brummie@sea

More Before and After pics

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:50:00 +0000

Here you go, Carlien.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

With nowt but vacuum cleaner and soft paintbrush (of course not stolen from Liezel, who's doing much more interesting things this dry-dock), this has got to be one of the most satisfying and easy jobs on the ship.

Non-AV post

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:28:00 +0000

So, dry dock continues.

I'm not hugely productive, alas.

I just can't seem to build up momentum to get a whole lot done in a day. I suspect a large part of it may be how horribly messy AV is right now. I'll spend as much time as I need tomorrow in cleaning up.

So, other stuff.

A List Apart is a really cool website. I've done enough web design to find the articles very interesting, and was just reading some of the ones about typography. I think I need to work on my blog to make it a little more beautiful to read.

It's unfortunate, I spend just enough time on the web and doing designy things to not be comfortable using the default layouts and all that, and want to make my own, but not enough to actually be able to do it very well. So the titles & dates, on this blog, for instance.

I modified the design last year while on furlough, and, having not spent enough time to really get my brain all the way around EMs and ENs, alignment, leading and everything, used something of a hack (I think) to get the date and title of each post a little closer together.

It looks OK to me, currently. However, if I forget to put a title, then it shifts up the date do that it overlaps some of the blog text.

Not good.

So, the answer, of course, is to insert a non-breaking-space into the title block.

But blogger won't let me do that! So, instead, I'll just have to keep on remembering to put in titles.

I'll be thinking a lot about vertical rhythm of text layout, and possibly make some changes to size and stuff later. I like learning these things as it helps fill in gaps in my head.

I sometimes wish for a fuller education. But given that I'm interested in EVERYTHING, it could take a while. Someone suggested I take a Liberal Arts degree or something like that. But then that doesn't really cover physics, electronic engineering , accoustics, psycology, software design, or that. It might help my spelling, I guess.

If I get a chance (which means, a bunch of years in a stable job with enough free time), then I may try and do something like that by corrospondence. But otherwise, I have wikipedia, a list apart, google, and the other tools of the 2009 home-educator's mind...

...

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:29:00 +0000

I found out that some of our panels were modified by someone in the past to do ... interesting things.

Home built new video-patch panel. Waaay more sensible, understandable, and usable.

AV updates, mid drydock.

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:13:00 +0000

Before:
After:

I think it looks a little better. Still messy, but at least understandable. Pretty much everything is plugged in now, and from preliminary tests, we appear to have somewhat better clarity in EVERYTHING, and some of the video signals are visibly higher signal-to-noise with much less interference.

We bought two new audio patch panels too, Behringer ones. Strangely, Behringer also seem to do unbalanced patch panels. Fortunately, the shop had both, and I noticed. What on earth would anyone want unbalanced patch panels for?!

I also had to butcher the two panels which we were replacing to get enough parts to fix a third panel which was very glitchy. Here are some of the internals which are slightly broken.

You can see a bit of corrosion on the top contact - even with jackplug cleaners and everything, the equipment is just plain old.

Today, hopefully, I can do the full system tests (need to borrow a oscilliscope and reference signal generators...), and then get the whole thing boxed up and leave it until the end of drydock. Then I can work on more fun projects. Videos, song composition, etc.

That's all for now, I'll post more shorter posts later, with more pictures.

Life carries on...

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:06:00 +0000

So. Short post.

We're in KK, Malaysia. Beautiful place.

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."

Oh dear.

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:41:00 +0000

Modern Christianity.

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:29:00 +0000

We're not sure of the difference between baseless optimism and faith.

Blinded by love?

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:45:00 +0000

Just a random thought.

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?

Bolts and other bits and bobs

noreply@blogger.com (Sue) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:10:00 +0000

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.

Avoid Sudoku!

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:55:00 +0000

I hardly ever do Sudoku.

But occasionally I fall into temptation, and picked up the following problem:


[4][ ][ ] [ ][ ][3] [ ][9][ ]
[5][1][ ] [ ][4][8] [ ][2][7]
[ ][2][ ] [ ][9][ ] [ ][8][ ]

[ ][4][ ] [3][7][ ] [2][ ][ ]
[7][ ][2] [ ][8][ ] [9][ ][ ]
[ ][ ][6] [ ][1][ ] [ ][5][3]

[ ][ ][7] [8][6][ ] [4][ ][9]
[9][6][ ] [ ][ ][7] [ ][ ][2]
[ ][ ][4] [ ][ ][1] [ ][7][ ]

Apparently DEAD EASY to do. It took me about 2 minutes.

