Arriving in Stavanger

Javel (as they say here in Norway)
I have arrived in Stavanger and as the bus stop poster below shows the Nu-Music Festival (which DIAL-A-DIVA is part of) is about to get underway.

The performer schedule is now closed. It is looking amazing I have to say. An incredible range. Diverse and wonderful talent from literally every corner of the globe. YAY!
Although most of my time & remaining mind power is still focused on the changes and additions to the performer schedule and the wonders of spreadsheet management, being here is a refreshing step into the physical. The picture below shows the office unit which is currently under construction. Petite and perfect. Tomorrow will see us applying undercoat and Wednesday will be painting day - shiny diva green, diva yellow and diva pink of course.



Yes, things seem to be going pretty smoothly. The Stavanger2008 team seem to be really on the case. No major stresses or problems thus far (I am firmly touching the wooden desk as I write that!). Today I have seen Greg's wonder computer for the first time which Trond picked up from London last week. It is now in the hands of Lars from the Stavanger City Council, who is setting it up to work with council network. Greg will arrive on Wednesday and tech testing will happen on Thursday.

International Preparation

So it's certainly not just the behind the scenes DIAL-A-DIVA team that is hard at work preparing... here is a shot of Joe (Joe Bludge) and Andrew (Fall Electric) warming up. Joe Budge and Fall Electric are two of the acts that will take part from Perth Australia. DIAL-A-DIVA will be with them from 10:40 CEST on the 8th.

Time Elastic

Time is melting, and yet, it is not quite pliable enough yet.
I have been going through the schedule - with lots of help from Bert and picking up on errors, overlaps other breaks in the time/space continuum of Saturday 8th September. Although there is nothing impossible as yet, there are still many artists who we'd like to give time to (that isn't in the middle of the night for them) and not much space in the schedule to play with. I am currently taking a crow bar to the 24 hour clock.

Cat is catching up with those still lost in myspace.
Jill is letting potential listeners know about DIAL-A-DIVA.
Trond (Stavanger2008) is travelling from Stavanger to London to collect the computer that will be the streaming server from Greg.
Greg is finalising the webcam details which he'll send out any minute now and has got the DIAL-A-DIVA message up on our phone number. He is also corresponding with Aasmund (numusic) about any remaining tech rider issues...
I believe that there is also a most wonderful office unit being constructed, which I'm looking forward to seeing next week.
Anne Dorthe (Stavanger2008) has co-ordinated a team of 17 volunteers for the event. Some of whom will have the ability to communicate in Russian and French as well as Norwegian and English which will increase our teams ability to understand the performers.
The various mail outs to press and interested parties has happened, much to the surprise of my local Post Office who had to deal with over 400 envelopes of posters and flyers going all over the world.
Audhild and Bente (Stavanger2008) are working on the publicity for Norway.

There is still a pretty long 'to-do' list but it looks like things are coming together :-)

22 days feels like 22 minutes

The run up to any deadline always puts a pressure on time, but this has a special feeling with DIAL-A-DIVA. Right now my main activity is thinking about time, minutes, performance slots, and time zones. TIMEZONES, 1/2 hour ones, daylight saving ones, summer time ones, highly populated ones, like Western South America and Eastern North America... sparse ones like Alaska, French Polynesia and Kiribati. Time on our hands and time slipping past. 22 days to go until we're listening to 24 hours worth of performed telecommunication time.

33 days to go and performance schedule is filling up

We have done a calculation:

total number of minutes in 24hours: 1440
total number of minutes we aim to allocate in advance: 1380
total mins allocated to date: 1069
conservative estimate of minutes to be allocated to artists we are currently corresponding with: 210
meaning we may effectively only have 70 - 80 mins left to allocate

So if you have been thinking about signing up DO IT NOW >> sign up

myspace profile RESOLUTION

Finally it is resolved - we are back, logged in to our original account.
Thanks to everyone who has been patient, and Myspace who sorted it out.

We will gradually migrate all friends together in the original account.

Now that we have access to our community again we'll turn our focus to the Russian Federation and China.

myspace profile - continuing saga

Just a note to say we are still unable to connect to our myspace profile (www.myspace.com/dialadiva2007) and continue to operate the temporary one (www.myspace.com/dialadivarescued) - hopefully this situation will be resolved soon and we will be able to pick up correspondence. In the meantime apologies to those who we continue not to respond to!