My Latest Ah-Hah Moment

Tonight is one of the final events of the year for the Performing Arts Department - the Frankfurter Festival. Essentially, it's a weenie roast with entertainment - an end of the year celebration of student performing arts and a fundraiser for our parent group. It's a nice evening for the students and parents. My responsibilities as the Technical Director to the Performing Arts is - with the help of my ever-dedicated crew of Performing Arts Technicians - to set up the lights, sound and staging for the event. We get the afternoon of to do this, so while it's a lot of grunt work, we manage to have a good time as well.

We host this outdoors in our courtyard, which went through a renovation a few years back through the generosity of the 50th Anniversary fund raising campaign. With the new lighting and sound that came with the renovation, it makes for a great outdoor venue.

This is the sticking point: it hinges upon the weather. We do have an indoor option - not as nice, but it still works just fine - that requires us to move a lot of equipment in another direction, and sometimes on short notice. On a day like today, where the weather gurus say there's a 50/50 chance of rain, we start watching the weather forecasts and Doppler radar around noon. Given the amount of sound and lighting equipment, we tend not to temp fate with the rain gods.

This means I need to communicate with the student crew on a minute-by-minute basis (well, relatively minute-by-minute). Most have cell phones, some with internet access. Few, if any can have their phones on during classes, but I full well know that some do. Is this a cause for Twitter?

This is where I issue a "Rant Watch" for the readers. I never thought Twitter was anything more than a narcissistic venue. In fact, most of the Tweets I see are in the media from celebrities or sports figures, and most of those are "me me me me me" sort of things. I've been pretty sure there is more to Twitter, but I really hadn't seen anything to suggest otherwise. So, up until this week I had never Tweeted.

Today the light is on. Tweeting could be the answer to communicate up-to-the-minute changes. Is there a better option? This could be my emergence from the 20th century.

Posted by blammers66 at 6:32 AM 0 comments