Styx (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} certifiedwaif) wrote,@ 2004-01-15 17:02:00 |
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Adelaide trip
I'd been invited by Conrad Parker (author of sweep, aube and many other pieces of open source software) to give my Linux audio demos presentation at the annual Linux Conference, which was in Adelaide this year. Last week Conrad reminded me how soon that was coming up.
Saturday
Saturday night was spent madly making last minute preparations for Sunday, including plane ticket, accomodation and the all important presentation. The original presentation was marred by several important things not working (always a problem with demos), and some interesting new pieces of software had come out that I wanted to demonstrate.
Got home at 1am, Sunday morning after having lugged my machine in to work to use the high speed Internet connection there.
Sunday
Got up nice and early, caught taxi to airport and met many people I recognised from SLUG, including Erik de Castro Lopo (DSP legend, worked at Fairlight, wrote libsamplerate and libsndfile, many many other contributions), Jan Schmidt and the giggling kids from my SLUG talk who mocked me for not knowing anything about beast, whatever the hell that is. Had nice chats, and an uneventful flight.
Got to Adelaide and we all went our seperate ways. Got to my hotel, which despite being the Adelaide International was very, very small. Asked if there was a computer monitor I could borrow, because I didn't bring one on the flight (assuming wrongly that even in a backwards hick town like Adelaide, they would have heard of these). Sadly, they didn't have anything of the sort.
Tried to get a late lunch at the restaurant within the hotel. Unfortunately you can't get food from there after 2:30pm (it had just reached 2:43pm). Became intimately familiar with the sizable snack menu at the cocktail bar downstairs (3 items, one of which didn't qualify as food). Amused myself by playing Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails and Sneaker Pimps on the jukebox in the foyer. This devil music really upset the locals, who immediately raced over to try to queue something incredibly boring and old up to try to compensate. I'd foreseen this, and had queued three songs up in advance.
At this point, I should mention that the average Adelaide resident is overwhelmingly:
1) white (often Aryan)
2) conservative
3) polite to a fault, but able to convey disapproval within that constraint quite adequately if you don't fit in, which I clearly didn't
Finished my meal and got tired of listening to the jukebox play The Needle and the Damage Done by Neil Young over and over again (being at a programming conference made me think of how badly the random number generator in the jukebox would fail the Chi square test). Went up to my room, operated my computer without a monitor to play Sepultura songs and starting doing capoeira warm-ups. Routed my computer's audio output through the mixer I'd brought and then through my Line 6 POD and fiddled to see what the effect on the sound was. Quite interesting ;)
After a few hours of that, I got terminally bored and starting calling everyone I knew who might possibly be in Adelaide by then. Most of the people still hadn't flown in, so I was left to my own devices.
Walked around Adelaide a bit, getting my bearings. It's small. You can walk from anything to anything if you have sufficient patience. Not very many people around on a Sunday afternoon. There are a lot of churches, and a lot of cafes. Walked all the way to where the conference was meant to be, then doubled back.
Went to the internal restaurant again at 8:47pm, only to be told that they had closed early as it was a quiet night. Was advised again of the snack menu at the cocktail bar downstairs. Told the waitress as acidly as I could manage that I was already very familiar with it, but at least there was one meal I hadn't already eaten.
Sat around feeling sorry for myself, then as luck would have it saw Conrad walk past. Dropped my steak sandwich and ran after him, to ask if anything interesting was happening.
Ended up going to a pub, sitting around with loads of open source people of various stripes making off colour jokes about children - which turned out to be loads of fun. Began to feel tired, scurried back to my hotel room and went to sleep.
Monday
I was due to present at 10am. As I had bought a lot of gear with me, and knew from past experience that it takes a while to set up, I had arranged to be there at 8am and spend any spare time writing more slides. Well, I was there at 8:30am and still didn't get to do that. Here's what happened:
By this stage, the auditorium had largely filled, which was rather gratifying. Gave the talk in about an hour (tragically cut short when jack wouldn't start), a problem I fixed during lunch after which I gave a further fifteen minutes presentation (this time for sure).
Other presentations were interesting, even the one about DJing under Linux which was focussed on making DJing even easier (as if there's much musicianship involved in DJing as it is).
Went off to the Linux audio jam that was supposed to happen. Someone offhandedly mentioned that they hadn't talked to the venue for a week, that it was a gay bar and that drag queens usually performed there. Sounded perfect, what could possibly go wrong?