Except the last 4 squares, which are impossible.

I'm almost annoyed enough to almost go learn what the rules for making a sudoku are, and find out which one this particular sudoku has broken.

Grr.

"I don't like being a Post-Modernist"

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Sat, 23 May 2009 13:39:00 +0000

It sucks.

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.

-------

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.

broken stuff

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:17:00 +0000

I don't like broken stuff.

Currently:

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.

The rubber mats on the starboard side one is equally falling apart.

Our chair broke again today.

The beanbag is more like just a bag now.

All of the music stands are slightly broken.

All of the mic stands are slightly broken.

And that's just off the top of my head right now.

...

I'm just plain tired of it all.

I have no training or knowledge about anything. I'm just a headless chicken, running around bleeding all over the place.

And I suck so much at delegation and actually getting other people to get things done, that it feels like nothing is getting done.

I know that's not true.

I'm just tired and complaining. I should shut up, finish the port shedule, and go to bed.

--

Oh yes. I just remembered the whole point of this post.

Yeah. Anyway. So, we've got so much *stuff*. It's insane. So many things. We're incredibly blessed, I guess is the good christian way of saying it. We could do without so much. We don't, honestly, NEED a lecturn mic. Yes, a mic on a stand next the lecturn looks ugly, but hey, looking good isn't a need, right? Most of what gets actually spoken through it is boring anyway. And we don't need non-distorting preview speakers in AV. Just enough to hear "oh yes, there's sound!", right? Most of the sound we have to play sounds bad in the first place, so what's the point of telling just exactly how bad it is? And it doesn't matter if there are wavey interference lines all over all the TVs, becauase as long as the audience can see at all, anything else is just "nice" but not "needed"?

I dunno. I'm frustrated. I don't know what is actually needed or what is just nice. I could make most shows happen with just a boom-box, laptop, and kareoke mic. It would sound and look a lot worse than currently, but it would still happen.

So much of the musicians themselves are so undertrained and unarranged, getting better speakers in the ceiling would help a little, but somehow persuading them "y'all don't actually have to strum every single chord in every single bar in every single song!" would help a lot more...

I've lost perspective, I think. I'm working out of what I think I can kind of expect, given the current state of things, but it's hard to know what stuff is my vision for improvement, what stuff is worth replacing, what parts of the work should be continued, what should be scrapped, etc.

The grass is always greener, though, hey?

If I could actually spend my whole time teaching music theory, I'd wish I could just do easy stuff like fixing mic cables and not have to worry about how to explain syncopation.

Funny. Being human and all.

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus."

A few days mixing

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:58:00 +0000

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.

If someone feels like randomly donating something expensive to me/Doulos, I really wouldn't mind about 4 or 5 of these: http://www.amazon.com/DBX-1046-Quad-Compressor-Limiter/dp/B0002H0QHI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=musical-instruments&qid=1241888411&sr=1-1 ...

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.

*sigh* So much to work on. So much to do.

TV stuff

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:29:00 +0000

Here's a conundrum for you.

If you're not interested in video, then this may be boring as anything for you.

Then again, you might find it facinating.

OK. Here's the deal. A conference, and it's Mandarin. The main speaker is American, and speaks no Mandarin whatsoever. So he has a translator. No problem. Now say you have an audience of 300-ish, and are using live video to show the speaker on TVs around the room so people can see. OK, again, no problem. But, since the speaker and the translator decided to stand far apart, if you show a shot wide enough to get them both, they're so small on screen that it's totally pointless putting them on screen. Usually, I believe, it's normal to just go for a close-up of the speaker. So, then, if you have audience who are all old people and probably somewhat hard of hearing, they'll want to lip-read the translator at least somewhat. So. What to do? Cutting back and forth between two cameras is too much work, and tiring, and probably more annoying to watch than anything else.

I tried to be a bit clever and "TVish" this time, but I still am not totally pleased with it.
If the speaker and translator decide to move around a lot, remote cameras just will not cut it.

Can you fix this?

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:27:00 +0000

"We dropped this. I think it's broken."

"Can you fix this please?"

Long time no update

noreply@blogger.com (Sue) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:25:00 +0000

Hi Blog.

