Bribery did the trick. An exchange of favors between us and the concert venue and a little bonus to the guards got them to allow cellphones into the space. The record label had been thankfully mute on the subject and the band was known to support fan recording, so it wasn't as hard as it could have been. There was also the fact that if this worked, it would be one of the coolest things managed in a while, even if it was for an audience of four.
Setting up the network and the back-end hardware a day before the band arrived was doable, if a little hoary. Nothing gives you a strong belief in your own mortality like standing on top of a thirty-foot ladder to hang a hacked-up and battery-powered access-point. Blessings unto Linksys for easily hacked firmware, blessings unto Adafruit for electronics kits that made powering the boxes easy. All blessings unto the Werner Corporation, whose ladder did not drop me thirty feet to the floor.
We lucked out in that almost everything worked immediately. I grabbed as many iphones as I could and ran out into the hall. We couldn't really do stress-testing, but we could verify that a handful of phones could find each other and knew where they stood, that a simple meshed display could be made by turning their screens on and off in sequence. It was in the hands of god now. Well, god and Steve Jobs - the app could still be yanked for some byzantine reason.
I don't think I've ever been as nervous as I was that night. We had exactly one chance to make this work, and nothing was ever supposed to work the first time. I liked this band a bit, had loved the video for "Here it Goes Again", and been floored by the Rube-Goldberg version of "This Too Shall Pass". But, it was the other version of that song, the one played with Notre Dame's marching band, that set me and my friends down this path, and the song was almost certainly next according to the set-list copy someone had photographed for me.
I wonder about myself sometimes, you know? Why do things like this for people whose names I would have to look up to remember?
When the morning comes,
When the morning comes,
When the morning comes!
The lead singer asks in the next beat, "You guys ready?" Oh boy, were we. "One! Two! Three!"
Before that beat finished, I looked down. Three hundred iPhones were running our application, three hundred points of light had found themselves and each other in the concert hall. Three hundred screens were being held aloft by their owners, each quietly briefed at the entrance and invited to join in the fun. Three hundred pixels made a simple display under my control. I had six buttons, one for each word.
The crowd sang along at the right moment. The words lit up the concert hall with an impossible bit of coordination that was only visible to the band now that the light tech had lowered the stage lights at my request.
"LET"
"IT"
"GO"
"THIS"
"TOO"
"SHALL"
"PASS"
"LET"
"IT"
"GO"
"THIS"
"TOO"
"SHALL"
"PASS"
I was right, the look on their faces was totally worth it. Advanced technology saves lives, connects people, hell - it's making us smarter. None of that compares with the ability to surprise and delight. No, you can't keep letting it get you down.
Thanks to Ok Go for making a pretty neat song.
