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March 17, 2010

I Have Found a Use for Twitter!

I call this: tech — Posted by KP @ 2:47 pm

So I’m at the hotel on a day off, thinking the rest of the crew is off partying for St. Patrick’s day. I settle in to sort my clothes for the laundry. When I do chores I generally like to put some music on.

I discovered yesterday that the hotel’s internet can’t handle Pandora reliably, so I start the Pandora app on my iPhone. I decide to tweet about how ridiculous that situation is, and open the Twitter website. In my feed I see a post from Nick (@nicktochelli) about how he’s doing laundry. Son of a bitch!

So I sent Nick a text asking if he was hogging the only machine, or if there were more. It also made me realize that I had a potential lunch buddy at the hotel, and wouldn’t have to go seek food alone.

Nick got back to me and said that he was moving on to the dryer so the washer would be available. We decided to have lunch at the bland and overpriced restaurant in the hotel, so that we could attend to our laundry, and because it’s raining and there’s nothing else close by.

See, without people tweeting things like “I’m doing laundry,” I would have dragged my ass, and my dirty clothes, all the way down to the laundry room potentially for no reason! This way I found someone to have lunch with and we got to coordinate our laundry cycles so I could get a machine easily.


The Map

I call this: On the Road Again,phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 10:22 am

Behold, the Acting Company tour overlaid on the only map that truly matters: AT&T’s 3G coverage.

AT&T has claimed that they cover 97% of Americans. I often feel like it’s The Acting Company’s mission to bring Shakespeare to the other 3%. To be honest, we’ve only been in a handful of places where my phone didn’t work at all, and I imagine that AT&T considers all of them to be part of their coverage area because your phone might sometimes work. Of course when you’re a stage manager trying to put on a show and you can’t reliably send or receive phone calls, text messages or email at your hotel, your venue, or anywhere in between, “in an hour there are many days,” as Shakespeare says.

But actually when you look at it, we only spend maybe half the tour in places without 3G coverage. At least according to this map. What it doesn’t show is that in places like Fairfax, VA, which is very close to Washington, and within the 3G bubble thereabouts, there is no AT&T service in the dressing rooms, which are only maybe 30 feet from the loading dock. I blame that on AT&T regardless. Buildings are made of concrete. People live and work in buildings. Plan for it.

Incidentally, the reason that Verizon works better indoors is because the frequency they operate on penetrates walls and floors better, so even with equal numbers of towers, they will always have better building penetration than AT&T (at least on the current generation of frequencies). However, with good service, AT&T does have theoretically higher speeds. Actually just the other day we were in 3G coverage somewhere and I ran a speed test on my phone and was getting speeds higher than the theoretical maximum of Verizon’s EV-DO Rev A. So it does pay off in the real world occasionally, I guess.


March 12, 2010

Dear Civilization: Please Help. Crew Starving. Send Interwebs.

I call this: On the Road Again,phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:54 pm

Here I sit, at the Fairfield Inn in Ottumwa, IA. Clinging to a single bar of Edge on my iPhone.

I know what you’re thinking: “why are you even looking at your phone and expecting it to work? — you’re in Iowa. AT&T has made it clear they don’t care about Iowa. You should be happy you have any signal at all.”

Well, about that. The Fairfield Inn is charging us $90 a night. What in Ottumwa is worth that much for a hotel room? I have no idea.  It must be something or else they’d be out of business.  All I know is it’s half a mile to the closest source of food, and this afternoon we had to have our bus driver drive us to the grocery store, and tonight he’s taking us downtown for dinner.  The bus driver, by the way, is not really supposed to have to do that.  His job is to drive us between cities, to the hotel, and to the venue.  Otherwise he should be sleeping, or picking up chicks, or whatever else bus drivers do when they’re off the clock.  Any other trips beyond that are just to be nice.

The bus internet, which uses Sprint, is struggling a bit here, too, which is surprising because it always does better than AT&T in places of dubious importance to wireless carriers.

No problem though. We have two days off here. We have hotel rooms. We can just sit in the hotel and use the internet all we want. WRONG.

THE HOTEL INTERNET IS BROKEN.

They don’t know when it will be fixed.

Let me recap what we’re getting for $90/night at the Fairfield Inn in Ottumwa, IA:

  • No access to food aside from the snack machine in the hall (I don’t know if it works)
  • Located in the middle of nowhere where both AT&T and Sprint don’t provide reliable service
  • NO INTERNET

Look at this smug little anthropomorphized ethernet jack. Lies. All lies. Now, a hotel advertising “high speed internet” almost always means that one time, about 10 years ago, their bandwidth would have been considered high speed. When I installed my first 56K modem I felt like I had put a rocketship in my computer too, so I get where they’re coming from. But seeing the little sticker on the wall when I checked in did not fill me with hope. I did kind of expect that there would be something coming out of it, though.