Long time no update, I blame I.T. and specifically I blame Blip, who works in I.T. I don't blame her because it's probably her fault, but because she deserves it. I can't access blogspot, so have to go back to the old email-mum-with-stuff-to-blog method.

Anyway.

So. Many changes in the last few months.

I went on break for a week last port in Manila. Yes, Manila again. So I've been there 3 times now, total of 3 months. Quite cool. Anyway, we only managed to actually get to where we wanted to go for 2 days of the week of shore-leave, but it was so peaceful there. We went up to the mountains, near a place called Taal where there's a volcano and so on.

Back on the ship, AV wise, I've been doing a bit more guerrilla carpentry.

Here's our laptop/workstation. Things to note: the amazing wall-mount for the screen. Made from 100% recyclable natural products. Also, the big screen is showing mac OS. This is from Ant's mac mini which is also hidden in the shot. The laptop is the A/V laptop, and running windows. The big screen can also show the A/V second screen quite happily, just by pressing a button on the screen. So. Two computers, but only one mouse and keyboard? Yep! Thanks to the amazing "Synergy" software, you can scroll the mouse off the left of the laptop screen and it jumps onto the mac, and vice versa! Very cool.

We had a Jazz recording session last monday, our amazing sax player just left the ship, so before he went we spent a whole afternoon recording with the band, and then had an evening for the ship's company to come and hang out while the band jammed in a quiet atmosphere. This is the old 4 channel data minidisk recorder that we found in a closet and used for recording each channel individually as well as the main mix on the computer.

And team changes. Here's one of the mainstays of the AV team, who just left yesterday. She's finished her commitment on Doulos, and has gone back to Europe. I'll miss her a lot. She's American. On the team currently we have a Swedish guy, two German lunatic men, an American videographer dude, or cat, or whatever historical term of endearment he currently is using, one strapping British lad who's currently in the UK for 2 months cross-training/work with the team there (like I did last year) and me.

Notice anything? Yep. All Westerners, and all guys. In a sense, that's pretty understandable. Of the kinds of people who join the ship, the western guys tend to be the group who are into tech/arts. But, it's also quite unbalanced. So in a week's time, we'll have a new member of the team, a Korean lady! She's worked as videographer in a big church in Korea for several years, so that's quite exciting. Both of the Germans will be leaving at the end of this port, around the 30th, and the Brit will be coming back. So we'll be somewhat smaller again, hopefully we'll get someone else soon, but who knows.

Anyway. It's a time of changes. I'm excited, and hope I can use these changes to bring better changes throughout the whole team and work we do.

And finally.

This is proof that the evil sock monster exists. We put all our underwear into bags before it goes to laundry, to keep it together and not let anything get lost, and yet, somehow, I've got here 7 - yes, count them - 7 non-matching socks.

What the heck?!

Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:10:00 +0000

OK. So finally I'm getting around to an explanation of the previous post.

My current - I'd use the word dialemma, but it's not. It's more a trilemma or quintalemma or something - is (somewhat) about copyright. The laws are fairly complex as what we're doing here is basically a live theatre venue, church, theatre company, video, dance and creative arts training and production centre, bible-school, and a few other things too. The people who were supposed to be taking care of the whole copyright thing have been doing a really poor - or at least misled - job for a number of years now, either that or else no-one ever bothered even trying to figure out what taking care of it really meant.

We're slowly getting there, I think, I hope. But currently I find myself saying more and more "no, sorry, you can't do that, that's illegal", without really having much viable alternative to offer.

And that sucks.

Part of the thing is what is copyright law really saying?

"This is mine, for me, and not for you, or for God. It's mine. Shove off."

Which people object to, obviously. Thus an argument often raised is

"Well, the artist who made this is a Christian, and so wants to glorify God, right, and we're trying to glorify Him too by using it, so we're fine to copy and edit it..."
Well. If the artist wanted you to just use it for whatever you want without checking with them first, then they wouldn't have put "Copyright 2003. For personal home use only. All rights Reserved" on it...

It gets worse with the internet.

"Hey, my pastor just sent me this really cool video I want to show in the programme tomorrow!"

"Well. The music backing to it I recognise, it's a song by Hillsong UK, and there is no copyright notice anywhere in the clip at all, one of those opening still-pictures you can see has part of a copyright label in the corner, but half cropped out, so we can safely assume that many of the images are taken uncredited from the internet, and even the one you can half read it's web address isn't being credited properly. That interview clip with the kids outside the theatre is almost certainly just filmed without their parents consent, and you want to show this clip to paying public?"

