How's your blinker fluid level?

No time to write today -- we're getting our microwave equipment verified, and other stuff is happening. So for your on-line amusement, this link for a supply of blinker fluid and other automotive needs.

Back tomorrow...

Monday and a half

The problem with normal weekends is that you come back Monday morning to face all of the crud that's accumulated over since Friday. The problem with holiday weekends is that Tuesday becomes a more intense version of Monday. Worse, people tend to forget that it's the first workday in the week, and schedule all kinds of stuff for the time you need to dig yourself out of the three-day hole.

Today we have (another) meeting to demo non-linear news editing equipment. We've been through this once already, but the vendor asked for a "do-over" because they didn't do a very good job selling their stuff the first time. Amazingly, we went along with this, even though their competitor's system is clearly superior and less expensive. We're just too nice.

And in about ten minutes some folks from New Jersey show up to verify our inventory of news microwave equipment. This is part of the Sprint / Nextel deal wherein they get part of the 2GHz broadcast auxilary band in exchange for replacing everyone's existing equipment. The inspectors will be taking snapshots and making sure our lists are legitimate. Today it's the studio and live trucks; tomorrow they climb the tower. At 900 feet, better them than me.

I'm still gritting my teeth over an email one of our production folks sent out Sunday about the audio console. It seems that he had a momentary problem with one of the channels and emailed everyone in his own department, but didn't bother to notify engineering, which is actually responsible for fixing it. One of his co-workers finally passed his note along to us yesterday evening with the observation that this is the same problem they have been having with another channel. It was my welcome back this morning.

The justification for not notifying engineering was threefold: first, it wouldn't get fixed anyway; second, he doesn't know how to send a trouble report; third, he didn't want to step on another production staffer's toes. My reply included the reminder that we aren't psychic and can't fix what we don't know is broken, simple directions for the use of paper and pencil, and an observation about whose toes he should be concerned about: the other people who need to use this equipment.

While not psychic, I can predict with remarkable accuracy what's going to happen: we'll get flooded with the most miniscule equipment complaints for a while (some of which blow smoke to cover operator errors and only waste our time), then things will go back to the way they were. "Oh, I didn't write it up... it's been like that for months, everyone knows about it." Then time for another round of dope slaps.

I've finished my lunch; now back to Monday, already in progress.

It's a hot, beautiful, hot, sunny, hot, day. Exactly what a holiday is supposed to be. The sort of day that reminds me of riding in the '63 Rambler — the one with the all-metal center console and vinyl upholstery that heated up like a waffle iron, ready to sear the legs of little kids wearing shorts.

No, I'm not posting any pictures of what my legs look like now. Instead, an illustration of what the Sprint / Nextel microwave inventory verification team might find at our Harrisburg - Lancaster station...



Have a wonderful holiday!

Growing and changing

Hooray for the end of the week! Got the 4:43 wakeup call Wednesday, then another yesterday. No call this morning but I woke up at 4:41 anyway, lying there and smelling the skunk that has taken up residence in our neighborhood, hoping it isn't under the front porch waiting to greet me. Finally got back to sleep about ten minutes before the alarm went off. Bother; no wonder I feel like my mind is running about seven minutes behind the rest of me.

By rights, Hannah is the one who should be exhausted: in fact, this morning the whiteboard on her door reads "Up at 10:35." Not 10:30 or quarter to eleven — 10:35. The past week has been a musical marathon for her: last Thursday, playing for the Piano Guild judging audition; Friday, accompanying the school's general and select choirs for the Spring concert; Saturday, accompanying the choirs again at the Darien Lake competition; Sunday, accompanying the school's touring ensemble at my parent's church; accompanying choir practice on Monday; piano lesson on Tuesday; playing for chapel at school Wednesday morning. And this, on top of the usual homework and the first part of her Regents examination for Spanish. She is generally up before my alarm goes off, and still going after I'm ready to turn in for the night. The wonder is not so much that she does all this, but that she can do it so well.

This was affirmed Wednesday afternoon as she, with five other sophomores and a handful of juniors and seniors, was inducted into the National Honor Society.



One of the speakers described the attributes which are considered in selecting inductees, making the observation that while each student has compiled an exemplary academic record, it is often by dint of consistent hard work, not through effortless ability. I could have launched out of my seat and hollered "Amen!" to that, but I didn't want to make Hannah drop her candle and give me the look.

It is a marvelous thing to watch character and maturity develop -- particularly in areas where I struggled at that age. But I am not impartial, so it's all the better when this is recognized by others more objective than myself. Our little girl is growing up.

All right, who took my box of Kleenex?

Objects in windshield may be lower than they appear

One reaction to yesterday's post and my disruption scheduling program: "Can you really do that?"

As far as you know!

