I Know Nothing About Power.

Interesting couple of days thus far here in Seoul. Load-in, which started on Sunday, lasted through most of yesterday (Monday). Last night we had our first (and only) full run-thru/rehearsal before jumping into doing a press event this afternoon, and our first show in just under two hours.

During yesterdays run through, I was running the lights when all of a sudden, the lighting console popped up and error message in the screens, "The console has lost power, do you want to save and shut down or continue?"

Oh crap, where did the power go? I looked down at the rack, the power lights were still on. What just happened? I chose to continue, the console has an emergency back up of about 4 minutes. Just enough time to find out what most problems are. I couldn't figure it out. So I hit the power switch, and turned it on (the technical term for turning something off and then on again is "cycling power". You can use that to impress your friends.) and then the console came back.

So we kept going with the show until all of a sudden the same thing happened again. Once again I chose to continue and then cycled power, and everything was fine.

I was getting frustrated when Mel told me they had the same problem in South America.

I know nothing about power, so Wayne and Mel had to dumb down the explanation for me. Basically the generator that we are running off of (Our rig is 120 volts the U.S. standard, while most of Korea is on 220 volts) was seeing power spikes and dips every time there was a big hit with the strobe lights. The console and other delicate things (some moving lights) cannot adapt quickly enough to the spikes and dips and thus, turn themselves off.

This is not a good thing, if you haven't seen this show, it's all about whacking on the strobes.

The sad thing is, nothing much can be done to fix it, short of getting a new generator. And since Korea is 22o volts, they had to ship our current generator in from Japan (who is also 120 volts).

We are making on final attempt tomorrow to correct the problem, they are running extra power cables to hopefully increase the amount of wire used and thus lessen the spikes and dips. Fingers crossed.

So for tonights show, I've had to turn off a bunch of strobes and set a limit of 70% on the rest of them. It sucks because this show is all about the big strobe hit. But you gotta do what you gotta do to get most of the show online.

I guess my point is, nothing much is happening in Seoul for me... yet. Once this show is rolling, I'll have more time off and hopefully more to report.

In the mean time, they've gotten the interwebs working. Which is nice. Of course, when the band shows up, and everyone gets on, it slows to a crawl. Although I hear they just set up a second wireless network down in the dressing rooms, to keep the kids separated.

Oh, and Jade, thank you for the suggestion, but I don't think I had anything to say really (sort of like today).

Finally, opening night is tonight. Of course, it is also the biggest night for the beef riots to happen. And thankfully, the government buildings are in the same neighborhoods as the theater is! Awesome. We get to see lots of police and lots of riot gear.

I hope people show up for the show...

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