Life in the local theatre: March 2013

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

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: