Then, on wednesday, in addition to Connect, we hosted a last-minute after-party for Madonna's crew (she was performing at the Oakland Coliseum that night.) Her backup singers/dancers put on a impromptu performance on stage, but the webcast was dead silent while they were on stage: apparently their mics and music had been been patched in wrong too. Yay.

Then! Then! There was no webcast at all on thursday for Joypad, because I was never given confirmation of the calendar information. So the calendar pages didn't even claim that we were open that night! Since our webcast automation is driven off the calendar, it didn't start. I started it by hand a little while into the evening, once I realized what was happening, only to discover that, again, the live band (The Chopping Channel) had been patched in in the same wrong way, so that the webcast was silent while the band was playing. Yay again.

We could solve all of these problems by making the system more idiot-proof: right now, there are too many settings that all have to be right. We could eliminate all those settings entirely, and we already know the additional equipment we'd need to do that and make these kinds of mistakes be impossible. But that gear (a second SoundWeb, plus a few odds and ends) would cost us another $5k or so that we don't have.

Speaking of money, there's also a theory that some of our problems with the RealVideo broadcast (that some people can't hear audio, and that sometimes video gets stuck on a single freeze-framed image) might be solved if we had a faster computer running RealProducer: the one we have now is ``only'' 700MHz, which is ``only'' 3x faster than my primary development machine was two years ago.

And related to the webcast lossage we had on thursday, I'm very disappointed with (meaning: have been known to fly into a blind rage over) the timeliness of our calendar pages. It should be the case that the DNA Lounge calendar has all the latest information earlier than anywhere else. But in practice, it turns out to have it later than everywhere else, because nobody ever tells me anything!

For example, I'm holding in my hand right now a flyer for an event coming up here in a few weeks. This flyer lists the date, dj names, and door price for the event. I've never known this information before now.

We have a box of thousands of these flyers.

That means that the promoters:

• gave this information to their graphic designer;
• who then took the time to design the flyer;
• then they sent that file to the printer;
• who then took the time to actually print a run of thousands of them;
• then someone went so far as to physically bring a crate of them here to the club.

And that's the first we heard about it.

We should have gotten that information at the same time that the graphic designer did, if not earlier. But we didn't, because they didn't need to. It wasn't a priority for them, because nobody here had the time to spend on the phone, nagging and begging and cajoling them to please let us know what the hell was going on.

Now here's why dealing with promoters is not my job: because I would solve this problem by making it be a priority for them. I would tell them that the next time I see a flyer before they've told me what will be on that flyer, their event is canceled. Of course that would mean we'd be closed a lot. Which I'm told would be Bad.

I generally send out mail to our announcements mailing list every wednesday to let the subscribers know about the events coming up here in the next two weeks, but I didn't send it this week. Why? Because I just couldn't bring myself to say that of the six events we have in the next two weeks, all I know about three of them is ``I'm pretty sure we're open.''

Oh, and the plumbing disasters continue unabated. Just go ahead and assume that the floors leak and half the toilets explode every weekend until I say otherwise.

I've never been closer to saying ``good luck'' to the staff here and going home for good than I have been this week. The fun/sucks ratio is approaching underflow.

On friday there was actual, full-on break dancing at the DNA. I mean we had a guy with an enormous afro spinning on his head and everything. That was not something I ever expected to see again. Plus a contortionist! And we didn't even hire these people!

This sunday we had a film shoot here at the club. It's an independent short (they're guessing it will end up being about ten minutes long) called ``Imprint,'' starring Alessandro Nivola and written and directed by Eric Holter. It's a story without dialog, set to music (which the director also wrote), about a guy dealing with the death of his sister. The bits they were filing at the DNA were during the ``raves and drug use'' part of the story. It was pretty interesting watching them do this. They dressed up various parts of the club in different ways, to let DNA play the part of a bunch of different clubs in close-ups. Later in the evening, they brought in a bunch of extras and staged a dance club scene in the main room. And, of course, I took some pictures.

I'm not sure when we'll be able to see the finished product, but they said that they're going to be submitting it to a number of different film festivals later this year.

Coincidentally, today I saw the video for ``Insane in the Brain'' by Cypress Hill, which was filmed at the DNA Lounge in 1993 or so. I'd known for a while that this video was filmed here, but I hadn't actually seen it again since I learned that! The most distinctively recognisable feature you can see in the video is the shape of the railings on the stairs on either side of the stage, but there are some brief shots that show the balcony as well.

It looks like the non-concert parts of the video were filmed upstairs in the lounge, before the previous owners had painted over the Keith Haring murals. The walls and ceiling of the lounge used to be covered with a twisty black-and-white psychedelic maze (picture this painted on a wall instead of Grace Jones, and you'll get the idea.) We uncovered bits and pieces of the mural while we were doing demolition in the lounge (taking down shelves and so on) but never enough of it to save. Who knows what posessed them to paint over that thing! Especially with the really amateurish faux-middle-eastern thing they replaced it with.