On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 02:13:48PM -0400, William Ferrell wrote:
> On 6/25/06, Jay R. Ashworth <[1]jra@baylink.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 01:36:00PM -0400, William Ferrell wrote:
> > I've relocated to Florida (Palm Bay), and am trying to set
> > up shop here as a KJ.
> Well, no shit. Welcome to sunny (where, by sunny, right now I mean
> 'rainy') Florida.
>
> Indeed. It's quite a bit nicer than Colorado's weather though.
I'll bet.
Heh. Yeah. You joke until you realize that last year it SNOWED IN JUNE there. That sucked, and filled me with much annoyance. Colorado natives can NOT drive correctly in snow. They all just buy four-wheel drives to compensate.
At least the wrecks are entertaining as long as you're not involved in them :P
> > but software projects are paying the bills right now. I've got
> Was that what brought you here?
>
> No, not really. A woman did. You'd think I'd have learned from the first
> time I moved from one state to another to live with somebody -- maybe I'll
> learn from this one.
So I found out further down, and forgot to go back and edit this. Nice
to have a portable skill, though, isn't it?
It is, yes. I love freelance software development. Because I'm single (dammit) and have no local "ties" really I can just up and "take a vacation" to some other exotic spot (though for now, Florida is plenty "exotic" compared to my previous port of call) and keep on working; clients rarely (if ever) need to actually meet face-to-face.
> Same here. I've got a Python module built that can automatically
> handle song rotations ( i.e. you hand it names, songs, etc., and
> it timestamps each submission (and new singer), counts total
> performances by each singer per night, and performs weighted,
> balanced rotation management to keep the "average wait time per
> singer" down.
How does that play in Peoria? Most of the KJs in my market use strict
rotation, and most of the circuit singers don't well tolerate anyone
who doesn't. Including me. :-)
I've been to many karaoke shows here in Palm Bay/Melbourne now, and I am consistently annoyed with how rotations run, because nobody runs them like I do. :)
Nobody seems to run a rotation the same way either, and the net result is people end up waiting too long. The guy who runs most of the shows I attend now does something really funky -- instead of smoothly blending new and old singers together into rotations, he does it in batches. One old singer, three new ones, one old one, four new ones, etc. That has the effect of putting people off and making people wait longer than necessary.
The management system I wrote was initially just strict rotation (FIFO), but that doesn't fly. The new one was designed with these principles and goals in mind:
1) A singer who arrives early (or at least on time) at show start and stays until the show closes should get to sing more songs (and with as "even" a wait between songs as possible) than someone who turns up later.
2) A singer who shows up an hour before the show closes should have at least a *chance* to sing one song if at all possible.
3) Apart from respecting 1 & 2, singers should sing on a first-come-first-served basis, mixing new singers with old once the first rotation is finished.
The end result of all this juggling is that a person who shows up right at 9:00pm at show start will still get to sing three songs if I have forty singers in a night, while someone who shows up at midnight (show closing at 1:00am) will sneak in and get one song. Everybody else waits a uniformly average amount of time ( i.e. everybody waits about the same amount of time, give or take a few minutes, between their songs). That wait increases as people get added, but it's uniform; there's no "special treatment".
It always went over very well in Colorado, mostly because the computer *displays* the whole process (you see your name appear in a different color if you're a new singer, and you see the colors staggered) between every song and people can see where they are on the rotation. When someone sees the list grow and change, they understand they're not the only singers and don't bitch about wait time. When they see that when they're new, they bump somebody, they don't get upset when a new singer bumps them later.
When I ran this rotation method without showing it on screen anywhere, people constantly asked when their turn was, how long the wait was, etc. Since I started showing the whole thing in a grid, those questions all but stopped. It may actually just be showing people how it's working that makes it effective, not the method itself, but it does help keep things flowing fast. Keep in mind that because the machine helps run some of this (some of my _javascript_ stuff implements some of this), the shows I run go very *fast*. As I'm calling for applause for the singer who's just finished a song, the computer/player is already ready for the next song, the computer's displaying the new singer's name, and I'm announcing the next singer right away. There's still filler music, but the only actual delays come in waiting for singers to get on and off the stage, and some occasional videos mixed in for good measure.
Overall it works, and I think here it'd be accepted just fine. I hear lots of complaints from people about how shows are run here, so I think what I do is different (and better) enough that it'll please people here. If not, I can package it and sell it :P
> Ironically I'm not using that right now at all since
> I put the new display software together. I'm curious about the new
> hardware you're talking about (with touch-screens not requiring a
> pen, etc.); we'd previously talked about older/cheaper hardware but
> I'd like to see these new targets.
Cool. I'll try to find you the best page on them to look at.
Thanks.
> Well, the experience has taught me (the hard way) that she'd not
> have been a good mate anyway. I could probably have handled just
> about any of her "quirks" and the many poor choices she's made,
> regarding me, herself, and others in her life, but the continuing
> lying (yes, present tense) that she insists on pulling has proven
> itself to just be part of her nature, and that is something I can't
> deal with.
Ruh roh.
Yeah; good call.
Indeed.
> She acts apologetic and offers an olive branch (classic
> "let's just be friends") when she sees what this has done to me,
> but to this day she maintains an "image" of the world that she'd
> like me to see, and I know much of it to be false. For all her
> intellect, she honestly doesn't seem to understand that she lives
> in a world where other people she's mucked with aren't afraid to
> talk to me about things she's done or said.
Good.
Glad you jumped early enough, though, perhaps, not as early as you'd
have liked.
Well, I could have saved a lot of money had I not moved here, but I'm here now so I must make the most of it. As far as she goes, I just have to start over with a new kind of relationship with her; one that, sadly, will be more guarded than it used to be, at least for awhile. There's been a lot of trust lost, and that can be hard to regain. It's not as if I intend to make it "hard" for her to get a friendship going again, it's just that it might *be* difficult. Who the hell knows?
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