Big Weekend

First off, I didn’t have a Friday entry because I was stuck in Jury duty. This was my second day back at the courthouse and I was not looking forward to getting picked for this 4-6 week case. I think that getting on a case would be fascinating but I have already purchased tickets for NYC and they were non-refundable. Joy. Luckily for us the case ended up settling out of court and I was free to go. Yeah!

It was a big weekend for Cedub studio. Saturday I rolled over to Chris’ around 9am and we dug right into the painting. I took the outside and started to cut in the red walls up to the gray eves and Chris started tackling the green trim around the door and windows. I started in with a really small roller and worked around from one side to the other then headed back the other way with a small brush to get the details.

All I have to say about stucco is it sucks for detailing. Trying to get a straight line on stucco is about as frustrating as a one legged cat trying to bury a turd on a frozen pond. Sorry, I had to use my favorite Texas saying… make sure to read the above sentence in a heavy Texan drawl ya’ll.

Once I cut the red in I came back with the gray paint and caught all the knocks and overspray from the red paint. I think I spent more time fighting the ladder and going up and down then I did painting. Ha!

Finally I could start on the roof trim. I realized that the best way to take care of it was from the roof leaning over the edge. It sounds more dangerous then it really was, but I had a head rush from looking upside down the whole time. I kept thinking about Ender’s Game and how he would keep re-orienting himself mentally in zero-g. Good book by the way.

While I was on the roof playing space-man-spiff, Chris finished the detailing on the trim and did all the touch up on the inside. By the time I climbed down he had also finished everything so the painting is finally done.

The only construction thing left is an electrical problem our master electrician found. This has been a pretty big bummer for us. It appears that the staples you use to hold your
Romex in place should be snug, not tight. (Romex is the type of power wire you run in the walls). Um, Mr. Master Electrician, shouldn’t this be something you explain to the crew (i.e. Chris and I) before you wire not after?!?

The reason this is bad is that if the wire is pressed together too tightly then you can get “bleed” in the line. What happens is that a small current jumps between the neutral and the positive lines. You in essence have a short because the exchange causes current to be passed out the ground.

Usually, in a short you get current in the ground and this flips the breaker, but with bleed the voltage is so low it does not cause the breaker to trip. The bad news is that bleed causes hum and that is the LAST thing we want in the studio.

The good news is that the master electrician says that he knows how to stop the bleed through some magical black art and he is working on it today. Hopefully by tomorrow the bleed will be all gone. In other good news, we passed final inspection. So, other then the bleed issue we are done with the physical building!!! Double Hazaah!

Sunday was another work day and we rented a U-Haul and started loading in all the gear. Once we loaded all the desks, racks, boxes, amps and other assorted toys we have the daunting task of plugging it all in and making the shit work.

The first big moment was putting the D8B mixer back together and hoping the thing would boot. We fired it up and we got a DSP cards did not load state error. Uh-oh. Okay, no biggie. Chris has read about similar errors, we just need to unplug the DSP cards and re-seat them. Apparently this happens a lot and is the first thing Technical Support tells you to do with this model.

Done… and re-boot. Same error. Damn it. Okay, well, lets try again with ALL the cards. Nope. Okay, let’s try unplugging the main connector. Nope. Um, shit. Get the handbook. Oh, we are missing a cable. Cool. Now where is the cable? Um, in this box? How about this one? Nope. Repeat until all boxes are searched and we finally find it buried in a cable box. Okay! Try again and presto the board boots. Groovy.

Next thing we do is get the Near-field monitors plugged in and bump some tuned. We plug the Haflers in, get the iPod and fire it up. We have to do some routing and then another heart-stopping moment. Sound is only coming out of one speaker.

Okay, well it could be a bad cable. Unplug the cable that works and plug it into the one that does not. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Okay, fine this sucks. We do some more testing and yup the speaker seems to be bad. None of the inputs are working and every once in a while we get this horrifying popping sound. This is not good. We realize that there are some dip switches on the back and that is when we determine that the two speakers are not set up the same way. We match the bad to the good settings and then we try again. Yup, that was it.

We now have a working board and speakers in the studio! Yeah, now only a few hundred more things to plug in and test… yippee!