"But they played it at my church last week!"

"So?"

"So it must be alright!"

"Wrong."

"What can we do instead?"

Indeed.

So now the whole issue of making our own material. Last week a couple of the programme staff went out with a camera and asked a bunch of random people on the street questions, then asked me how to edit it (for 2 days later). So I kind of pulled stuff together, found an old recording of a couple on-board musicians jamming which kind of fit.

The end result wasn't great. In any sense. It shouldn't even have passed my own quality control.

Nevertheless, I'm trying to get the programme staff to come to us, the AV team, when they want multimedia materials, rather than them spending hours and hours making them themselves improperly, and then asking us to either fix it, or show it anyway.

Trying to build up relationships and trust and the kinds of working interaction I believe is vital for where we MUST go.

*sigh*

A big part of me wants to scrap using most video stuff altogether, as most of what we have, or can do, sucks. I want to have a very high standard, and just drop anything that fails to reach the bar.

But I want to do that with other live programme material too. Skits, songs, dramas, sermons, personal stories (yes, most personal "testimonies" suck. It's not that the people telling it have anything wrong with them. But they suck at telling it.).

So, if we want to "compete" in the world of mass <-> mass media (to coin a phrase), then we have to have some standards. Most of the visible world seems to not care tuppence for copyright, and is happy enough to disregard it on every corner.

Likewise for many issues of video "quality". Framing (putting peoples faces (and everything else) in the correct size/ratio in the right part of the screen), using tripods, cutting "with" rather than "without" the backing music, colour correction, audio normalising, S/N, compression, codecs, details, details, details.

We (in both terms of the ship, and the world), seem to have become very used to absolute crap video production quality, and to absolute crap copyright and control quality. Many argue that we should join in the mass production of media as publicity from us. I've thought about it myself, it would be very cool to have weekly video "podcasts" from the Doulos.

But can we get the video quality (including copyright) sorted out and good enough to actually DO this at a "good" level?

And production of videos for on board? Even showing of videos on board?

Is my refusing to show a video because it (to me) looks shoddy just interlectual snobbery due to some small background in multimedia?

Is my refusing to show a video because it breaks copyright me being pigheaded and daft over laws which (honestly), no-one in the room watching cares about?

So, personal integrity, and God.

Does God care if we break the law?

I think so.

Does God care if we show crap videos?

I think so too.

"But it's powerful!"

So are many things. I don't think it's stretching the truth to say a vast majority of the church and their spirituality would benefit from being more relaxed, but we're not going to start distributing tranqulisers.

Ethics

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:36:00 +0000

"The Good is often the greatest enemy of the Best." - Maxwell
"If anyone turns a deaf ear to the law, even his prayers are detestable" - Proverbs 28:9

Which is better, to spend ones time sitting with street kids loving them and giving them hope for the future, or sitting in an office, wading through tedious documents that it's actually your duty to understand?

Which is more worthy, to slog away at understanding a law you know that 99% of people really care nothing about, nor even believe in, enforcing it over others and creating unheaval and more work and stress for all of them, or to spend time creatively working on more fun and generally well-recognised projects?

How do you find motivation to inconvienence yourself and others to a phenomincal degree, appearing to red-light and be negative to all the other people you want to encourage and help, in order to fulfil a law you don't even agree with yourself?

For the Christians in mainline western churches:

If your country declared it illegal to meet in groups larger than 15, would you keep meeting
as normal in defiance of the government and protest the loss of your "rights", or find a way to keep "doing" church and fulfilling the call of the bible within the constraints of the law?

Which is more important: Comfortably doing what you're used to, or uncomfortably denying yourself in order to be a righteous and unimpeachable testimony?

Guitar Repair

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:16:00 +0000

Time for a short post.

My guitar has had this annoying buzz on it for months now, and I finally got around to fixing it, which basically meant opening it up, finding the buzz (a slightly loose structural support beam) and gluing it solid. No big deal, but I've been avoiding guitar practice for AGES because it annoyed me so much that I couldnt' play. It took me half an hour to fix, and now I've been practicing every day since.

Moral of the tale: Um. Do I really need to tell you?

Welcome back, me.

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:53:00 +0000

Greetings.

