So. First Post in a LONG time.

I’m sitting in a starbucks in Hong Kong, so this is also the first post I have personally posted in a long time too. Mostly I send my entries via email to Cyprus, where my family upload them here for me.

On Doulos we do have an internet connection now, and have done for the last year. This is via a huge golfball stuck on top of the book-ex roof. OK. It’s not really a golfball. It just looks like one. It’s actually a satillite dish inside a globe, so it can swing around and point the right way without getting stopped by anything or fall off or something.

A few months ago one of the I.T. techies came out from the USA and did some clever stuff with the connection packet shaping and bandwidth distribution, so now all ship computers have internet access, and when we are in port we usually have a wired local broadband connection. Personal laptops don’t have access to the net, only our doulos email accounts, but I (theoretically) could post from the computer inside the AV booth.

Speaking of which, I’m now working as an “Audio Visual Operator” or possibly “technician”. Yes, after all that hassle. It’s great. Totally different work, but getting to work with on board shows/programmes every day is good. I really enjoy that, and have many ideas I want to try, and hopefully will get a chance to soon. Learning/practicing live sound mixing is also good. Not something I feel very confident at yet, but it’s something I really want to be good at, and so working with AV every day, I’m getting better. Some nice things about being a musician and doing AV, I’m trying to be able to say “that echo/feedback/noise/loud-part-of-voice is B, one octive above concert A” and then be able to EQ it out straight away… takes practice though, to be able to do it fast enough to not be noticed. Anyway, I’m out of battery juice on this machine, so should head home. It’s lunch time. “Cold cuts and cheese” Yum.