11 posts tagged “bumbershoot”

The show came and went, I hope it was well attended.
Here's the full album version of Easy Rider:

Strange Fruit was interesting.

Saturday stuff above, Monday below

Iranian artists face a culture that forbids many forms of representational art - hence the geometric patterns in Persian rugs. Artists find outlets in a variety of ways, many of the most fascinating involve use of text. The written form is more connected and rhythmic than our alphabet, and in the hands of some of the poster artists you get beautiful and interesting spins on fonts and texts - it's like the creative energies are constrained so they burst out through the little loop-holes that are fairly unrestricted; the result takes fonts much further creatively than it had occurred to me they could go. Odd layout here, the Tehran-Seattle posters are below to the left in a vertical column. They are also pretty lame pictures, but the original posters were pretty cool. The presentation was good, the cultural background increased the impact of the art.

Power of One was interesting and inspiring, if ultimately a  little grueling.















I always enjoy Flatstock. Talented artist in a diverse assortment of poster styles. Two different vendors (including Daniel Danger) had the airline lose their stock, hopefully it will catch up to them over night so they can at least get a couple of days to make some sales.

We're off. Calling while music is blaring makes for hard to understand posts.










I used a GPS to track our location during Bumbershoot, here's a roughly annotated view:
Here's a hybrid of google Earth and google maps with our path:


Staxx Brothers had an interesting mix of sounds and influences.

Neko Case at the Mainstage

The Girls at the Sky Church in the EMP

Odds n Ends  

Sweetwater at the Exhibition Hall

Joe Bonamassa at the Mural Amphitheater

PWRFL Power

Man Man

Monday
Here's the path on a google Map/Earth hybrid:
You can see the 2 trips into Memorial Stadium - the yellow path was the Offspring, the blue path is Death Cab for Cutie. Only 1 trip to the EMP Sky Church this time, but multiple trips to the green, the Mural Amphitheater, and the Broad St. stages.

Note the detail from the fountain, I got hot enough to need a dousing.

Mark Pickerel &
His Praying Hands
















Montonix: One for the ages!

PHYSICS - and a poodle with a blue Mohawk! I didn't take a picture, though.
 

Offspring












I notice that after really good shows (like the Offspring) I'm wrung out so my post doesn't sound all that enthusiastic. Odd side effect.
Notice that by the last video I'm having a harder time framing the stage and holding the camera level. Also, check out the smearing effect from the water on the lense - you hope it's from the hoses they were spraying the crowd of with...

It's also kind of funny to watch the smoke machine mostly lose the battle with the mild late summer breeze.



Two Gallants
Somewhere along the way I switched my camera's video to the 640x480 mode, so the Two Gallants videos I took are 80 and 100+ MBytes, so I can;t upload them, vox has a 50 MByte limit.

I also managed to turn on some odd color control setting that made the colors almost non-existent, so the video isn't that good for all the high resolution anyway. Oops.

Adelle (I think, the web site schedule lists something else)
Better resolution video, color's washed out though.











Cheb i Sabbah & 1002 Nights featuring Riffat Sultana
No Flobots

Old 97s
Arthur & Yu

Del Tha Funky Homosapien
 

Battles

Supperchunk















Death Cab for Cutie

Bumbershoot is today! Up early getting ready, handling logistics. BLT for breakfast - mmmm!

I checked the Bumbershoot web site next at bumbershoot.org - my original theory was that I could have a scheme to assign mailboxes to individual bands, but that was way over-engineered for the handful of people I was likely to be able to get blogging. I noticed a set of categories on one of the menus on the web site and decided to use those as mailboxes:
comedy, dance, film, literary arts, music, visual arts, theater arts,  spectacle, and I added miscellaneous. I had my mailbox design, now I configured them using the web interface to the UC box. It took me 30 or 40 minutes to create them all, set passwords and turn off the annoying enrollment and force password change settings, set passwords, up maximum message length to 10 minutes, recorded names, and had it set.

Next I dug into the remote access. Between the new license and some reconfiguring on the server and with my Exchange client I was finally able to get the messages showing up on my Windows laptop within a fraction of a second of leaving them. All of the pieces are thus in place for a manual audio blog - the result is this page with the 3 audio blogs on the upper left.

First I added a few folders to help organize things, then I downloaded the voicemessage.wav files by right clicking on the .wav file for each and selecting Save As, giving them appropriate names while I was at it. Then I went into my vox account and started this post. It only took a few moments to upload the audio files, most of the 30 minutes it has ended up taking me was consumed writing this text.

So far I posted three short messages about getting all of this in place, configured, and working.

Simple enough so far, but it seems like this is going to get much more challenging if the number of messages increases much.

I sent out a Seattle & Bellevue Cisco e-mail asking for help & got a coworker to volunteer herself and her friends, they're going to Bumbershoot all three days.

Rosa usually goes, we'll see if we can get her to call in and leave comments. Carina and I will be there all three days, we'll have to try using both lines simultaneously a few times since we both have cell phones. Since we'll be watching shows together, we'll probably end up making calls at the same time (right after a show ends, or we leave early...) on occasion.

It's already quite obvious that the manual approach isn't going to scale well. Getting this post together took 30 minutes for probably less than 2 minutes of content in 3 audio files. Just the 2 to 6 people I have lined up to blog could generate a pretty hefty number of messages without too much effort - I'm hoping to have over 100 messages when it's all said and done, but we'll see. Extrapolating from early efforts, that may take 20 to 40 hours to process. Clearly the amount of text added will drop substantially if we really do get that many messages. Here's hoping!

Pretty slick. I'm using IMAP to connect Outlook into Unity Connection, the voice messaging product from Cisco that I work on. The voice message account just looks like another e-mail account in-box, it's sea-alpha-cuc in this example:
The inbox shows my voice mail messages with the message attached as a .wav file for each message. I left one using my cell phone sitting at home with my lap-top using VPN over wifi/cable modem with Outlook running and the cuc-install-49 folder selected as shown. The message appeared (and Outlook beeped) in a fraction of a second. Under load it may get slower, but I expect load to be low on Labor Day weekend during Bumbershoot so we should be OK.

The VoiceMessage.wav file can be saved by right clicking on it and selecting Save As. In this example the wav file is 103 KB, just short of 13 seconds of 8 KB/sec audio.

The sound was better than I had expected, if not spectacular. I added it to this blog as VoiceMessageTest above to the right so you can see - or should I say hear - for yourself.

Uploading it into Vox was mildly trivial. I think from now on I'll use small rather than medium sound icons, but otherwise we're pretty much good to go.

Hmm, sheer genius - I need to go somewhere with live music this weekend to do a dry run, I want to see what a 15 second bit of a song sounds like. Also I want to try talking or perhaps screaming over the music and seeing if we end up with anything intelligible. A job related excuse to hit the bars and drink some beer - I mean listen to some music and audio blog. What'll I think up next!