Journalism Class

For this blog entry I'm going to simply talk about the English classes that I've taken the past 2 years.

Here at good ole ALHS we have many opportunities to take all sorts of classes. There is a large variety of electives, one of the many reasons why students love it here.

For English, you are required to take English 9 and 10. And then starting in 11th grade I had the opportunity to choose what English class I wanted to be in. I chose to take American Literature II and College Composition my junior year. It is recommended that for junior and senior year you take a year of writing and a year of reading. College Comp. was a semester of writing and Am Lit II was a semester of reading.

I chose American Literature II because it covered a time period that interested me more than American Literature I. I chose to take College Composition because Mrs. Hallett is a wonderful person who I wanted to have as a teacher. Coincidentally She taught both classes. She made reading and writing a lot of fun by incorporating enticing activities and projects. There never was busy work with Mrs. Hallett; everything was worthwhile.

For senior year I elected to be in British Literature for 1 semester and Journalism for 1 semester. Brit Lit has been very interesting thus far. We have read some plays and some poetry and everything is different! It's like a breath of fresh air. We are currently reading Macbeth. Mrs. Elias is the teacher and she, like Mrs. Hallett makes the class fun. We act out scenes and write our own poetry. Every activity helps us understand the content a little better. This helps greatly at test time. Finally, the class that I'm writing this for... Journalism! This class has been a blast. Mr. Arra, married about a year ago, recently had a baby, and teacher for 10 years is really passionate about what he does. He loves his job and his family. I hate writing but ever since the start of the second semester he has taught me to love writing and has showed me different ways to accomplish different tasks. In this class we have written different length articles, movie reviews, choice reviews and blogs such as this one.

Long story short, I have enjoyed my experience with this schools English department and I recommend to all current and upcoming high school students to take as many English classes as possible. It is well worth it.

New Sound Board!

Here at the good ole ALHS Performing Arts Center we just recently bought a new sound board! The sound board is what allows us to play music, plug in microphones and play whatever we want through the sound system. This is very exciting for us as we have a musical coming up in less than two weeks.

 Below and to the left is where our 8 wireless receivers are now mounted. This rack is in the sound booth. To the right of that is a close shot of the patch panel.

This is the patch panel. All of the inputs from the stage are directed to the board here. It is very similar to a network switch or a phone switch.

 Patches go from mic to mix. If you plug a mic into port 26 on stage, on this panel you plug a line from mic-26 to whichever mix you want.


 Below is the old sound board. It was a 32 channel analog board. It was about 12 years old.

                                                                                                                                                                              To the left is a pile of old equipment. Among it is a few rack mixers, a vcr, old school EQ's, power conditoiners and more.

To the right is a close up of the screen and control panel for our new Yamaha LS9 sound board. This board is digital, much more compact, and can handle a lot more than our old analog board. This board is capable of handling 64 channels and as you can see below it is quite literally half the size of the old board.

Various Doings

As we approach the end of yet another thrilling academic year the theater has gotten quite busy. This isn't a new occurrence but one that happens every March, April and May.

In these closing months of school there are many spring concerts, academic award ceremonies, athletic award ceremonies, and a musical. We just recently had the district wide orchestra concert. This was a wonderful event, as the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and high school grade level strings players where showcased. You could really tell how a student can progress in the field of music when they start in the 5th grade and stick with it through their high school years.

Before our upcoming musical, "All Shook Up" we have some preparatory things to take care of. One of these major things was to replace sconce and house lights.

 As seen here on the left, these are two sconce lights. They are mounted on the walls and can be controlled independantly. When on by them selves they give the theater a very soft and subtle light. Enough to walk and see where you are going but it would be too dim to comfortably read a book.







Below, a wooden platform with custom legs. These legs are cut an angle to accommodate for the slope in the floor in the PAC. This was made so a ladder could be safely used to change the sconce bulbs.


These sconce lights haven't been changed in years and there were 5 or so that were burned out. All of the bulbs were changed this week.

Along with changing the sconce lights, the house lights were changed.

 As depicted in the photo on the left rows of house lights are lowered together. From in the cat walk there are cranks that drop down an entire row of house lights. These have not been changed in quite some time.

On the right, one of the lights rigging cables snapped. A rigger is coming in on Monday to repair this. Each light is held up by two air craft cables.

The following two pictures are on scaffolding that has been set on stage for the upcoming musical. The scaffolding will be up for the duration of the show. Singing and dancing will take place from on and all over the scaffolding. It will be lit it a very creative manner.

Thanks for reading!

-Joe

Project Raspberry Pi

So as most of you know I like technology. I recently bought a Raspberry Pi. I've come across maybe 7 people in my personal life that know what that means and what it really is. Through this post I hope to share a little bit of information on what an rPi is and what you can do with it.

This is my Pi.

A Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computer. It may not look like much, which it really isn't. However, great things often come in small packages. Which this did. It was a box that I could put in the pocket of a hooded sweatshirt...