---

A bad day for a (former?) part-timer at one of our Birmingham radio stations:






I think they need to revise the clearance label now.

Reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin and his dad are in the car:

Calvin: "How do they know the load limit on bridges, Dad?"
Dad: "They drive bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge until it breaks. Then they weigh the last truck and rebuild the bridge."

Pardon my snoring

An early post today! One of the joys of working in showbiz is the 4:43am wakeup call because something's not working. This morning it was a server that creates the ticker for our Binghamton station: it didn't come back up after a Windows Update. Thanks a bunch, Microsoft. At least the problem was easily remedied and caused no real harm.

Equipment failures spawn some of the more entertaining questions and comments:

"Why does the Chyron only fail when someone's using it?"
"Will the IT department email us when we can restart Outlook?"
"You should put up a slide to let people know the transmitter's down."
"Can't you undelete that bad edit?"
"I don't care if the projector lost the loop; you should keep a spare."
"The live truck lost its brakes? Then drive it to a flat spot to set up the hit."
"It's smoking... is that bad?"
"Can't you fix it some other time?"
"You can't remote into the server if it's off?"
"Sure I unplugged it, but that can't have anything to do with the problem."

Henceforth, we shall adopt a proactive paradigm. From now on all failures will be carefully chosen, targeted and scheduled for maximum effect. To that end, I have created a new application to manage disruption on a more intentional basis:



This also lets me inflict maximum chaos on those who most greatly annoy me.

Twenty years ago one of our veteran control room operators gave me this bit of wisdom: "When the phone rings at three in the morning, it ain't Publisher's Clearing House calling to say you've won."

Time for more coffee... I really need to wake up before it's time to go home.

"Have you heard of a dictionary?"

My inbox seems to be filling up lately with an unusual amount of mail offering all manner of products for personal enhancement. I can't imagine why anyone would respond to any of these messages, let alone open them. As a Vermont campground caretaker remarked years ago, "Takes all kinds — and we got 'em."

Note to spammers: if you want to break through the first layer of my defenses, you need to pick a more convincing return address name. Anything from "Mushroom F. Underrated" or "Mazourkas O. Nitrated" might as well say DELETE ME NOW.

---

Did Canada issue a warning to its citizens abroad yesterday urging them to return home with all possible speed? Dozens of cars with Ontario and Quebec plates zipped past me as if I was standing still, some doing better than 80 through construction zones. Amazingly, the state police cars just sat there and ignored them.

---

Leave it to William F. Buckley Jr.:

Some years ago I was a defendant in a lawsuit brought by a creepy fascistic outfit (they are now out of business), and the question before the jury was whether I and the magazine I edited were racist. The attorney had one weapon to use in making his point, namely that we had published an editorial about Adam Clayton Powell Jr. when he made a terminally wrong move in his defense against federal prosecutors. The editorial we published was titled, "The Jig Is Up for Adam Clayton Powell Jr.?" On the witness stand I argued that the word "jig" could be used other than as animadversion. The feverish lawyer grabbed a book from his table and slammed it down on the arm of my chair. "Have you ever heard of a dictionary?" he asked scornfully, as if he had put the smoking gun in my lap. I examined the American Heritage College Dictionary and said yes, I was familiar with it. "In fact," I was able to say, opening the book, "I wrote the introduction to this edition." That was the high moment of my forensic life. And, of course, the dictionary establishes that the word “jig” can be used harmlessly.

HT: Justin Taylor

Link to full article

Oh, it's Monday all right

A very short entry before I go home and collapse.

On the ride to school Hannah asked me what I was doing today. I told her ordinary stuff, nothing special -- mainly figuring out how to mess people up. She smiled at that.

It turned out to be an ordinary Monday, events and equipment conspiring to mess me up.

• Bad pressure regulator on the main heat pump water circulator, putting 35 pounds of pressure on a system intended to run at 15. We caught it before any of the plastic hoses burst. We'll count that as a preliminary win.

• A deer took on a car in front of my parents' house. The deer lost, but crawled up to their bedroom window before expiring. Frost wrote, "When you have to go there, they have to take you in." Frost was wrong: I swung by to drag her back down to the curb so that the reluctant DPW crews would take her to her final resting place. (Just what does the city do with dead deer, anyway?)

• A failed power supply on Binghamton's transmitter took out their over-the-air audio. Drove down to help resolve it. They're back on the air with audio, although at reduced power. Drove back.

• The oscillator in Syracuse's studio-to-transmitter microwave died just as I got back to Syracuse. Hooray for backup equipment. But it failed too late in the day, so MRC can't get a replacement in tonight's Fedex shipment.