We’ve complained, but the manager won’t be in until tomorrow, so who knows how it will turn out. I wouldn’t mind paying half the price for a place to shower, sleep and do laundry, but we’ve stayed in nice hotels in the downtown areas of major cities for less, and they had internet, too.

If we were just passing through it would be one thing, but this is where we’re spending two days off. The cast, lucky sons-of-guns, are staying an extra day in our previous hotel, which was near a lot of stuff, including a fast food / ice cream joint called Culver’s, which I’d never heard of, but about which I will be fantasizing for months if not years.

I think I may be doing a lot of writing for these days, although usually when I write I do refer to the internet for things. I will get by with whatever I can eke out of my one bar of Edge. I can only imagine what a disaster my life would be right now if my phone wasn’t jailbroken and I couldn’t tether. You hear me, AT&T? I’m stealing the bandwidth I already paid you for — 1KB every second!

UPDATE

Well things worked out OK. An hour before we were supposed to check out, Bobby called to say that the hotel was going to take care of us and let us stay all night (we have a 4AM load-in, so we were going to check out at 1PM and then sit on the bus in the middle of nowhere until our 3:30AM departure). And on top of that, they just fixed the internet! So the ability to stay all day, time to grab some sleep before load-in, even shower again if we want to, and the access to internet while here, have made it worth the $90 (I consider that a day-and-a-half hotel stay, which works out to just about what the room is worth).

I had just settled in to spend my last hour in the hotel beginning to prepare graphic elements for the next version of my stage management database, which I will begin working on once the tour is over. I figured it’s the one project I can accomplish completely offline. I want it to share the look and feel of the website, so I began importing the graphics. Here’s what I came up with in the five minutes before the phone rang.

And this whole experience allowed me to return to my childhood, when you could click a web link, go take a shower, and come back to see if the page had finished loading.

In other news, their internet seemed really fast, maybe fast enough for gaming, which is what I usually hope to do when staying in a hotel for a day off, so I headed over to DSL Reports to see what the speeds were. One time it tested at about 100kpbs, and another in excess of 1MB. Anyway, I’m happy with whatever it is.


March 11, 2010

Filemaker 11 Released

I call this: computers,tech — Posted by KP @ 8:07 am

My Twitter feed lit up the other day with news that Filemaker 11 has been released.

I use Filemaker to design a stage management database that does pretty much everything I need to do. Ever. So of course this is a big deal to me.

New Features

Charts is the one they’re really pushing in the marketing, but have you ever seen a stage management chart? I mean it would be cute if you wanted to look at trends, like have a little pie chart showing how many tickets you sold relative to capacity or something, but I don’t think a stage manager has ever needed a chart.

The two words that got my attention were “filtered portals,” which is one of those things I’m always shocked it doesn’t do already. A portal is like a window within a window, for lack of a better term, that pulls data from some other table in the database and displays it as a list. For instance, my venue information layout contains data about a single venue (name, address, union status, etc.) and within it has two portals — one for all contacts (pulled from the contacts table) that have that venue in their “company” field, and another for all performances that are listed in the event table as occurring there. So when I look at each venue, I see all the contacts associated with it, and all the performances that happen there.

However, my event table tracks rehearsals, previews and performances, which are indicated by a drop-down menu to choose which type a particular event is. Most of the time this isn’t a problem because we’re mainly doing shows, but for example at the Guthrie, we were rehearsing there for a month. If you look at the Guthrie’s venue entry, you’ll see all the rehearsals as well. There is currently no way to tell the portal “show me related records from the events table, but only the ones that have ‘Perf’ as their Type.” It seems like a really obvious feature, and one that always bugs me that it’s been missing. So for that alone I want to upgrade.

Upgrade Pricing

I have Filemaker 10. I paid $300 for it. Like six months ago. The upgrade pricing for Filemaker 11 is $179. The cost is high, but for apps like this I expect it. What makes it frustrating is that it’s $179 whether you own Filemaker 10, 9 or (for the first six months) 8. So basically there’s no incentive to upgrade to every version. Which for a large corporation is probably a good idea anyway, since changing the compatibility of your database every couple years would be a huge undertaking. But it would be nice if they threw a bone, even a small one ($20?), to people who care enough to want the extra features right away. Why are people who bought the program 5 years ago paying the same to upgrade as me who bought a version that’s only been out a year? Lame. Very lame.