For a hard drive the Pi uses an SD card. This is a form of flash memory or a solid state drive. The operating system is quite small in comparison to various Windows operating systems and Mac OS's. You may be wondering what type of OS is it, the answer is Linux! All Mac OS's are based off of Linux so to a Mac user a Linux machine should look familiar.

Many computer users now a days are used to what called a GUI. This stands for Graphical User Interface. It is like the desktop and pictures and mouse portion of your computer. Without a GUI you would have a command line and a screen full of text. To many this is quite daunting and a major obstacle. What this has to do with the Pi is, it starts in a command line setting. By using the command 'startx' it runs the program to bring up the Linux GUI. Windows GUI is called explorer.exe. In all Windows OS's newer than I believe 3.x the GUI starts automatically after POST (power on self test).

There are many different distros or distributions of Linux. For the Pi I'm using a variation of Debian.

What I'm doing with the Pi is making it a dedicated web server. Just like you can buy a domain from a company like GoDaddy and make a website... only difference, I'm making the server and I own the server. I will not be buying a domain, I'm making it.

Many question why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because it has many possibilities. I will be able to plug my external hard drive into the Pi and access it from anywhere with an internet connection. This is the same thing as Dropbox or Google Drive, except, I'm not limited to a few gigabytes of storage. I will have over 1 TB of personal cloud storage.

Not only will I be able to use the Pi for the web server but it also has GPIO pins. This stands for general purpose input/output. Its a bank of pins that I can connect to and control what they do. I know someone who connected a couple of relays to the GPIO pins and with a little bit of programming they made a web server where they could control the relays. A relay is like a switch. Why would you want to control switched from the internet? Well he uses it to open his garage door from his phone.

With the same simple principle you could turn on and off lights in your home while away on vacation or control a light show outside of your house at Christmas or Halloween time.

Here are some more pictures from my project:

The Raspberry Pi has 1080p graphics.

This is the GUI

Here I am downloading packages from the internet

My cluttered desk during the beginning phases.

I had a little bit of trouble.

Through SSH I was able to control the Pi remotely from a Windows machine

Yet another entry.

Here we are Sunday. It felt like today would never come. We struck the set of Oklahoma today. After 2 or 3 months of hard work late night's and stress it is over. I'm out of town for the weekend so I don't have a way to post pictures from camera but there are a couple of shots I want to share with everyone so I'll post them when I can.

All in all the show went really well. No one was sick. No one got hurt. The set didn't fall apart. The lights stayed on and the crowd kept clapping. I'm sad to see it go but I'm excited to sleep again.

The producer and his wife held the cast party last night and it was so much fun!

Now that the show is over it is time for more concerts and presentations. We are back in full swing with our drama club. They rehearse 4 times a week in the theater and in the choir room. Their production this spring will be All Shook Up. This musical features many songs made famous by Elvis! 

I will be posting pictures from the show as soon as I can as my personal laptop has crashed and my home internet is down... I'm writing this from my work computer and am not sure if I'll have time this week to put the pictures up from here.

My next entry should either be focused on lighting or on sound... I haven't decided yet.

Thanks for reading!

-Joe

EXTRA CRED?!

Mr. Arra still owes me extra credit for these...

Oklahoma!

Im late with this post but whatever.

Oklahoma opened on Friday and it was incredible. I've worked over 100 hours in the past 2 weeks and it is paying off. Hopefully my teachers will be forgiving of my tardiness and what not.

The play was directed by Ian Atwood. He went to school for theater and has been in several productions. Ian not only directed the musical but he also designed a huge portion of the lighting.

Lighting in our theater consists of 7 parts. House lighting, box booms, front of house, first electric, second electric, third electric and forth electric. However for the production house lights usually are not on. The electrics are on system pipes and are above the stage. The box booms are in the house and are recessed in the walls. The front of house is midway back in the house and runs the width of the house.

Ian creatively combined all of these different aspects and angles with varying intensity and color to beautifully light the deck. Many audience members commented on the lights and lived them! Kudos to Ian and our light board operator and her assistants!

I will add pictures sometime this week!

These pictures are of a mic table with 14 wireless microphones. These are the type of mics actors and actresses wear when on stage. They cost around $110 a piece. The next one is the view of the stage from the house right spot booth and the last is a snapshot of the light board consoles monitor. The picture showcases almost all of the channels on the board. These channels are patched to dimmers, and lights are plugged into these dimmers. That is the simplified explanation of how you can control all the lights from a computer in the back of the auditorium. Which you can actually do from anywhere in the auditorium now.

I figured out ho to enable and manipulate what is called mRFU. It allows me to access the light board from my tablet by way of wireless access point. This means I can control the lights from anywhere within the auditorium. This comes in handy when focusing lights. Instead of having to shout to someone at the light  board you can use a tablet of a phone to bring up the specific light you need.

All in all it was a great opening weekend. Great job Ian!