all this and more

So, yeah, I finally have a chance to sit down and write something again!

Friday’s show was lots of fun; thanks again to B-Side Records for having all of us! I think I scared some of the gentler fans of Leannan Sidhe and Kraken-Rohl, but really, that’s good. Muah ha ha!

Saturday and Sunday were Conflikt days. I really enjoy Conflikt, not just because of the excellent con suite, not just because it’s an all-music convention, but also because I can do all this new/raw material and nobody minds. My performances will be rough, but I can do a fleet of new material and people will listen seriously. “Open Mic Night at the Winking Skeever,” “Sad Muppet,” “Scene from a Starship on Fire,” “Get Out,” and “Getting Away with It” all got first public performances. The last of those is still a bit of a mess, but the others? Less OFD than expected! Which is good news.

“Sad Muppet” was the most fun to put together. Thanks to Sunnie Larsen, Allegra Sloman, Leannan Sidhe, and Autumn O’Leary for being the Minion Chorus and Signer for that one. It’s so much better a song as soon as the chorus actually exists – I tried to rework it into a song I could do solo, but it just doesn’t work right.

I’d say more but I’m pretty wiped out – not from the weekend necessarily, because I got huge amounts of Stuff done on Monday and was pretty high-energy all day – but idk why. Regardless, all that was great! I want to do more shows – particularly house concerts! They’re really easy and we don’t need a huge turnout – it’s like throwing a party, with entertainment, and they’re really helpful. Let me know if you’re willing to help!

More later. For now, g’night!

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

I can has a tripod.

After Woot! offered an HD video camera cheaply enough that I went for it, I realised I really need a better - or at least a second - tripod, and I went thrift store spelunking again. Tomorrow I'll write up a more general post on the band blog, about pawn-shop spelunking, but I'm gonna geek about this first because it was fun.

First I hit UW surplus (nothing good) and checked out an actual camera store (goddammit tall tripods are expensive) so I hit Goodwill and the pawn shop next to it on a whim and found a Slik U-210 for $15. It's a total monster of a device - the U-212 is the shorter current version, if you're curious.

It wasn't perfect - it tested okay in store, but needed serious cleaning, a new camera mount screw (trivial, hardware store), and so on. And something I thought was a mechanical fault turned out to be a design feature - at least, after the tripod was disassembled, cleaned, lubricated, and reassembled. That's the fun part. ^_^

The fault was that the elevator crank started slipping when I tried to raise the camera platform. The elevator is used to raise the camera platform beyond the already-quite-tall maximum base height provided by the tripod legs. The slippage wasn't so bad that I couldn't work with it, so I didn't mind that much; even were that hopelessly broken - and it wasn't - it'd still be a better (and taller) tripod than I've been using. It hadn't done this in my quick test in the store, though, and experiment showed that the elevator post could rotate, for no clear reason. And when it rotated, the gears no longer meshed correctly, and slipped.

Separately, all the camera adjustment points were rather more stiff than they should've been. On a good tripod, you can elevate the camera (see above), tilt back and forth, tilt left and right; it's called six-axis motion. All this worked, but it was all pretty resistant.

So instead of just doing a deep cleaning, I took the whole tripod apart as far as I could, and scrubbed and lubricated all the parts I could reach before putting it back together. I also figured out more about the mechanics and features, through experimenting, as part of the process. And I have to say, once cleaned and lubricated? "Slik" is totally the right name for this tripod. Everything mechanical is super smooth. It's nice, and the design is clever.

Anyway, that all done, I started playing with the elevator post again. I found the post's centre point and set various adjustments to try to keep it there, and everything worked great - and far more easily than before. So I thought I'd see how badly the elevator crank would slip when the centre post got rotated again, because it's not difficult to put it off-centre at all. In fact, it's so easy that it looked like a design flaw - the same things you do to rotate the camera itself left and right can also throw the elevator post off, if you forget to loosen the camera rotation clamp. (As would be inevitable.)

So I put the elevator well off-centre intentionally, and gave it a good crank - and it recentred itself, then elevated. I tried it again, all the way off the other direction, and then a couple of more times to be sure: it turns out the tripod's elevator shaft re-centres itself first every time you change elevation. The ability to get off-centre at all is apparently part of its recentring ability, and also a way of handling the torque if you try to rotate the camera body without loosening the appropriate clamp first.

And it was just dirty and jammed, and now it's not.

It's still a little weird, honestly. Maybe it's some sort of fallback feature. Fault-tolerance in hardware? I'm for it! Either way, I love it when spelunking pays off. :D