San Antonio Training- Day 2

As we are getting towards the middle of the 2nd week of training, it's really important that everyone feels comfortable with their set of equipment and that everything is in working order. So, today we continued with more setups- All of the new Tour Managers ran through another setup/take down cycle, and after lunch both Brad and myself got an opportunity to do a complete setup of our rigs and test everything out. (Lunch was interesting, as I got my first taste ever of a BIG thing here in this part of the country... Chick-Fil-A! It was delicious...)

Anyway, for the most part I has the same equipment as last year, including my same van, which will start this year with just under 81,000 miles on it. I only had one missing item (microphone) and had to replace one speaker bag and one screen fabric. One of the things I was really concentrating on this year was the fact that I got NEW projectors. And...I mean NEW! I spent the morning unpacking them from their boxes and putting them in road cases and inventoring them. They are one of Optoma's newest models, the TXR776. This is a 4100 lumen unit that can take DVI, S-Video, RGB, Computer AND composite inputs! I am hoping this will help in some of the schools that had situations where we had brightness issues in the rooms.

After an initial run, some pluses- Much brighter, and seemingly over just as sturdy as the Hitachi's I used last year. The minuses- the unit only has one adjustment and alignment option...a single adjustable foot in the front cent of the projector. This means any side-to-side adjustment will have to be done on the stand. The other is that is seems to not have as much of a zoom range as the Hitachi's. We will see how they do Friday night...as my projectors will be the ones used at the New Show Premiere at Journey Fellowship church!

After we finished up for the day, I stopped back at the office to take care of a few things, and got the honor of meeting in person the one and only Joey Knight, who was there for a short while with Chad getting his rig ready to go before taking off back to Kentucky. I then took off back to the hotel, and we proceeded to have Pan-fried Bratwurst, courtesy of yours truly (it was a bit scary, as I had to do something I do not normally do- grilling is my favorite method, but in order to use the hotel gas grill, you have to supply your own gas, I wasn't ready to cough up $20 for a cylinder). It still turned out well though, and then took in some TV and called it a night.

Tomorrow...the new Tour Managers do Time Trials! Should be good...