TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

1:37 PM
Posted by jodi rose

I'm camping out in John's office at the green bridge site - he's one of the head honchos and people keep walking past looking very surprised to see the dishevelled singing bridge girl sitting here. but he told me I could use it when he's not here - and being a queen of pirate media I'm quite happy to make my base anywhere there's an internet connection. Had another rough start this morning; for the first hour no sound coming through from the accelerometers. Did I update about placing them on monday? no, I don't think so. Ok, so the first two hours were a complete nightmare, convinced that it wasn't going to work at all - then once the first one was in place, it only took about ten minutes to get the second cable miked up for good. Five of them spent trying to get the adhesive working and not finding a flat surface - I love watching a highly specialised electrical expert installing something so tiny and delicate with superglue! Once it was in place, not sure the sound was nearly as good as when I was testing it, but couldn't ask them to reposition it after all that fiddly hard work.

This morning, freaking out again with absolutely no signal no sound at all from either of them. Eeeek. What am I going to do to salvage this, thinking fast.
Tried a few different places with the trusty old $70 schaller oyster contacts (don't know why I ever used anything else... well apart from the issue of losing signal over 100m and the accelerometers being the instrument actually designed for the job) and picked up plenty of internal noise in the structure through building still going on. But nothing from my $800 each highly tuned sensitive equipment... hmm.
Finally, one of the boys who helped yesterday came over and tried a few common-sense options with me - is this plugged in? duh! Now we're getting somewhere. Listened to the sweet symphony of bridge sounds for an hour or so, from the two cables now permanently miked up. Plenty of pows and pops going on, but I can't wait to hear it go off with the buses going past. Phew, repuation intact, almost time to sign off on this and get on with the next phase. Luka wrote me a very cute email the other day, saying; Jodi, don't worry so much. You're doing great things, relax, have a fosters for me!! Ah perfect. We worked well together in Ljubljana, a day of listening to music and drinking slovenian slivovitz, hopefully to be continued in the next stage of building the bridge vj instrument. yippeee. and I wonder why people think I don't lead a normal life ;)