Now instead of immediately hitting the “purchase” button upon the logic of “11 is better than 10” (I call this the Spinal Tap Theory of Software), I’m going to really have to look into the features to see if it’s something I will get significantly more productivity out of. And I may try to save up some Amazon gift certificates or get it for my birthday rather than buy it right away. If I didn’t need a new laptop, things would be different, but I’m being very cautious about spending any significant money until after the computer is purchased, so that I can examine how broke I am before proceeding with purchases that might become lower-priority in light of my brokeification.


February 12, 2010

Pimp My Workbox

I call this: On the Road Again,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:59 pm

For some time, stage management has had the saddest workbox on all of the Acting Company tour. Nick and I have vowed to change that this year. At the Guthrie we came into possession of some blue ropelight, and were going to cobble together some kind of interior lighting. Our TD, Bobby, said he would help us install it, and picked up some parts at Home Depot in Minneapolis.

Here in Pittsfield, MA, we finally got some spare time, and Bobby spent what must have been three hours on our box. The result is gorgeous. Not only is every shelf and compartment lit with ropelight, but it’s dim-able, and we also have two outlets in the shelf that serves as our laptop-holder. The ropelight that was handed down to us has a burnout, which we were OK with, but Bobby is going to replace it for us when we get near a Home Depot. It’s probably a good idea, because it’s kind of comical that the dead spot landed exactly over Nick’s shelf.


Breaking Even. And Just Breaking.

I call this: mac,On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:52 am

This morning I paid off my credit card. Not just paid the balance, which I haven’t been able to do in months — paid every. last. dime.

Of course the secret to my success is that I’m on tour, I’ve been under full LORT B scale for the last two months (though not anymore), and our per diem kicked in last week. But after that almost inconceivable windfall, it still took me two-and-a-half months to break even and start making some money on this only 5-month contract.

My dream, perhaps you recall, was that by the end of this tour I would have saved enough money that I could replace my Macbook Pro in cash whenever the need arose. I really don’t think in two-and-a-half months I can make enough money to do that, and so far I haven’t found the drive to double or triple up on hotel rooms. We septuple-up every night on the bus, when we’re in a hotel I like to have my space.

But nevertheless, by not having any debt, at least the bright side is that I have room for new debt.

Which comes at a good time, because although I’ve been in denial about it, my poor Macbook Pro has been making it clear that the display is going bad for about six months now. This morning we arrived at the theatre for the 1-hour R&J, and the display was a mess. I had to reboot it a couple times before it started to calm down, and now it’s just dandy. Of course I keep frequent backups, and I was in the middle of pulling up my prop list on Nick’s computer when mine started working.

I’m not sure if it’s the connection, something in the display itself, or the video card, but it’s exhibited very occasional flickering or graphic corruption, which has sometimes been fixed by squeezing the bezel in certain places, leading me to think it’s the display itself. If it’s just a loose connection it might be something that can be fixed cheaply at the Apple Store, but if the display needs to be replaced, I’m not sure it’s worth the money to keep laying out hundreds of dollars to fix it, when something else could just as easily break right after that. Once again, people, keep track of the date your Apple Care expires! Or at least don’t wait until the last day to renew it, in case your recollection of what date it was is off by a day.

I’m hearing rumors of quad-core Macbook Pros coming out in the near-ish future, and I’d love for mine to hold on long enough to have something significant like that to upgrade to. I don’t feel like the current Macbook Pros are really that much more exciting than mine. And what I want most of all is built-in GPS, or a way of getting the location from my phone’s GPS without having to do anything. I get so frustrated with my computer when it doesn’t know where I am.

Anyway, I thought I’d fill you in, since one of these days you’re bound to read another post about me getting ready for a show and discovering that my computer has up-and-died. And when that happens, I hope I’m someplace with an Apple Store.


January 23, 2010

Small Wonderful iPhone Moment

I call this: phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 9:03 am

This afternoon during rehearsal I got an email from Hunter, who runs the accessibility program that provides a variety of ways for audiences with disabilities to experience Guthrie shows. He wanted to get a transcript of our preshow and intermission announcements so they could be added to the captions for our performance tomorrow night.

I had an older version of the preshow announcement, but they both had been somewhat improvised when they were recorded, so I didn’t have anything with the exact wording of the current announcement.