Monday night
The comedy of errors continued, when we got to the venue with our mixing boards with quarter inch outs only to be told that there was no sound person there tonight and be shown one XLR input we were supposed to play everything through. Linux geeks don't know much about audio, and hadn't thought to check this :| Immediately felt bad about my inferior $100 mixing board.
Two hours later, about 100 people had settled to watch us make noise and we were still no closer to getting anything coming out of the speakers. Half an hour later people had begun to leave.
Finally got the required cabling and started to play sounds at people. One of the other people who showed up was a jazz sax player and so I played rhythm as best I could while he soloed over the top. People used the Linux boxes patched into the mixer to play beats.
This was technically my first gig, and to be honest it sounded pretty terrible. We had no foldback, and most of the sound was coming out of speakers at the other end of the room (about a 100 ms delay between me strumming a guitar chord and actually hearing it, which made playing in time with the drums nigh on impossible). While my friend the sax player knew most of the jazz repotoire I didn't know much beyond Mack the Knife, and so tried to fake my way through. This kind of worked :| People patched laptops into the mixer and introduced ground loops. People altered the tempo of the drum machine running on the Linux box and wondered why we couldn't adapt (go from 120 bpm to 160bpm within a bar, don't worry - we can cope!).
But all in all, it was kind of fun and actually useful as a learning experience. Certain things didn't work, which gives us something to work on for next year - and iiwusynth has a rather nasty voice robbing problem when you play full chord voicings, so that's something to fix :)
Went back to hotel room, having made some friends and probably deafened a few people along the way.
Flew back Tuesday morning, with loads and loads of ideas.
I'd been invited by Conrad Parker (author of sweep, aube and many other pieces of open source software) to give my Linux audio demos presentation at the annual Linux Conference, which was in Adelaide this year. Last week Conrad reminded me how soon that was coming up.
Saturday
Saturday night was spent madly making last minute preparations for Sunday, including plane ticket, accomodation and the all important presentation. The original presentation was marred by several important things not working (always a problem with demos), and some interesting new pieces of software had come out that I wanted to demonstrate.
Got home at 1am, Sunday morning after having lugged my machine in to work to use the high speed Internet connection there.
Sunday
Got up nice and early, caught taxi to airport and met many people I recognised from SLUG, including Erik de Castro Lopo (DSP legend, worked at Fairlight, wrote libsamplerate and libsndfile, many many other contributions), Jan Schmidt and the giggling kids from my SLUG talk who mocked me for not knowing anything about beast, whatever the hell that is. Had nice chats, and an uneventful flight.
Got to Adelaide and we all went our seperate ways. Got to my hotel, which despite being the Adelaide International was very, very small. Asked if there was a computer monitor I could borrow, because I didn't bring one on the flight (assuming wrongly that even in a backwards hick town like Adelaide, they would have heard of these). Sadly, they didn't have anything of the sort.
Tried to get a late lunch at the restaurant within the hotel. Unfortunately you can't get food from there after 2:30pm (it had just reached 2:43pm). Became intimately familiar with the sizable snack menu at the cocktail bar downstairs (3 items, one of which didn't qualify as food). Amused myself by playing Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails and Sneaker Pimps on the jukebox in the foyer. This devil music really upset the locals, who immediately raced over to try to queue something incredibly boring and old up to try to compensate. I'd foreseen this, and had queued three songs up in advance.
At this point, I should mention that the average Adelaide resident is overwhelmingly:
1) white (often Aryan)
2) conservative
3) polite to a fault, but able to convey disapproval within that constraint quite adequately if you don't fit in, which I clearly didn't
Finished my meal and got tired of listening to the jukebox play The Needle and the Damage Done by Neil Young over and over again (being at a programming conference made me think of how badly the random number generator in the jukebox would fail the Chi square test). Went up to my room, operated my computer without a monitor to play Sepultura songs and starting doing capoeira warm-ups. Routed my computer's audio output through the mixer I'd brought and then through my Line 6 POD and fiddled to see what the effect on the sound was. Quite interesting ;)
After a few hours of that, I got terminally bored and starting calling everyone I knew who might possibly be in Adelaide by then. Most of the people still hadn't flown in, so I was left to my own devices.
Walked around Adelaide a bit, getting my bearings. It's small. You can walk from anything to anything if you have sufficient patience. Not very many people around on a Sunday afternoon. There are a lot of churches, and a lot of cafes. Walked all the way to where the conference was meant to be, then doubled back.
