Underbelly and the Edinburgh Fringe

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I’ve managed to get a job working at Underbelly in Edinburgh as tech crew during the Edinburgh Fringe – a month of thousands of performing arts shows at hundreds of venues.

I’ve not actually got my own venue, I’m working as a cover technician, so I get to hop around the different venues at Underbelly Cowgate and run those for a day or two at a time while others are off on holiday or otherwise. On the up-side it lets me see so many more shows. On the downside, I’ve no idea what’s needed for these shows – most have pretty decent notes so I have an idea, but not all! Some shows need opped too, and a couple of times I’ve been the only tech op for a show which I’ve never seen or heard about before. Usually though, if a show doesn’t have their own op, it’s usually a really straight-forward show to run (less than 10 cues, including audience in, bows, and audience out states).

So here’s a list of all the shows I’ve seen, set up for, or generally helped with:

  • Belly Laugh
    • Sad Faces
    • One Hour Plays
    • Punch
    • Leads & Stern
    • Durham Revue
    • Tiffany Stevenson
    • Flames over New Jersey
  • Big Belly
    • Real Man’s Guide to Sainthood
    • Captain Ko
    • Tenderpits
    • Guide to Second Date Sex
  • Iron Belly
    • Razing Eddie
    • You Obviously Know What I’m Talking About
    • Chapel Street
    • Strong Arm
    • Beast
    • Truth
    • The Great Puppet Horn
    • The Lonely One
    • Tom Cottle
  • Delhi Belly
    • Graters: Julian Ignores his Friend
    • Letters to the Man
    • Jessie Cave’s Bookworm
    • Dog-Eared Collective
    • Mark Grist: Rogue Teacher
  • White Belly
    • Spring Awakening
    • Almost Nothing to do with Frogs
    • Bad Bread
    • Oxford Revue
    • Mark Nelson
    • Doc Faustus
  • Belly Button
    • Glory Dazed
    • Doctor Brown
  • Belly Dancer
    • Discover Ben Target!
  • (Top floor)
    • Boom Boom Club

Bolded are the ones I’ve actually seen. Italicised are the ones I’ve opped.

It’s hard to believe it’s nearly over – it’s been amazing, and there’s only one day of shows left, then the strike (take-down / de-rig / etc). I’m definitely going to try to go back next year if I can, it’s definitely been worth it! I’ve met so many cool people, talented actors / directors / technicians, and the team I’ve been working with have been nothing short of amazing :)

Shell-freezing Ctrl-S and other keyboard shortcuts

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For a while now I’ve known about the rather annoying Linux shell freezing that happens when you press Ctrl-S. At first, it seems like a connection drop-out if it’s remote (I use the Linux shell a lot, via PuTTY on Windows), but it took me a few months to realise that it was when I pressed a key. A few months later, I learnt it was caused by Ctrl-S, when I meant to press Ctrl-D (EOF).

Apparently, this is intended behaviour – a scroll lock of sorts. Ctrl-S again doesn’t solve it, but Ctrl-Q will.

So, here’s a few other keyboard shortcuts you may or may not find useful – not all of these may work on every unix/linux variant.

Ctrl-A Moves the cursor to the beginning of the line. See Ctrl-E.
Ctrl-B Moves the cursor backward one character. See Ctrl-F.
Ctrl-C SIGINT – interrupts (cancels)
Ctrl-D EOF – end of file character, marks the end of user input. If used on an interactive shell, will log you out. If used on a STDIN stream, will mark the end of the stream so it stops expecting input from you.(These are essentially different angles on the same thing)
Ctrl-E Moves the cursor to the end of the line. See Ctrl-A.
Ctrl-F Moves the cursor forward one character. See Ctrl-B.
Ctrl-H Backspace
Ctrl-L Clears the screen (like the clear command)
Ctrl-N Next item in history. See Ctrl-P
Ctrl-P Previous item in history. See Ctrl-N
Ctrl-Q XON – Resumes screen output. See Ctrl-S.
Ctrl-R Reverse history search.
Ctrl-S XOFF – Suspends screen output. See Ctrl-Q.
Ctrl-U Delete line
Ctrl-W Delete last word
Ctrl-Z SIGTSTP – suspend a process. Can be resumed with either fg or bg

Thanks to http://www.computerhope.com/ushort.htm and http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.aspx?ArticleId=19672 for some of the info here.