How many jerks does it take?

A gorgeous Saturday -- sunny, not too hot. The kind of spring day designed for swinging softly in the hammock, sipping a lemonade and reading a couple of paragraphs before dozing off.

We don't have a hammock, but we do have prematurely tall grass and a crotchety Sears mower in the barn, waiting for its first outing of the year. And four new tires in the barn waiting to be mounted and installed on my Saturn. So much for dozing.

Loaded up the old tires -- the ones that came with the car, still on their original wheels -- plus the new ones fresh from Tire Rack, and dropped them off to be mounted. Several years ago we bought a set of snow tires from Tire Rack, pre-mounted so that I can change from summer to winter tires myself. Buying the snow tires was easy: a few mouse clicks, and three days later the Blizzaks show up on the porch, ready to be bolted on. Today was harder, and I felt like I ought to apologize for presenting these alien tires to the store to be mounted. The manager didn't seem offended, and said they would be ready in a couple of hours.

Stopped at Hess to top off the Santa Fe and to fill the gas can for the lawnmower. A biker on the other side of the pump apparently had similar plans: he was filling an identical red plastic can, lashed to the seat of his motorcycle with a nylon strap embroidered with skulls every few inches. I was feeling rather pleased with myself, pumping regular at only $2.99 a gallon when it's about a dime higher everywhere else. Funny how little it takes to distort one's point of view...

Back home and out to the barn. First job: clean up and put away the snowblower. Two winters ago we bought a big honking Ariens that can cut through several feet of lake effect and deposit it in our neighbor's driveway 70 feet away. (It can, but we don't. We have wonderful neighbors who appreciate us mainly for not being like the previous residents, who liked to vandalize the neighborhood. We got the warmest welcome when we moved in!)

As it happens, the Ariens, in addition to being equipped with a monster Snow King engine, AC electric starter, headlight and heated handgrips, apparently comes standard with super powers: since we bought it, we have had fewer than ten occasions to use it. Normally, we get enough snow to run the thing more than that in a couple of weeks. But I'm not really complaining.

The funny thing is, the Ariens seems determined to be never fully utilized. Aside from the lack of significant storms, the features that seemed so important at the store just haven't been relevant, especially the electric starter. My dad bought a similarly sized Ariens about 30 years ago, and while it was a real workhorse, it took a fair amount of cranking to get it started. You definitely did not want to stall it at the bottom of the driveway, because that meant you had to start it by hand, jerking forever on a little rubber tee. But the new one is different: it has this big pull ring that you can grab even with snowmobile gloves. So the day our new one arrived from the store, I thought I'd just give it a couple of pulls for fun before plugging it in, mostly to feel good about buying the electric starter. I didn't get the chance: it roared into rude orange life on the first pull. Cold. And it's been that way ever since. I have never even tried the electric starter, and the only reason it ever takes more than one pull is if I forget to put in the plastic ignition key. So I wheeled it out into the sunshine, squirted some gasoline stabilizer into the tank and started it with the usual single pull, and let it run.

Pulled the mower out of the barn, checked the oil and the spark plug, and filled the tank with about half the can of gas. It used to cost about as much to fill the 77 Chevette, but that's another story. Squeezed the red rubber primer bulb a few times, and gave the rope a manly pull -- nothing. Pulled again and again. Squeezed the primer some more, fiddled with the spark plug, pulled some more. Nothing. Maybe it was intimidated by the Ariens next to it, roaring away. Ran the snowblower back into the barn and shut it off -- deafening silence.

Back out to the mower. More pulling, more priming, more fiddling. Nothing for the effort except for a dull twitch in my right shoulder. And then I thought: maybe it's dead. Maybe I can get a new one, one that starts on the first pull. I wonder if Ariens makes lawn mowers. All I have to do is to prove to Laurie that it's dead, never coming back, and that we NEED to replace it. It's never worked very well, never wants to start, is self-destructive -- it's already eaten two plastic discharge chutes. The evil auto-cannibalistic mower from hell is finally dead! I'll go in and break the sad news, after just last pull...

It started, coughing and sputtering and surrounding me in a stinky blue cloud.

It's not fair.

Whose rules, whose rights?

It's one of those annoying days. The phone coupler that worked so well in my office, didn't quite when I installed it in the rack. It turns out that there's a subtle but critical difference between the phone lines that come from Verizon's fiber rack (of which the circuit in my office is one) versus the older copper lines that come all the way from the central office (like the IFB numbers). It looks like the circuit needs something like a diac to let the ring-detect signal build up a bit before trying seize the line; right now the "on line" LED just flashes at the ring frequency. I've been battling this for a while, so I'm just now getting to lunch, several hours late.

It also doesn't help that I keep thinking about the press conference the county's district attorney held this afternoon, announcing the arrest of the motorcyclist trooper Todeschini pursued, resulting in Todeschini's death. Actually, it wasn't the conference that bothered me -- it's the ethos of a group called "stunters", of whom I had been unaware until a state police spokesman mentioned their web site. It makes for interesting reading, if you have a taste for illogical self-centeredness. The essence is that law is meaningless; stunters have the "right" to ride any way they please. Yet their web site lists rules (their own) which they expect to be followed. They are very big on their own rights -- especially so far as resisting police goes -- but don't give much thought to how those rights are to be protected and enforced. They don't seem to see any disconnect here. They don't consider that others might have rights, too.

