Going It Alone

I have once again offered my services as a programmer to my friend whi is struggling with her Actionscript project. The last time I offered to help was on the promise that I would be fed a delicious roast dinner - which by the way didn't appear - and so this time I made sure I would be fed.

With the food order secure, I agreed to help them. I consider myself to be a fairly generous person and unless it is being generous through cooking/baking for other people - meals, cakes etc - I usually ask for only a token payment, which is usually food.

I still don't consider any skills I may have to be of a standard good enough to warrant any proper payment which is one of the reasons I either do things for free or for something small. Food is - in my opinion - a very food token because it is usually comparatively inexpensive but requires some thought and effort to be put in as a match for the time and effort I have given.

The other event of today was that it was my first go at operating lights on my own. I wasn't totally alone of course - there were people there that I could have asked help from should a disaster have occurred but essentially I was in charge of ensuring the lights were of a decent standard during the night. Thankfully, pretty much everything went to plan. I rigged a couple more lights, got everything programmed okay with only one slip of the mind when trying to remember where the button to randomise a sequence was. I also managed to find a dodgy cable which meant that of the group of four lights behind the dance stage, three didn't work. Thankfully it was only a bad cable and nothing more serious and swapping the cable made them spring back to life again.

Another slip of the mind meant that just before the doors opened, I remembered that I hadn't rigged any blinders. This is a very silly mistake to make because they play a very large role in a Pop Tarts event. I could have easily got away with not having rigged any strobes but blinders are a must. IN my defence, I did program them into the lighting desk and the only reason I hadn't got round to actually putting the lights in the roof was because the people putting up the stage were in the way.

During the event I discovered a few bugs in my programming. Setting one of the colour chases off made one of the lighting groups change to open white so I had to be very quick when using those to overwrite the change. Other silly mistakes were the positioning of the strobe buttons above the colourful lights on the stage. If I had the roller on the wrong set of chases, I would end up setting off the strobe by accident. Hopefully most of the punters would have been too drunk to notice but it does make you panic a little bit when you see something unexpected happen.

Other than those few mishaps however, I think it went fairly well. The main thing I have learned from all of this is that I need to test everything beforehand to give me time to correct anything before the people arrive. As I get quicker at programming however, I should have more time left before doors open to play around with everything and make sure it all works as I expect it too.