During the preshow sound check I asked our engineer, Jake, to play both announcements for me while I used the voice recorder on my iPhone to record it, so I could later write it out for Hunter. It so happens, as I was doing so, Hunter came into the house to prepare for the sign language interpreters we had tonight. He saw what I was doing, and said that if I just sent him the audio file he could handle it. So right there, with a couple clicks, I emailed the file to him, and was done.

It’s not the most exciting thing ever, but it was just one of those really simple cases where something can be handled so much more elegantly than ever before with modern technology.


January 19, 2010

Teaching the Database to Speak

I call this: tech — Posted by KP @ 2:40 am

I have to tell you what I learned tonight. I must caution you, there is some geek-speak below, in as plain terms as possible.

I was watching a screencast from Filemaker, about the fun new things you can do in Filemaker Pro 10. This isn’t really news to me, as I’ve been using v. 10 for months, and the last version I owned before that was v. 7. But this particular screencast began by talking about the ontimer script feature. That’s not something I’ve really worked with much, except that I have a Filemaker clock that I found online, and basically tinkered with just enough to add it to my database, without exactly understanding how all of it works.

This screencast explained it (it’s actually really simple, it just executes a specified script every however-many seconds), and suddenly I figured out how to do something that I knew was theoretically possible, but thought was outside my programming knowledge: to get the performance report to remind me to make calls based on what time it is.

The report already has an “intermission calculator” where I can enter how long I want the intermission to be, and based on the end time of Act I, it displays what time I need to call 5 and places (assuming it takes 3 minutes from calling places to actually being able to start). It does the math for me, but it doesn’t help to remind me in any way, I still have to keep watching the clock.

Well using the ontimer script, which I have running every 10 seconds when the performance report is loaded, it records the current time as a variable, and then goes down the list of possible calls (30 minutes, 15 minutes, 6 minutes, and 2 minutes before the scheduled start time, as well as the “call 5 at” and “call places at” times from the intermission calculator), comparing the current time to those times.

I added a series of fields to each report that corresponds to each call that needs to be made — by default the value is 0 (the call has not been made). The script looks through each of the possible calls whose value is 0, and then looks to see if the current time is greater than or equal to the time one of the calls is due. If so, it says — out loud — the call (i.e. “Half hour please”) and then displays a pop-up window saying “Call half hour now!” Once this window is dismissed, the call field changes from 0 to 1, and from that point on, the script no longer worries about that call.

It’s absolutely hysterical. But most of all, it’s going to be very handy. From here pretty much anything is possible. Now I’ve got it to send me a text message when it makes a call, so even if I’m not in the booth I’ll get the call wherever I am (except for the places calls, where I should already be in the booth). At the end of the script it checks to see if all the calls are marked as “1” and if so, it ends the timer script.

I can’t wait to start using this tomorrow!

I’m so excited I made a movie demonstrating how it works. I suggest watching it at Youtube where it’s in higher resolution.


January 18, 2010

Another Amazing Genius Bar Experience

I call this: mac — Posted by KP @ 2:58 pm

As someone of a geeky persuasion, I have an inherent dislike of seeking technical support. Under no circumstances will I do so except in a case of obvious hardware failure where I have no choice. And then I fear the series of questions from the technician, who expects (or his employer expects him to ask) that what ails my hardware can be solved by rebooting it, and that I haven’t tried that, and every other possible solution already before seeking help.

I have had a rather unfortunate number of opportunities to visit Apple’s Genius Bar in Apple Stores all over the country, and at this point have had so many pleasant experiences that rather than thinking of it as a dreaded last resort, when I reach the moment of acceptance that my hardware is broken, I’m comforted knowing that as soon as I’m somewhere with access to an Apple Store they’ll make it all better.

So my battery in my Macbook Pro (the one I got as a replacement when we were in Pennsylvania on tour last year) has been showing defective performance for at least 3 months. But when I gathered my paperwork to take it in, I realized it only came with a 90 day warranty. Which is pretty lame for a battery, even if it was free. So I held off doing anything about it, but took the receipt with me on tour, in case I wanted it when the battery inevitably decided to become completely useless.

That day came last week when I was in an informal meeting in the cafe at the Guthrie, and right in the middle of editing our Google calendar, my computer spontaneously shut down after about a half hour off the charger, while still showing a 50% charge. With the meeting at a temporary stand-still, I closed the lid and said, “well, I know what I’m doing on the day off.”

I thought about just buying another battery, since I knew I was out of warranty, but $130 for something that is obviously defective, and my non-fear of the Genius Bar, was enough that I was willing to take my chances and make an appointment. Maybe they could give me a discount at least.