It is I, author of this blog, and spokesperson of the incredibly inconsideratly inactive bloggers foundation of Doulos, and I have returned! Yea, verily, verily, etc.

So. It's been 5 weeks since I last posted, roughly. And it has been quite a busy, time, yes, of course, that's the way it is around here. And is that an excuse for not blogging? Well, probably not. But I'll use it as an excuse anyway.

We're currently sailing between Kuching, Malaysia, where we spent Christmas and New Year, to Cebu, Philippines, where we were 2 years ago.

Every 6 months or so we get a new batch of recruits, who go for 2 weeks of safety training, and that group of people is usually fairly "clannish", and are known as the "Preship" group of whichever port they did their training. So I'm from the "Sharjah Preship". Other famous past examples would be the Manila Preship, Banjul Preship, Istanbul Preship, etc, etc.

Anyway, 2 years ago we had the Cebu Preship join us, and they'll mostly be leaving in the next month or so, and the next group of recruits will also be doing their training in Cebu... This is NOT normal. It's the first time we've had this, ever, to popular knowledge. Normally it's at least 7 or 8 years between being back in the same place at the same rough time to be able to do this, so every Preship is a different city.

This might seem like a very minor thing, and from a completely outside viewpoint, it is. However, Doulos isn't just a ship full of people from different places, we also have a very strong Doulos Culture, which has devleopped over the decades as result of our rules, regulations, work habits, and the bizarre lifestyle which we have on board.

"Preship" groups are almost like your family, or clan. Whenever someone gets up to say something in a community meeting, for instance at the end of a port when we get together to share stories of what we (and God) have been up to, most people will introduce themselves with something like "Hi, My name is Daniel, and I'm from Cyprus, and the Sharjah Preship!" or whatever. At this point, everyone else from Sharjah will shout and scream or chant, or whatever.

OK, so the people from Sharjah probably won't, since there's only about 5 of us left, and we never managed to get a chant to work properly, but everyone from all the other active preships on board will for their people. So, to have two groups of people from different Preships, with the same name, is a bit weird. It's like having two football teams with the same name. If they played each other, who would you cheer for?

So. There's a random piece of Doulos culture for you. Now for some thoughts about it.

We are incredibly clannish, and seem, as humans, as christians, and as Douloi, to have an innate capacity to draw lines between each other, and to divide on the slightest pretext. And partly I object to the amount that the training department push Preship identity during the training. I can also see the side whereby this "Preship " concept can be used positively to establish a home base and place for people to live and identify themselves in the community.

And identity is such a weird thing. Who are we? The good evangelical in me says something like "My identity is in Christ alone! All other things are slag!" And yeah, yeah. OK, so that is true, of course. But we do all seem to use boxes, either rigid or flexible, to put people and everything into. We constantly talk about getting "out of the box" and "not putting people in boxes", but is that really practical? People's individuality MUST trump any box we put them into, and anyone MUST be able to climb out of that box, and we must not dump people into boxes and judge them there and leave them forever, but is it possible to truly not create comparisons and labels?

Some days I get really fed up of the boxes and labels, and try to rebel.

"Hey! Are you the AV guy?"

"Nope."

"Oh. Who is working tonight then?"

"I am. I work here, but I'm not the AV guy. I'm Daniel."

I don't know. Enough rambling. It's time for sleep.

Drydock '08

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:18:00 +0000

The sweat drips from my nose, and splashes, sizzling, onto the soldering iron.

It's roasting hot, and the cables are all around me, as squashed into a small space behind the audio rack I put the finishing touches to the new audio lines I just ran across from the desk opposite.

It's dry-dock again.My third, now, and this time, I'm just not enjoying it.

I have quite a lot on my plate at the moment, what with trying to sort out many technical issues in the A/V equipment, and also get as much as possible done to allow us to expand and use what we have better throughout this coming year.

Also, the other members of the A/V team are busy with other projects, and I'm helping out a bit again with the deck ladder-repair and making crew.

Bink!

That's the sound that the lights make when blackouts happen.

We just had another powercut.

Vrum bzzzzzt! Klunk! Klunk! Klunkklunkklunkduhduhduhduh!

That's the sound that the fanrooms make when the power comes back on again.

The power just came back on again, by the way.

So, anyway. Right.

Yeah, there's another fairly huge but unofficial project on which has pretty much sucked all the free time out of one of my team for the last 10 months - even from well before he joined AV - and also has been increasingly impinging upon the time of the rest of us.

