Saturday, July 07, 2007

Class....

Original plan for last night was to see a movie, but I was exhausted, and went to be early. Slept well, woke up an hour before the new travel alarm went off. Had some coffee, grabbed my big rolling case and walked from Euston Station area to central Soho to teach the class - stopping at Cafe Nero for a Mocha along the way. Felt fine...

Until about halfway through the class, when my body realized I should be asleep. I decided to *not* eat lunch - which may have been a mistake - and took a walk around Soho during my lunch hour. Blood circulating again, I did the second half of today's class... but somewhere along the line I lost control (of the class, not my bladder or temper) and answered a string of questions that had to do with people's individual script problems. Took a minute to get back on track. Finished the day, and then realized that the room we are using had another function going on it it and we'd have to pack everything up.

Our big issue ended up being film clips - as usual. We checked out the venue yesterday, but there was no one there who knew the tech stuff about how to plug into the digital projector... or even how to lower the screen (it had a remote control - but we didn't know where that was). So the half hour before class was scrambling to figure out how to make it all work... and we never really did. No one could find the video in plugs, so we decided to run it off a laptop - not mine, but one of the Raindance guy's. It had issues. I was able to show one or two clips - without sound - before we realized this wasn't going to work. At lunch we connected my portable DVD player, and it worked fine. I took my walk through Soho to keep my blood flowing and it was smooth sailing as far as clips were concerned for the rest of the day...

Except tomorrow morning we'll have to figure out how to connect everything all over again. And the day ended with me dragging my bag back to the Raindance office - tomorrow one of the Raindance guys is supposed to bring it to the venue. It has *everything* in it... I hope he remembers.

- Bill

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah but what'd you have for lunch?

Unk

MaryAn Batchellor said...

I'm so SICK of the same ol' problem - nobody with the tech knowledge to set things up so you either bring all your own stuff and set it up every day or figure somebody else's stuff out for yourself and still set it up everyday. We live in a tech world. I really don't get why teachers, speakers, singers, performers, are responsible for setting everything up themselves but it always seems to turn out that way. Even at the most elite hotels, music halls, and conference centers, tech stuff seems low priority. This seems to be a universal theme. Don't teach or sing or present or perform unless (1) you can set up the sound/video/computers yourself AND/OR (2) you can carry on if nothing works. Plan B isn't optional. Nor is tech knowledge.

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