels are somewhat … odd. I’m working my way through cleaning them all, but some of them just seem sad and tired. the sockets wiggle about and the connections as glitchy as you would expect.
The folding doors between our port and main lounges seems a bit squint and is now very hard to open or close.
You know you’re not going to enjoy the evening when you get told before sound-check “make sure I’m very quiet in the mix, because I’m out of practice”.
That was a few days ago. Today:
Our keyboard output stopped working between soundcheck and performance. We didn’t know until there just was no sound as the musician hit her cue *after* the soloist started singing. We couldn’t do anything in time, eventually we managed to get it working for about half the piece, and they carried on very professionally, but it died again. She left the stage in tears. That really makes you feel crap as a sound-guy.
We then got a SM58 microphone and clamped it to the top of the keyboard’s built in speakers. That worked well enough for the rest of the show.
I hate stuff like that.
It’s fun, showing up at venues, and having comments like “Oh yes, well, all the tweeters are blown, that’s why it sounds bad. We haven’t replaced them yet”. (Well. Thanks for telling us the same day we need them!)
I spent about an hour today trying to figure out the wiring for the venue on shore, it was “broken”. everything held together with tape, wires coming out of the wall without labels. I managed to get some working, and watching the little blue sparks flying around was quite amusing when I was trying to find which speakers were attached to which wires, and which amplifers actually worked… I gave up eventually and just used our own speakers.
I screwed up a lot today. It could have been a much better performance. I didn’t manage to get the compressors hooked up into the system in time, even. And the MC and translator were all over the place with their level. Crying out for compression. Painful, even.
I really need to start playing worst-case-scenario with my people more. I can generally problem solve and get something working “well enough” fast, but they can’t (yet), and I could do so much more, and better, if I could a few arrange things ahead of time, and think in advance, and not do everything by the seat of my pants.