They created an(other) unrealistic deadline to finish it before the end of this drydock, and I knew he would push all his time and energy into it.

So I pretty much gave him his work time to get this thing finished.

Which is good, I guess.

I mean, he's not dead, which if we'd pushed hard at the AV jobs as well, I think he would be.

He just wouldn't have slept at all.

We barely did anyway.

I was up until 3 one night working on an animation for the project.

Anyway.

Many of the AV tasks I had (I wrote down 58 jobs I'd have liked to either do, or investigate the feasibility of) have not been done, and most of them I didn't even get a chance to investigate how possible they were.

So.. somewhat frustrating.

The first version is done now, which is good.

Anyway.

Still plenty of logistics and miscommunication issues to sort out.

So.

What else...

I've been making sure I keep time for myself, not burning out, and part of that includes focussing more on painting and artwork.. we've begun "creative communities" on board - basically an internal art/photography/creative writing club, with picking a theme per month.

The theme last month was "Freedom".

This month it's "Love".

Here's a painting of mine - "Searching for Love"

I helped out a bit with the ladderwork again this drydock.

Pretty much the same as last year.. this time we stretched the rope slightly more thoroughly.. Check out before and after stretching:

Quite impressive.

I feel somewhat drawn out and stretched myself.

I don't think I'll snap.. but hopefully I'll be all the more resilient to whatever life throws at me in the future because of it.

And my current work in progress.

Being Nasty at the desk, and nice the rest of the time.

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:06:00 +0000

Well... it's been busy.

It is busy!

We've left Australia, and are sailing currently to East Timor. The programme team have a new manager, who is bent on reforming them and is changing many ways of working, becoming more team based:

brainstorming rather than ivory tower development of programmes,
Flexi-time working, everyone chipping in rather than fixed hours, and so on.

The AV team isn't really part of the programmes team (go figure), but we work a lot with them, and so I've been trying to push my team into being at as much of this voyage's programme team time as possible. Attending devotions with them, being at the creativity sessions, and so on.

This morning we had a fairly good session, which I led, I was trying to get them to think outside of the box in reguards to how we use our venue. The on board "Main Lounge" is most frequently set up with all the programme happening in one "stage" section at the front, and then rows of chairs at the back, or tables in a cafe setting. Often the most transformation the room gets is having curtains put up, perhaps fairy lights and lots of flags (you know, the whole international thing).

Anyway. We can do so much more. Once we started imagining things, ideas like turning the whole room into a Japanese Garden, with an island in the middle and a moat and bridges and stuff came up. Building a slum from Manilla out of the whole room, hanging the curtains to turn it into a ginormous beduin-style tent, and so on. One group even thought of having a "Indiana Jones" type set up, with different areas of the lounge being different places around the world, tying up some of the audience with a knife suspended above their head and then dropping it on them if their team-mates didn't answer the questions of a quiz correctly...

Some of the ideas may take a little modifying. Health and Safety, you know.

Still, it was a good session, and then we looked through a lot of our video clips collection, to talk about what we can use, how we can use videos we have more effectively, and so on.

This evening was the weekly prayer-night, which this week was being run by the on board School. It was somewhat chaotic, as these kinds of things are wont to be.

Anyway, the guy who was leading the musicy part of it didn't bring me a song list at all (which is mentioned on the pre-event A/V form, which he otherwise did fill in), and then half an hour before we began, during his sound check time, he brought up two new songs which needed to be entered into the database while I was trying to sound check them... He know's it's supposed to be 24 hours before an event that they give in any new songs.

Still, I told him off, but put the songs in anyway. So, quite hectic. It all went really well in the end, and sounded pretty good, all the songs worked, and so on. Apparently I made an impression on him though, as after the evening was finished, he showed up at the sound desk with a large bar of chocolate to say sorry for being so late all the time!! Amazing!

Makin' a movie

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:40:00 +0000

I'm working on another short film/video project. Here's a few frames from it for your enjoyment.

I'm still quite tired and frustrated and so on, but a bit better. I've had a day off since my last post, which was good, and another few days off in the next few weeks too, so that's good too. I'll be writing a longer text blogpost soon.

Handover

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:51:00 +0000

I'm tired. I'm stressed.

I won't pretend to hide it.

I'm pissed off at the system, thoroughly fed up of how things currently are - in my work, my life, and in many things around me.