Went to the internal restaurant again at 8:47pm, only to be told that they had closed early as it was a quiet night. Was advised again of the snack menu at the cocktail bar downstairs. Told the waitress as acidly as I could manage that I was already very familiar with it, but at least there was one meal I hadn't already eaten.
Sat around feeling sorry for myself, then as luck would have it saw Conrad walk past. Dropped my steak sandwich and ran after him, to ask if anything interesting was happening.
Ended up going to a pub, sitting around with loads of open source people of various stripes making off colour jokes about children - which turned out to be loads of fun. Began to feel tired, scurried back to my hotel room and went to sleep.
Monday
I was due to present at 10am. As I had bought a lot of gear with me, and knew from past experience that it takes a while to set up, I had arranged to be there at 8am and spend any spare time writing more slides. Well, I was there at 8:30am and still didn't get to do that. Here's what happened:
- Was told to go to the wrong room. Got halfway through setting up my gear before being told I was in the Debian miniconf room
- Went to see the organisers, to be told they didn't know where we were supposed to be. The room we were meant to be in was filled by people who were interested in hearing about IP6. Found out we were scheduled to be in that room, and kicked them all out.
- Conrad forgot the power cable for his video splitter. This meant I would have to do demos using the mouse and looking at the projector behind me.
- Plugged everything in and video didn't work. Someone suggested that perhaps the video card had become unseated during the flight. Took cover off case and reseated card. This fixed it.
- Booted up again, only to find that sound didn't work. Bear in mind, I'd tested sound last night in the hotel room by playing Sepultura through my mixer. It turned out that reseating the video card had unseated the sound card. Fixed that and booted up again.
- MIDI keyboard I had arranged to borrow arrives. Fired up my favorite wave table synth (which I had tested on Sat. night), connected the relevant MIDI ports in ALSA and hit keys ... to nothing. Assumed MIDI keyboard somehow didn't work, checked all that out and finally in a flash of inspiration fired up alsamodularsynth, which worked fine (!!!). So in between Sat. night and Sunday morning, iiwusynth had decided that outputting sound was boring! It later turned out it was outputting sound just fine, but the sound was completely inaudible due to the gain inexplicably having dropped.
By this stage, the auditorium had largely filled, which was rather gratifying. Gave the talk in about an hour (tragically cut short when jack wouldn't start), a problem I fixed during lunch after which I gave a further fifteen minutes presentation (this time for sure).
Other presentations were interesting, even the one about DJing under Linux which was focussed on making DJing even easier (as if there's much musicianship involved in DJing as it is).
Went off to the Linux audio jam that was supposed to happen. Someone offhandedly mentioned that they hadn't talked to the venue for a week, that it was a gay bar and that drag queens usually performed there. Sounded perfect, what could possibly go wrong?
Monday night
The comedy of errors continued, when we got to the venue with our mixing boards with quarter inch outs only to be told that there was no sound person there tonight and be shown one XLR input we were supposed to play everything through. Linux geeks don't know much about audio, and hadn't thought to check this :| Immediately felt bad about my inferior $100 mixing board.
Two hours later, about 100 people had settled to watch us make noise and we were still no closer to getting anything coming out of the speakers. Half an hour later people had begun to leave.
Finally got the required cabling and started to play sounds at people. One of the other people who showed up was a jazz sax player and so I played rhythm as best I could while he soloed over the top. People used the Linux boxes patched into the mixer to play beats.
This was technically my first gig, and to be honest it sounded pretty terrible. We had no foldback, and most of the sound was coming out of speakers at the other end of the room (about a 100 ms delay between me strumming a guitar chord and actually hearing it, which made playing in time with the drums nigh on impossible). While my friend the sax player knew most of the jazz repotoire I didn't know much beyond Mack the Knife, and so tried to fake my way through. This kind of worked :| People patched laptops into the mixer and introduced ground loops. People altered the tempo of the drum machine running on the Linux box and wondered why we couldn't adapt (go from 120 bpm to 160bpm within a bar, don't worry - we can cope!).
But all in all, it was kind of fun and actually useful as a learning experience. Certain things didn't work, which gives us something to work on for next year - and iiwusynth has a rather nasty voice robbing problem when you play full chord voicings, so that's something to fix :)
Went back to hotel room, having made some friends and probably deafened a few people along the way.
Flew back Tuesday morning, with loads and loads of ideas.