If the law is subordinate to personal gratification, what then? Hypothetically, what if the next big trend in brainless hedonism is "extreme skeet," whose notional enthusiasts decide that it's much more fun to aim at rapidly moving targets -- say, motorcycles doing 100 miles an hour down public roads -- than at clay disks? Should the police ignore that, too? Would these stunters insist that the police enforce their self-assigned right to break the law in safety and impunity? Or would they become society's latest class of victim?

I'm not so hungry any more.

Saying goodbye to a hero

Our community is focused today is on the death of Craig Todeschini, a state trooper who was killed pursuing a speeding motorcyclist several days ago. The station has devoted much time and many resources to this, pre-empting normal programming to carry the funeral live.

But we at the station have a second reason to mourn: one of our own, Dave Stanton, died Sunday and his funeral was earlier this morning.

It's fairly obvious to label someone like Todeschini, who was both a policeman and a volunteer fireman, as heroic; yet in many ways, Dave exemplified a quiet heroism made all the more profound in that it did not depend on spectacular circumstances to be made apparent.

Dave started as a news photographer back in the days of film, lugging camera, sound gear, lights, and batteries from story to story. In good weather and bad, through the mundane and the dangerous. When the late 1970s brought the first electronic news equipment, he learned a whole new technology and saddled up with even heavier and bulkier gear. Nowadays as we carry a digital camcorder with self-contained battery in the palm of the hand, it's easy to forget that back then, you had to strap on upwards of 50 pounds of camera, recorder, lights and batteries. Little wonder that Dave, like most news photographers of that era, suffered serious back and joint problems.

When finally in the late 1980s the physical toll became just too great, Dave took the initiative to change his career, switching from the news department to engineering. He spent untold hours in personal study, taking correspondence courses in electronics and going through specialized training to repair the very equipment he used to take out in the field. And over the years he made it his business to follow the changing technology as it passed from the rudimentary Umatic cassettes through Betacam, to the digital DVC-Pro we use today. It was sheer determination that kept him ahead of the curve, and kept the station's news equipment functional even during the lean years before we had the ratings or resources we enjoy today.

Dave branched out to become one of the microwave truck operators, but his most remarkable live hit came one afternoon when he and reporter Jeff Schiedecker narrowly missed being killed when the plane in which they were returning to Syracuse was hijacked by a deranged man who attacked the pilot and tried to crash the plane. Dave grabbed his camera, taking a series of dramatic photos as the hijacker was subdued; and shortly after landing, had the presence of mind to give a clear and riveting account of the incident live, during our early newscast.

But to my mind, the most telling picture of Dave was during the final months of his wife Phyllis' battle with cancer, as he ran through years of accumulated vacation and leave time to love and take care of her. His devotion inspired his co-workers to donate weeks of their own time so that he could continue to serve Phyllis... and yet our sacrifice paled next to his dedication.

A man who took his responsibilities seriously and went about, doing the things that needed to be done. Our own hero... and today, we remember him.

It's alive!

Today ended on a satisfying note: the first "production" phone coupler I'm building worked right on the first try, so now I get to build up eight more.

What's the big deal? Well, one of the things I do is design stuff: studio facilities, transmission systems, some software, and sometimes the hardware itself. It's not that I couldn't have gone out and bought nine phone couplers; a number of companies make them. But the corporate reality is that to do so would require going through an agonizing capital expense proposal process, at the end of which I would probably get approval for only five of something similar to but different from what we need. On the other hand, nobody blinks at buying parts (especially when the parts cost less than a fifth of what ready-made equipment costs). And we happen to need them... fast.

As it happens, our Syracuse TV station does an awful lot of live news from the field... and the folks standing in front of the camera have to hear what's on the air, plus cues from the control room. They have two microwave trucks, two satellite trucks, plus fiberoptic connections to our sister stations in the region and CNN. So during any given newscast, we can easily have half a dozen different remotes coming in, each of which needs to dial into a separate number for IFB (that's what the talent earpiece feed is called -- short for "Interrupted FoldBack"). We're about to head into May Sweeps, one of a handful of ratings periods throughout the year, during which every news department goes all out to attract and maintain viewers. We tend to do more live remotes than usual, and it is critical that everything works properly.

Of course, even if it weren't sweeps, it's a busy week; we're shorthanded, what with folks at the National Association of Broadcaster's big annual event in Las Vegas. Worse, it's been hectic around town, with lots of breaking news. Tomorrow is the funeral for a state trooper who was killed pursuing some bozo doing 100 miles an hour on a motorcycle, and we're covering that live. It's been that kind of week, and it's only Wednesday.

Which brings me back to why I'm designing and building all these phone couplers. We have a bunch that have been working fairly faithfully for about 12 years -- or so I thought. It turns out that they are acting pretty much like an average 12 year old kid: quick to answer the phone, slow to hang up. In fact, sometimes the only way to get them to get off the line is to tap them sharply on the side (the couplers, not the kid). Apparently the reed relays like to stick, which is funny: I assumed that being sealed, they would be extremely reliable. Live and learn. So... we need something reliable... NOW!

The newly designed coupler does away with the mechanical relay, and is pretty bulletproof. It uses two optical relays by Clare, one to handle ring detect and the other to check for end-of-call. Sometime I'll go into the process of making the printed circuit boards, but the bottom line is that the first board does its thing... and tomorrow, another eight will follow.

Unless tomorrow runs true to form and I get pulled away to solve some other crisis.