Pounding comes in all forms

I’m writing this through a constant pounding in the temples – nope, not my choice of music but a lingering cold (sniff).

I’m going to skip over last weeks shows for the most part. It was heavy on Russians, heavy on cloth’s that, quite frankly, smelt of animal piss (we couldn’t decide between horse or rat), light on schedule, tight on power (the Glaciators nearly ended up on sound power) and heavy on magna-lock doors.

Y’all know that I’m not a huge fan of doors that impede movement through at any point; doors with non-working press to open buttons, particularly when on crutches, or magnetic locks blocking the mast of MEWPs …

But several of the doors are looking a little worse for wear, as is the architrave around them.

When visiting a theatre, if a door doesn’t seem to budge, don’t think that the answer to the door is a firm boot (unless the fire is getting closer …)

And if the door magically splinters when you softly (with a boot) try to open it, at least have the courtesy to inform a member of in-house staff.

Moving swiftly on, this week starts with a brief run from an Isreali contemporary dance company who may well be the first company to supply security guards.

[Shop talk]

Grey marley was surrounded on three sides by lots of 8′ x 4′ black masking flats screwed to the floor providing lots of entrances that weren’t particularly noticeable.

Lighting was wonderfully simple – four bars of PAR64 with CP62 doing top light. And when I say four bars, I mean, we now know how many PARs we can fit on 16m bars (42 in case you are wondering – there should be a HHGTTG joke in there).

A few SL’s on a fifth bar doing a tight corridor on the front edge of the stage.

And a few Source 4’s out front for the bows.

Wonderfully simple.

Sound was driven from our aging O2R and was all playback from a pair of DN2100 dual deck CD players. A single XTA 448 provided the speaker management to our MediaMatrix/EAW/JBL rig out front and to two pairs of our old favourite E12’s onstage, powered by D6 amps. One pair was hung from the onstage perch positions for sidefill, the other pair were on stands so they stood just over the upstage flattage wall.

A single UPM-1P was on a shelf on the front edge of the stage.

Yep, that’s an awful lot of AD/DA conversions in that.

I’m also not entirely convinced that the Denon CD players were actually needed – certainly the whole sound requirements could have been run from a computer based playback preferably running AES or SPDIF into the Yamaha.

[/shop talk]

The show was, for me, nothing spectacular. There’s just something about watching dancers in street garb to a backing track that just seems ‘not quite finished’. There may be moments that make you go gosh but there’s an overall incoherence, a sense of disconnection, between the dancers, the music and the visuals that misses the ‘oomph’ factor – that little ‘wow’ hook that live performance is capable of.

Maybe it’s just the performing equivalent of ‘you don’t get music/cartoons/food like you used to in the old days’ …

Well, the head’s still pounding so I feel there may be some pain-relieving substance in my future. At least my voice is coming back – spent a couple of hours sitting around the centre of London after I missed the last night bus on Saturday, waiting for the Sunday train service to start.

Cue three days of near silence on my part.

Yep, wife number one was happy …

After sales service should not be an after thought part 3

Well, it’s the 22nd and while I’m not writing this from the new laptop – I could be!

Yep, it’s up and running – with no thanks to CCL.

Citylink turned up early for the collection (but hey, at least they turned up) and CCL had it back by the 10th.

On the 16th, I called CCL to find out what was happening (so much for that seven day service) and was told that Vista had been re-installed and the laptop was fine.

“I should probably arrange a delivery,” said the guy at CCL.

Ya think??

It did actually arrive the next day.

And still had the same not loading properly error.

SIgh.

Obviously, the laptop being fine is just it switches on without beeping.

After we had scheduling ANOTHER pickup (here we go), and with the weekend free, we decided to try HP Recovery, a partition on the laptop that holds re-installation files.

The process took about an hour, and would delete any user created content (files and programs) – of course, we hadn’t been able to get to a position to put any user-created content on the laptop so that wasn’t a problem.

The hour came and went and the laptop …

… worked.

That simple.

I’m not certain what CCL were doing to it – I know the day before it first got dispatched to us, they were able to install AIM and AOL search (gee thanks). Beyond that, I would have thought that actually loading into Vista and having a look at the desktop might be in order, seeing as how that was the reported error.

I dunno, I’m just old-fashioned like that.

Of course, it took another couple of hours to install all the security updates that MS had released since the laptop left HP (and to remove Norton, AOL and the rest of the bloatware).

I really have to say that CCL have not been a shining beacon of online sales – the telephone system leaves you hanging for ages (though, to be fair, it is a local geographical number and not an 0845 or 0870 number), the technical support wasn’t and there’s an air of laissez faire about the whole thing.

Plus, the communication between them and Citylink was pretty poor. If Citylink really can’t specify a delivery of pickup time then CCL need to adjust their service (and marketing) accordingly.

(A citylink driver of course showed up early for the final pickup, despite us emailing CCL to cancel the pickup)

Not encouraging and I don’t recommend them.

The laptop – well, it seems to be doing nicely.

I’ll post a review in a few weeks once it’s bedded in properly. It’s doing a lot better than the company we got it from.