the end of 2001

[chris raettig <chris@raettig.org>]

i never really got the chance to journal the final few weeks
of 2001. it built to a bit of a crecendo before the acts of
human kindness which allowed me to escape. and now i cant remember
much of what i considered of interest at the time, but will attempt
to journal as much as my flawed memory permits. 

the whole kpmg thing kicked off, of course. which i wont dwell on too much
because i've covered it amply elsewhere. but on one day alone i was asked
if i would speak to wired, the wall street journal and the observer. 
on christmas eve (or was it the day before that? i forget) i ended
up wandering around my sisters garden and giving a radio interview
for the bbc. the pictures that jon took of me standing outside
the kpmg building made their way into the big issue,
and the rumour goes that the big issue journalist got yelled out
by someone important at kpmg; "dont you know who i am?! i'm one of
the most powerful men in corporate america!". 

it was all very silly. but i enjoyed the ride. i turned down a great
many press enquiries because i was too busy with other things, and i guess
also because i'm a reluctant media participant. especially when it comes to
things of such little importance. it struck home when i read the big 
issue. the story on the opposing page was about the shameful rigging
of the regular count of homeless people. i had heard about it in great
detail a couple of days earlier during a lengthy drinking session with
a friend of mine who is involved with thamesreach. friends are good
at keeping you grounded.

i'm a little conflicted, though. i *do* have strong opinions on the
right to hyperlink. like many in the weblogging community i was building
sites long before kpmg even knew what the web was. some would suggest
that they still dont. 

the amount of pre-christmas traffic to my site was staggering. we
weathered the infamous slashdot effect and many other waves of high
traffic. i spent some time optimising the server and removing unnecessary
graphics to lighten the load, but we still crashed on a couple of occasions. 
my server is designed to serve a personal website. it was never built
with any conception that the personal site would have to serve a million
visitors in under a week. 

my email inbox was overflowing. hundreds of messages of support, encouragement
and just general friendliness from around the world. i'm still maintaining
some great dialogues with new found friends. traffic eventually
plateaued (thank god!) and has calmed down a lot during the new year,
though remains significantly above where it was before frank dunne
sent me an email. 

it taught me something about my own views towards webcams. i have always
maintained that i dont censor my webcams for my own purposes, only at the
request of visitors to my flat/office. and that i dont alter my behaviour - 
the cameras capture my life as it happens. most of the time this works pretty
well. my philosophy towards life and the fact that its easy to forget the
webcams after a while mean i can get on with life as normal. however; 

it was a week or so before christmas. i'm sat in bed, considering whether 
to make some tea or indulge in a quiet spot of masturbation. when i happen 
to glance at one of my terminals which is churning out summaries of live 
internet traffic through my network. 

there were 143 people watching me from 5 different angles. 

i put the kettle on. 

 
i've never knowingly adapted my behaviour for the camera before. and god 
knows they've caught more disturbing imagery than that in the past. you 
dont expose yourself to this level of webcamming without thinking carefully 
about the consequences. but traffic hadn't been that high previously, or if 
it was i hadn't noticed. something stopped me. i think i still have to work 
this one out in my head. 


whilst the whole kpmg thing is at its peak, and elrond; the main internet 
server in my flat is working harder than its ever done before, i'm deeply 
involved in the technical details and logistics of live webcam events for 
showstudio. its mid december and i havent had a moment to consider christmas 
as yet. 

on the 10th of december (i think), a friend from my college days arrives in 
london to assist with 'sleep', our first live event. we went for some food 
and a beer and caught up on old times, then settled down for an early night. 

the following day was a long one. i was awake for sixty hours straight. 
at a little past 1pm we arrived at the hotel, just off my old stomping ground
of edgware road, with a car piled high with lighting rigs, sandbags, networking
gear, computers, monitors and a *lot* of ethernet cable. 

the general concept behind sleep was this; four top models, each asleep 
overnight in a seperate room of an exclusive london hotel, wearing fashions
most fashionable nightwear, overseen by nick knight. above each bed
would be suspended a webcam (axis 2100), connected by carefully taped-down
lengths of cable to the network operations centre located in a fifth
hotel room, where mike and myself were based. from here we would monitor
things, and make sure images were grabbed from the webcams and uploaded
successfully to the live webserver throughout the night. all of this would
be repeated the following night with a different set of models, and new
clothes. 

