Thursday, 30 September 2010

Valley of the Dolls

We have Ballet Lorent in at the moment...
They have a few additional members of the cast in the form of a load of Dolls from Habitat. I've asked for fire ratings on them already... but now it's the day before the show I insisted...
Turns out they are pretty flammable... out comes the Flame Check :)
Here's them drying...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=537GGOjOFLQ

Tuesday, 14 September 2010

Generators and Stuff

This weekend I was working in Leicester Sq for a Cadburys promotion, Spots and Stripes game.

It was all a bit fraught... missing the last train and just managing to hire a car in time to get me there for a 4am call wasn't good! But this is what greeted me when I got there:

All in, a nice weekend till this:



This is a photo of an xray of the tip of my finger taken at St Thomas's after the jockey wheel of a trailer generator collapsed... Ouch! And thoroughly frustrating now :(

Thursday, 9 September 2010

BBC Look North

Yesterday we had a surprise call from the BBC. They wanted to use one of our spaces to film a quick live article on some dance research.
We had a satellite van outside and a crew inside.
I was really pleased with how quickly the Lab accomodated this... and they left with a great impression of the space! :)
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Friday, 3 September 2010

DC Atrium

The atrium at DC really does attract a lot of light at all times of the day. This I caught as I was locking up tonight.

Sometimes when the sun is just right we can get real light into the theatre. Usually when when we don't want it to I might add.
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Tuesday, 31 August 2010

Points.

Finally.. and probably not before time, I spoke to the steelwork designer for Dance City. He is a dude caller Wille and works for Arup in Scotland.

I had a question over the suitability of the beams from which we suspend our motors from in the Dance Lab. And after one quick calculation he answered it with a "Yes, that's fine. You have a large safety factor in there. I'll email you the calc"

Awesome!!!

Lesson in this is: Stay away from architects, they are making it up. Speak to designers, they do the work!

And for those that are interested, here is the steelwork layout for the 3rd floor at DC:

Thursday, 26 August 2010

Tallescope!

Will probably bite the bullet and move on to a mororised system of access soon. Writing a risk assesment whilst maintaining any sort of productivity with a Tallescope is proving difficult. Just wish I didn't have a sprung dance floor to put a machine on as it rather limits my choices! :(

Monday, 16 August 2010

Carbon Reduction Commitment

Today I got the draft of a CRC report from EDF energy, our electricity supplier...
All organizations have to assess themselves by sometime in Sept 2010 to see if they qualify for the full scheme and if so register with the environment agency. (This would involve buying carbon credits for the following year)
Luckily we don't, although I wasn't sure there for a while... full registration is required when you consume 6,000 Mwh. Now that's a lot of numbers in a row and it confused me.
It turns out we use about 261,926kwh of elec... double that for gas and we use, lets say: 600,000kwh of energy... 10% of the required amount.
As an additional note... I use a logging tool called Smeasure which compares energy usage to degree days (i.e. ambient temp'ish). This service puts us at above average in the efficiency of the use of our energy.

Friday, 13 August 2010

Good, good night...

Show day for the Dance City & Claire Dixon's "Urban Summer School" today.

Awesome!!! Love the kids shows. So much energy :)

Busked the lot with 3 effect chases and groups only on the Congo. Easy as :)  Goes to show that if you need to make it complicated then you could well be making it harder for yourself.

Oh yeah, and there was some Power Point stuff too... But that's now more or less second nature for this sort of gig now! ;)

Thursday, 12 August 2010

It takes two... servers

Today.. whilst not feeling that productive, may actually have been a good day.

Got an engineer to replace the motherboard in our exchange server... it's now running on full memory.
Restarted the Databox gateway and re ran the services that facilitate the online ticketing system - this saves a few calls to the ticket office.
Met with a structural engineer to discuss loading capacities of our roof beams - got some great advice.
More or less collated everything we need to register for the Carbon Reduction Scheme (more admin load!)

Tomorrow I may do some techie stuff :)

Tuesday, 10 August 2010

All's quiet...


This isn't something that you see everyday at DC!

Whilst I was waiting for a meeting to finish... after having used the lift roof to access a fire alarm sounder... I though that I'd play with the setting on the BMS.

I reset a lot of the schedules and finally got it to a point where the boilers actually go into standby. Fingers x'ed they come back on when we need them!! ;)