Yet, still, most things are going fairly well...

I'm now the "AV manager", and discovering more and more how disorganised and messed up it is.

We have small forms in the drawer under the computer which are used during the sunday service on board, we give out the little forms, then people can fill them in if they want to, so that they can give to the weekly offering (usually to help a local ministry, or work in India, or similar) direct from their on board account, rather than having to use cash.

Anyway, this morning, the guy running the service came up and asked for them.. We had 10. Not good enough! So, I told him a few ideas of who he could ask for more, but this was at half an hour before the service, on a Sunday Morning. Not the best time to go looking for people to do random work like that.

We need to have once a week or so someone to check how many we have, say on a Friday, and then to get at least 200 before the Sunday morning.

Not a big deal, right?

Well, no, not a problem at all. Just the problem is that there are *hundreds* of little issues like this. Every day. And *NONE* of them are written down. When I started, there were no current weekly checklists or anything.

I don't want to become a lists and rules based dictator, but how on earth else do you manage to get everything done that needs to be?

When I took over this job, there was maybe 1 hour of discussion between me and the predecessor about stuff, but none of these little details were noted. Each day day I find mord

And it was the same thing when I became waterman, 2 years ago. There's no consistancy! As soon as people leave, things get dropped.

It's why ships tend to have such strict and over the top and detailed procedures - everything gets written down.

Anyway. It's just intensely frustrating. I'm so bad at admin, so weak at organisation, so forgetful about details, so easily overwhelmed by situations, so inexperienced at leadership, so unknowledgeable about everything technical I should know about, so young!

I guess in one way it's kind of exciting. I mean, whoopee! So much stuff to learn! So much I can improve!

Yet it's kind of hard to say that and not at least have some irony and sarcasm in it too.

Yes, it's good to be stretched and have all this improvement to do, but at the same time, it's "live". We're not playing with blank bullets. Every round is for real.

Every time I start a video playing in a programme, it's not school, not training. People are in the programme, watching, and notice if things don't work.

The audience have paid, usually. The programme organiser has spend hours arranging everything, and if I screw up, it's her work that gets ruined.

Trying to set priorites, and figure out what actually is realistic and achievable...

And then how to make sure it happens. And each day discovering more things which have got dropped and then not only do we need to carry it, but we have to stop, pick it up, clean it, do repairs on it, and then start carrying it again.

I could go on. My list of current frustrations and things we're doing badly is pretty much endless.

And I know I'm a perfectionist, but this isn't perfectionism.. This is realism.

Wireless Microphone Batteries Dying mid-show
Cables going glitchy
Videos playing during rehearsal but then refusing to play in performance
Audio levels on all videos being different and needing constant riding
Audio patch-panels/jackfields acting
The trash not getting taken every day
The room looking a mess all the time
Cables not getting fixed or taken out when they break

Those are all itty bitty technical details. But they effect almost every programme we do.

And why?! Why have they not been fixed? And how can they be fixed easily, or at least dealt with, or worked around?

Well, they can. But we're lacking any way to report problems, to deal with them, or do anything in a purposeful or directed way.

And it's not just about technical details. Those are the easiest for me to see - of course - and those are the bits that are our job. From a programme side, this show up as mics dying unexpectedly, feedback, disruption, long pauses, lack of flow and professionalism, etc, etc, etc.

And we've all become so accepting of it! And that's wrong. We cannot accept crap, when we are capable of beauty, and if we're not capable of exquisite complex beauty, then we must simplfy until what we do is excellent at that level.

There's so much attitude and team thinking that has to change too, and just as soon if not before the technical bits can get solved. I really am trying to focus on the people, in the team and those we work with/for, and that's a topic for a whole other post, or possibly whole other blog. So I'll just stick with the technical day to day bits today.

Everything is so reactive. Like the offering forms this morning. Having problems show up, and then deal with them.

Honestly, we - the ship - has been doing programmes for so long now that ALL of these things should have become non-issues. And once we can get out of this constanct scrambling to pick up the pieces of something that's just exploded, or running around like headless chickens to stop something from exploding, then we can actually start enjoying it, and being creative and actually going somewhere positive and improving.

But man, it's tiring right now.

Un-named Haiku

noreply@blogger.com (dan) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:00:00 +0000

This blog post is short.
It is for my friend Bridget.
The sentence count: three.