The Night From Hell

Tonight was a busy night at the union. There were a couple of events going on at the same time which always makes things a bit difficult but one of the events was the International Cultural Evening which is a massive event joining together a huge number of international students and the various societies and committees that represent the vast number of countries with students at the university.

Before Pop Tarts started, there was a gig in the next room which had to be changed over in a relatively short space of time. It also meant that we didn't have access to all of the usual equipment until very late on in the evening and the spare amp usually used to provide sound to the on stage area - which becomes a dance stage at this event - didn't work. Eventually a very old and dodgy replacement was found and assembled only to find out that there was time to use the decent one from the other room meaning the old one had to be taken down and the new one put up.

More disastrously, the lighting desk decided it had had enough and the screen refused to work. This wouldn't have been a huge problem if the fixtures had already been patched in because you can see what is happening most of the time but unless you have memorised the fixture library order, there is no way of telling what fixture you are patching. The only solution we could come up with was to use the USB DMX adapter and use a free trial of a lighting program from the internet to control them. The venue had to be rewired to cope with this as well because it is usually set up with two lines (universes) for the dance floor and stage respectively. We only had one spare DMX adapter and the software only supports one universe anyway. In the end there was no way to control the movement and it took a lot of effort to make anything actually happen. Thankfully because there were several events all on at the same time, there were some of the more experienced crew on hand to sort it all out. One day I'm supposed to know how to do all of this sort of stuff!

After all of this excitement, despite it being nearly five o'clock in the morning, I couldn't get to sleep and so decided to catch up on Dr Who. I will probably regret this tomorrow but at the moment I am happy.