So today I went, and the genius’ eyes popped out of his head when he saw how bad the battery’s stats were. Then he ran the diagnostic, which I blogged about last time, and if possible, it showed even more red commentary on just how bad it thought my battery was.

So the genius went to the back to discuss the situation, and came back and said they would replace it for free because of how many bad batteries I’ve had, and because I paid for one of them (plus the one the computer came with). I was very pleased that they were able to be flexible in their policy based on the circumstances.

So then I brought up my secondary question, which is that a couple days ago (after making my Genius Bar appointment) my iPhone cable broke — the cable split, exposing the wires right where the cable meets the plug that goes into the phone. I have a general awareness that that’s usually something they consider wear-and-tear (though those cables wear out way too easily), but I thought I’d take advantage of the fact that my iPhone is pretty much the only piece of hardware I own that’s under warranty, and bring the cable along in the hopes they would cover it. They did.

So I spent nothing and got about $150 in new accessories that technically they weren’t required to give me. It was a very worthwhile day.

And now yet again my trusty Macbook Pro gets a new lease on life, and between that and the new hard drive, should be running like a spring chicken until I can afford to replace it. We just won’t talk about the video problem it had on the night of the first preview. It must have been a solar flare or something…

Tech Details

For those who track things like battery failure stats… I did some research before taking my computer in, since I know (from personal experience!) that these batteries fail at a higher-than-normal rate (this is the original MBP 15″ battery). What I found from perusing the Apple support forums is that the batteries made by Sony seem most prone to failure, and those by SMP are apparently better. My old one was a Sony, and I’m glad to find that the new one is SMP.

I didn’t bother recording the exact stats of the battery, because they were so awful there was no question it wasn’t normal degradation of a rechargeable battery, but it was at 8% health after 80-something charge cycles, which is FRIGGIN TERRIBLE if you’re looking for comparisons.

And while I am fully aware that this particular model of Macbook Pro suffers from battery issues, most models of computers have one common flaw where they are most likely to fail, and the battery isn’t such a bad one. That being said, the whole issue is moot as this model is obsolete, and Apple has been employing new battery technology for a while now, so it doesn’t make me nervous about future purchases. I’m actually really looking forward to getting an upgrade in six months or so, mostly because of the more reliable, higher-capacity battery. There’s not much else in the unibody MBPs that excites me, although there are rumors that there may be a quad-core model coming soonish, which would be worth waiting for (although I expect it will be out before I was ready to purchase).


January 17, 2010

Review: Altec Lansing Orbit MP3 Speaker

I call this: computers,tech — Posted by KP @ 6:08 pm

This week we had a Skype conference scheduled between our cast and the NY office.  Nick and my reaction to this was kind of like, “um… uh… OK,” cause we’re not really set up to have video conferences with 14 people on our end.  But being the technological type, we set our computers up, and reserved a good room to have the call in.  But we knew our laptop speakers would not be loud enough to let a room full of people hear well.  I travel with a cheap external speaker, but it’s barely louder than the laptop’s own, and I’ve been looking for a while for other options that are small enough to tour with.

I came across the Altec Lansing Orbit MP3 speaker at the Apple Store, and took a chance on it.

It’s about the size of a doughnut, and comes in a cute carrying case with a carabiner, so easy to travel with.  The short cord curls up under the bottom and the 1/8″ stereo mini plug snaps into place to hold it in.  The bottom also has little rubbery feet, which is nice.  The overall build quality feels very good.  It’s not lightweight for its size, but it’s also not made of cheap materials.

It’s an omnidirectional speaker, so you can place it on your desktop with the speaker pointing up, and the sound will fill the room.  The speaker takes 3 AAA batteries (included), and only works when powered.  My old speaker would produce a tiny bit of sound when unpowered, which was handy for listening without batteries to devices that don’t have their own speakers, such as older iPods and CD players.  But that’s really not something that has been an issue for me too often, so I don’t really mind losing it.  I haven’t had it long enough to get an idea of the battery life, but the power button supposedly also indicates when the battery is low.  There is no volume control on the speaker, so you must use the built-in volume on your computer or music device.

For basic tasks of making computer sound audible to a larger room, or having better sound while watching video or listening to music, I find it works very well.  I think at $40 it’s a fair price for the features, and the accessories are of surprisingly good quality.

There’s also a USB version, which is good because it doesn’t need batteries, but it’s not as flexible because it can only be used with a computer. It’s also $10 more.



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