our first nightmare came when one of the servers we had brought to process
the images failed to boot. this machine also contained a lot of important
showstudio data, some of which was not backed up. the filesystem was spewing
out errors all over the place as it tried to mount drives. this mirrored
a problem we'd encountered with the trial run the previous week, where 
a drive got damaged in transit. 

i was already quite stressed at this point, having to keep a million other
balls in the air. "give me a call when you've got some good news!" i barked
at mike as i grabbed one of my mobile phones and stormed out of the room. 
not my finest hour. 

we did get it running in the end, and it was fine. though wiring up all of
the cameras, assigning ip addresses and getting everything configured took
longer than we had anticipated. mike did running and cable laying while
i ran the software side of things and liaison with the many other people
involved in the project. 

with lots of people running around and many things to be done i stressed
the importance of finding three hours of calm uninterrupted silence at
some point during the day to solve our other problem; the suite of software
i had written to drive the event was largely lost due to the hard drive
corruption during the trial run. 

so it comes to 11:45pm. all of the equipment is setup. including positioning
and lighting checks, a curious process of describing required camera adjustments
to one of nicks assistants over the phone whilst he alternated between lying
on the bed, and leaping up to move the camera. everyone has eaten (except
mike and i), our operations centre is full of fashion people, makeup people,
nicks assistants, models and assorted others. its 11:45pm and we're
supposed to go live at midnight. "right", says i, "i'd better write that
software then". 

we were late, but only by a few minutes. miraculously the software got written.
though we rewrote much of it during quiet times during the night. as my
fingers are flying furiously over the keyboard, cranking out perl code
to glue everything together, a couple of dozen people are stood behind me
and to my side waiting for it to go live. simon, one of the fashion guys
realises how intimidating this all must seem, though mischievously says;
"shall we all start clapping, really slowly?". 

mike and i needed to stay awake all night to make sure of a smooth event.
our general setup involved two linux boxes connected over seperate phonelines
to different isp's, each machine doing the same tasks, so that if one line
went down, we could seamlessly upload through the other. a combination
of unix tools grabbed images from the webcams, performed post-processing
on the shots (using imagemagick), uploaded a copy of each processed image
to the live webserver once a minute, and stored another more high resolution
image in a local archive. 

i'm sat in an expensive london hotel room, watching my four debug windows.
each one showing a high resolution 10 frames per second image of a top
model, in bed. i think to myself "i've had worse pitches than this". 

as well as administering the event, we played lots of scrabble after 
everyone else had left, to keep our minds awake. we ate well from the room
service and ordered coffee at regular intervals. i had been asked
prior to the event what my dietary requirements were and i had replied
"coffee and cake". i was not disappointed. i was *very* well supplied
with assorted confection. *very* well supplied indeed.

the mood was upbeat. i felt genuinely honoured to be working with such 
talented and dedicated people. i get so emotional to see people with a passion,
skill and relentless motivation for things i know little about. it was
fun to be surrounded by some of the worlds best photography, lighting, 
makeup and fashion professionals. all of us working together to produce
something amazing. i felt... alive. mentally very alert due to the 
responsibility for making sure everything worked. emotionally satisfied to 
be working on such an interesting (from my perspective) project. it was 
stressful, but it was also a lot of fun. especially because stress sometimes 
needs to be relieved in such an environment. 

its about as glamerous as computer programming gets; models getting changed
all around you, surrounded by the surreality and character-filled environment
of fashion photography, and working to tight, immoveable deadlines in
interesting locations. and hey - i got to write some pretty nice perl code :-)

i made sure that mike and i took regular breaks from the madness so we
could keep our sanity. we chatted a lot through the night, and it was
good to catch up on gossip. it all felt a little surreal. 

