To add to everything else this week, I have had to borrow £250 to buy a laptop to use at the club night because Stephen doesn’t want to continue with the DJ night and without his laptop, which I now own and his iPod is very difficult. But at least on the flip side I don’t need to rely on anyone else now, I can have the entire music collection between my iPod and laptop, so I could technically DJ myself. Today I was supposed to be having Sky TV installed, and all I have to show for it is a bad cut on my arm as I had to climb over the back wall to get back into the house as the front door slammed shut and I didn’t have my keys on me. The engineer couldn’t install the dish out back as I thought they would, and he reckoned that the chimneys would get in the way even if he put the dish on a pole. I have had to re-book the install with the special heights team which won’t be for another two weeks, it’s booked for Thursday 19th and it’s an all day booking, so can’t go out all day, so hopefully they’ll come early. This is obviously very annoying for me as it was a big part of my stop drinking plan, I have no real TV channels to watch as things stand. ARGH!!!
To add to this I am having a nightmare with this laptop re-installing Windows as there was a lot of unnecessary crap on the system. I put in my Windows disc, I get two minutes into the install then it tells me I can’t install Windows because I don’t have any hard disks. This is when I realise that the laptop has a SATA drive which requires additional drivers to be installed before Windows will recognise the drive. I have these drivers on CD, but because of Microsoft’s idiocy the install will only accept drivers from the A drive (e.g. floppy disk) and the laptop doesn’t have a floppy disk drive. I’ve tried to use my USB memory stick with no luck, but it does recognise the memory stick as a hard disk and asked if I wanted to install Windows onto that instead. It now looks like I am going to have to create a slipstream disk with the drivers included, which is a real pain in the arse, but I guess if I need to reinstall, all the drivers I need to get up and running will be in place automatically.
I turned up at Voodoo last night to show the people that had hired out the venue for the night and was shocked to see a fuckin’ huge PA setup, it made our 12Kw rig look like a toy. They brought in a 30Kw Nexo rig with all sorts of expensive outboard for effects and clip protection, but the showstopper was the Midas desk. I could only stand there with my mouth open in pure awe of the equipment, then my attention veered toward the lower part of their equipment rack and then fell on the floor laughing. I couldn’t help laughing at the irony, they have the best of everything else then they have a rack of Behringer compressors and gates. If you don’t know Behringer’s reputation, they are budget PA manufacturers and their stuff isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination. It’ll usually stops working after a few months for no apparent reason, which is why any serious venue and/or engineer wouldn’t touch Behringer equipment. If you are going to have that level of system, I would spend out the extra couple of grand and buy a load of DBX compressors and gates, any PA system is only as good as it’s weakest link and the Behringer outboard is definitely the weakest link! While I am on the subject of engineers, their engineer is a cock, I can’t deny that he is good, it sounded nice in soundcheck if insanely loud, the whole rig is too big for a 250 capacity venue. This rig would be happy filling a field full of thousands of people with sound, let alone a small venue. Anyway the engineer, I can’t fault his skills, but he has a serious attitude problem, he seems to think he is better than anyone else, the way he spoke to me and the other Voodoo staff was unacceptable. At the end of the day I went down there to help them out, it was my night off, next time they can fuck right off, I am not putting myself out to be talked to by a jumped up engineer that has a superiority complex. Although I have to say the band themselves were very nice; I can’t say anything bad about them!