Anyway, after spending a day sorting through and testing piles of
televisions, we came away with a dozen or so that mostly work. So
yesterday, Dan and I took stock of the various TVs tucked into corners
around the club, figured out which ones work, and shuffled things
around. We had to abandon a few of them because they have this
irritating feature where they stay off when power drops and is
re-applied: so if you're turning them on and off from a power strip, as
we are, you'd also have to climb up and turn some of the TVs back on by
hand, which is too much hassle. I'm told this is some legally-mandated
``energy saving'' feature. Maybe it will be possible to short across
the power buttons to avoid this on some of them. We'll see.
So most of the TVs looking down on the lounge display pictures now,
and there's a new stack of them under the main stairs in the main room.
I think it worked out pretty well!
We were planning on putting a row of TVs under the balcony
downstairs by just setting them on top of the deceptively shelf-like
plumbing and electrical conduit that runs the length of the room near
the wall, but it turns out that (surprise) TVs are actually kind of
heavy, and the way those pipes were flexing was just a little too
nervous-making for comfort.
×
10-Mar-2002 (sun)
Every now and then I get mail from somebody who read this log who
says, ``wow, that's really something. You should write a book.'' This
confuses me. Because I did, didn't I? What do they think this is?
Maybe it would help if I put in chapter headings, instead of just
sorting it chronologically:
| Chapter One: |
|
I Am Born. |
| Chapter Two: |
I Am Nailed to the Hull. |
| Chapter Three: |
I Am Eaten by Sharks. |
|
... |
I updated my Webcasting Legally
document to correspond to the new varieties of impending doom that are looming
over the head of every webcaster as of last month.
I had to crank down the allowed number of simultaneous connections
to the webcast archives, because apparently the
Disco Biscuits
show last wednesday was insanely popular with the listen-at-home crowd;
they pushed us over our bandwidth limit for long enough that our ISP
put a rate limiter on us, which was killing performance across the
board. I don't really know how to deal with usage spikes like that;
short-lived spikes are ok (e.g., 20 listeners for half a day is fine if
there are only 5 during the other half) but when the spike lasts too
long, we've got trouble.
×
17-Mar-2002 (sun)
Hey, I just noticed that I've been doing this little weblog for
two years now as of March 3, which is
the day we closed escrow! Wow. The web site had been up since
January, which was when we finally got control of the domain, but
mainly contained a call to arms about our permit battles at that point.
This month has been going really well! We might actually be able
to pay everyone's salary this month. It looks like yesterday's
Wicked party was
our biggest night to date: lots of people showed up to see Doc Martin
spin, and we didn't shut down until almost 7AM. The cool thing is (if
I understand the history correctly) he actually got his start DJing at
the DNA Lounge back in
1986.
I put some more pictures in the
gallery. If you ever take
pictures of DNA Lounge events and wouldn't mind sharing them, please
let me know: I'm always looking for more stuff for our gallery...
Oh, also you can now buy DNA Lounge t-shirts
and tank-tops by credit card online, in addition to in person at
coat-check. You know you want one.
×
20-Mar-2002 (wed)×
30-Mar-2002 (sat)
We got a couple of new CD players,
Pioneer CDJ-100s. This came about because someone was interested
in buying one of our
Denon 2100s, so it didn't end up costing us much to trade up. I'm
not sure the Denons have ever been used by a DJ who mixes; most
DJs who beatmatch use vinyl, and the few who do use CDs tend to bring
their own CDJs with them, and DJs who don't beatmatch probably would
have been satisfied with a pair of Discmans. So clearly we bought the
wrong thing the first time out; nobody who cares likes the Denons.
We ended up putting the new decks in the lounge instead of the main
room. It would probably make more sense for them to go in the main
room, but the layout of the lounge coffin lends itself to them, and
getting them well-situated in the main room's coffin would basically
require us to rebuild the coffin, and we've got better things to spend
the money on at the moment, unfortunately. I'd definitely want them to
be firmly mounted, because I've seen the sticky, banged-up mess that
becomes of any gear we leave up there that isn't bolted down, like our
VCR and DVD player. (I even had to attach a cable to the DVD player's
remote control so it would stop walking off, just like in a cheap hotel
room!)
I don't know how many of you ever call our info line
(415-626-1409) but Barry has been
updating that about once a week. It takes him a long time, because
he usually only gets part of the way through it without screwing up
and having to start over, and by the fourth or fifth try, there's
usually someone in the office making fun of him, which doesn't make
it any easier. So, I played around with the
Festival
speech-synthesis package (which works pretty well) and I hacked up
another Perl script to translate our
calendar pages to
English sentences. So from now on, our info line will be read by
a slightly-deadpan British robot.
The mechavoice isn't up yet, though, because Barry's really proud
of how well he read the most recent announcement and doesn't want to
delete it yet!
I'm told DNA got a nice mention in the April issue of
Maxim,
though it doesn't seem to be online. We also got a brief
mention in NewsWeek,
and I was quoted in a recent
Chronicle article on the state of the SF club scene (with a
couple of
pictures of the club!)
Also, Salon has a good (DNA-less)
interview
with Rusty from SomaFM about the
impending doom bearing down on all us
webcasters.
