Brighton gig screen goes One Step Beyond with an update pop-up

BORK!BORK!BORK! An update message made an unscheduled appearance on a big screen during July's On The Beach event in Brighton, England. Partially obscured by speakers capable of deafening those at the back of the audience, the pop-up still managed to compete with the performers for attention. Thanks to modern technology, something unexpected appearing behind the performer is now high on the list of worries for technicians tasked with making sure all goes well for popsters. In the old days, it might have been a bulb blowing, an unfortunate miscalculation in scale for a model of Stonehenge, or a spontaneously exploding drummer. Now it's the unwanted update message distracting from the performance of whoever is on the stage. Some eardrum-splitting speakers obscure part of the message, but no amount of antics from David Rodigan can hide the dialog - complete with the ominous choice between "Remind me later" and "Install updates." Either unaware or too fiercely professional to let technical trouble derail the show, Rodigan continued entertaining the audience while, we imagine, somebody with a keyboard and mouse sweated profusely - and not just because Brighton was in the middle of a heatwave. What do you do? Do you allow the update to proceed? Do you close the message and hope it won't reappear at an inopportune moment? And if you do something, do you risk interfering with a carefully choreographed show? Welcome, as the headline act would later sing, to the House of Fun. Unexpected update pop-ups are the bane of many an administrator's life, filling helpdesk systems with "this weird thing happened" tickets, and clogging the telephone lines with confused users. You might hope a seaside gig on a sunny Friday would offer a break from such nonsense. But no. While much of the music came from an era before auto-updates and the World Wide Web, the tech, alas, wanted to be kept bang up to date. And it was not afraid to share that fact with a crowd more keen on a Night Boat to Cairo than a bork to nowhere. (R)