Dear Strand Fan, 

We had a flood.   This time it was in the concession stand courtesy of the Cherry Coke valve on our fountain drink machine.   We turned the water off, shut the CO2, and unplugged the pump.   It still made quite a mess.    Coke came out to fix the problem.   The valve developed a hairline crack that caused the issue.    Thankfully we were trained on how to remove the valves so that we can continue to serve product if the problem occurs again.   Below is a picture of the cracked housing.

We are well into the warm weather.   We suspect that one of our 7 air conditioning units is not functioning up to full capacity.   We will get that unit serviced soon.  Fortunately with the redundant design of our system we really don’t notice!

We are still trying to retrieve our website.  Our technical director Cody Veerkamp passed away unexpectedly in February.  Cody was the guru of all things technical at the Strand.  (warning, tech talk ahead).   The site is on a Linux server.   The server has the ftp protocols passworded.   Because of this we could not download a copy of the site.  We tried and tried, and just cannot get past that password.    We enlisted the help of a local company Tubesock to help with the issue.  We are all stymied.   Steve Frazee and David Finkel removed all the equipment last week.  We could see the backups, but again a pesky password.   

Tubesock could not take the equipment until the end of this week.  In the meantime one of our longtime Friday Night Fright patrons said he could help.  Stephen K. just happens to be in the industry with tons of experience with things like this.   Stephen took the equipment and as of mid-week has made some progress.   Along with Stephen we received help from a cyber security team in South Central Indiana.   They are all working to help us get our site back.

When you go to our URL you are taken directly to our ticketing system.  This is not hosted with the Strand’s site, therefore is not affected.   This is stressful for sure, and we will be happy when it is resolved.  Sadly we are only one password away…

Memorial Day is this weekend.  We give special gratitude to volunteers Bob Schlick, US Army 1958-1968 and  Dave Ellis, US Navy 1977-1985.   Without their service, places like the Strand could not exist.  Thank you. 

Enjoy the good weather.   We will see you back on Friday June 2 for SWEET BABY JAMES: A TRIBUTE TO JAMES TAYLOR.    As always thank you for the support.  See you at the Strand.