everything went really well. after we went offline at 7am i went outside
and took a walk in hyde park. i love the park early in the morning. there
are very few people around, and its so peaceful. i really should go there
more often. i spent some of the day upgrading the software, liaising with
various people to prepare things for the second night, and even found
time for a spot of shopping. then we did the whole thing again for the
second night. this time we were ready to go live an hour early. mike
managed to get a few hours sleep, but i stayed awake until we went offline
at 7am again, then dropped onto the bed and fell immediately asleep. mouth
open. droolling onto the sheets. only to be woken shortly after so that we 
could begin the logistical nightmare of clearing everything out of the hotel. 
a procedure that would have been so much smoother had someone not 
accidentally yanked the plugs on one of the unix servers, as it was 
post-processing images. that person spent the next hours avoiding me,
not wanting to incur the wrath of chrisr. :-)

after all the work had been done, i popped briefly into the studio,
then we went straight off to the pub. i was too awake and high on 
adrenaline to sleep, so needed to calm down. the whole thing was such
a great buzz for me. i ate a big meal, drank a bottle of wine, then went 
home and slept like a baby. 

sleep. a quite ironic name for the project, really. at least from
my position.


our second live event was 'make it up'. technically this was a lot more
straightforward, so i didnt recruit an assistant. and we'd learnt a lot
of the lessons from sleep. at the last minute we ended up changing the
venue of the event, which caused me a whole raftload of problems. but
we managed it. this was to be an hourlong event, with faster webcam 
refreshes and some more ambitious image post-processing. makeup artist val 
garland was to makeup twelve blonde models wearing their underwear (or less). 
that was the basic idea.  meanwhile nick knight would direct, and apply 
different filters to the images as the event went on. 

it was that or eastenders. 

as this was being done at a professional studio, internet access wasnt
really a problem. and we were only using one camera (plus a backup). 
we also had some shiney new equipment which made things a lot smoother. 
from my position a few feet from the 'set', i was able to relax a little
more and watch the show. we were ready to start broadcasting several
hours early, which did a lot to steady my nerves.  

makeup is a pretty loose description of what the event actually entailed. 
nothing i say could possibly do justice or adequately describe. but
it had a theatrical quality, and elements of the abstract. it was
totally surreal and a lot of fun. it ended with the twelve girls covered
in brightly coloured paint, much of it fired from oversized super-soaker
water guns. the studio was a *mess* by the time we were through. i dont 
think the images are yet archived at showstudio.com, but they should be soon. 

this was pretty much my last work commitment before christmas. what with
these live events, the whole kpmg thing, an insanely busy email inbox and
frantic phonecalls trying to get my non-showstudio projects in order before
everybody went on holiday, it was a mad, mad end to the year. on
about the 20th of december i had my first opportunity to even consider
christmas. it didnt look like i'd be able to arrange a break for myself.
but at the last minute (as i've documented previously) everything came
together, and i disappeared for a much required and enormously satisfying
two week holiday up north. during which i did staggeringly little, and
loved every minute of it. i did manage to save 1.2gig of images taken
during a drunken night at the pub, which i may threaten to put online
in some form, at some point. 

i've probably forgotten a great many things that happened at the end of
last year. and there are certainly a few anecdotes that i cant retell in
so public a forum ;) but i think thats about the general gist of it. 

i loved the surreal ride which was november and december. but i also
loved the peace and quiet of my dangerously overdue holiday. i came
back to london feeling very peaceful, happy, almost zen-like. ready
to confront the new year and whatever it might throw at me. 

i'm pleased to be able to say that this feeling has remained. life is good.
i dont know what this new year has in store for me yet. but for a change
i'm not scared of the unknown. far from it. i'm almost sickeningly
upbeat. i'm launching myself with enthusiasm into exciting new
territory, and learning a lot about myself in the process. 
progress on tsp-4 is happening so much faster than i could have ever
hoped. its a really good feeling to be making progress on the things
that are important to me. the person i'm working with on this project
and i share a level of trust, honesty and respect with each other
that i cant even begin to describe. despite bringing completely
different (though complimentary) capabilities to the project, we come
from the same place spiritually. we share a very similar ethical and
moral code. which is very important to me considering that we're working
very closely together at the moment. 

i've only been at the studio for one and a half days this year. 
the rest of the time has been spent recovering from the flu, 
relaxing, and working on tsp-4. i'm also spending a lot of time
in the company of friends. they're precious things. and they keep
me sane. (ish!)

there should be more announcements over the next few weeks about what
i plan to be doing this year. already though, more live webcam events
are on the horizon. bigger, better, more surreal. and i plan to do
quite a bit more voluntary work this year. 

2002 is going to kick ass!

PGP signature