• Binghamton called back: part of their routing switcher just crapped out. It's probably 35 years old, made by a company called Telemation. Telemation was bought by Bell and Howell, which was bought by Utah Scientific, which was bought by Bosch and shut down. The employees bought the facility and ressurected Utah Scientific. I sure hope I don't have to drive back to Binghamton...

It's time to go home. Actually it's past time, and Hannah just called my cell as I was getting off the phone with Binghamton's engineer. Dinner's done, and nobody's smiling.

Maybe geese aren't so bad after all

My inbox is filling up with replies to a note from our radio stations in Durango Colorado:

Well this is just loads of fun! I'm looking for a suggestion for getting rid of rattle snakes (yes plural). While cad welding a ground strap to a tower this morning jake no neck decided to make an appearance. Once he was delt with, one of his buddies decided it was play time for him too. To me 2 snakes at same place at the same time indicates that there are usually more so I am looking for suggestions.

Several folks suggested chemical solutions like mothballs or snake repellants; others recommended a professional pest removal service. One reply pitched out the idea of feeding them mice, presumably to make them too full to be interested in people. But the overwhelming majority are voting for the manly approach: explosives. Shoot 'em, burn 'em, blow 'em up.

Who says broadcasting can't be fun?

---

Update: an hour later and the email keeps pouring in, but the general drift has shifted. Now I'm seeing suggestions for how to serve snake, and which side dishes best complement the meat. But it always comes back to practical violence: one fellow suggests using military flash-bang grenades to dispatch them and cook them in one easy step.

Make this a top priority

It's one of those days when everything you had planned to do goes right out the window. The data link for Syracuse's doppler radar started getting flaky last week, and there's been some serious misdiagnosis going on. It's a classic scenario: people who don't really know how the system works have decided what the problem has to be, and they email everyone except the folks who are actually responsible for fixing it. Since rain is forecast for this afternoon, the news director got into the act this morning with the demand to "make this a top priority."

So even though I have no responsibility for this equipment, I dropped my own work and drove up to Pompey to deal decisively with it, terminating an unused subcarrier modulator with extreme prejudice. Marvin Martian meets Dirty Harry.

---

The goose exclusionary zone next to our building seems to be working: the flock loiters around the new fencing, grumbling and pooping. The grass around the gazebo is safe to cross again, but the front driveway has become more of a minefield than ever. I noticed seven new goslings this morning: the baby boom is in high gear.

As with any other project, installing the fence has had unexpected consequences. Now that the geese are banished, a family of rabbits has taken up residence under the gazebo and robins have nested in its rafters. The robins go ballistic when the baby bunnies venture into the open to nibble, and dive straight at them. Yesterday one of our photographers was attacked and driven back into the building. It's a sad day when a weeks-old bunny shows greater fortitude than a 35 year-old news photog.

---

The rain's started and thunder's not far off. I'd better make sure the radar's still working.

The more things change...

Dad and I spent several hours in a meeting yesterday, beginning preparations for the new digital microwave systems our stations will be installing to transmit live news shots back to the studios. We sat side by side, listening and making notes and thinking about the work we would need to do during the next year.

Some forty years ago we sat side by side in a breezy wooden press box perched above the concrete stands of Archbold Stadium, talking about the radio remote that was about to start. We had lugged cases of equipment up the open stairs — the clunky Koss headphones with a wire bracket on the side to hold the mic; the RCA mixer with knobs almost bigger than my hands; the long Sennheiser shotgun mic to pick up the band. As he spoke, I absorbed both technical and practical lessons: keep some crowd noise in the mix; pay attention to what's coming up, not just to what's happening right now; make sure to visit the bathroom before the broadcast starts; don't leave cups of soda around because they draw bees.

So much has changed since he got into the business. He started at channel 3 before videotape came to Syracuse, and was there when their first color equipment went on the air. Nowadays tape is being replaced by computer servers and solid state memory cards; in three more years the standards that made color broadcasting possible will be discontinued, replaced by digital transmission. The control room was an exciting noisy place full of massive machinery that smelled of warm oil, film cleaner, and hot tubes; 16 millimeter projectors pulled film through the gate frame by frame with a nervous chatter; optical multiplexers flipped their mirrors with a thunk; VTR heads sounded their thin whine as they spun, quick as a dentist's drill, on air bearings. And above it all, the quietly urgent commands of engineers on the intercom, coordinating everything at precisely the right time.

Nowadays one can walk into a control room and find it empty, computer monitors scrolling unseen as the automation plays commercials and switches satellite feeds.

Equipment failure used to be a normal daily event. Lamps would blow, tubes would fail. Film splices would break and the damaged edge of a videotape would catch the spinning head and be instantly sliced as by a buzz saw. Engineers went about their duties with a constant edge of alertness, ready to patch around a dead amplifier or to touch up an adjustment with the Xcelite tweakers that were as much a badge of their profession as the FCC licenses framed on the wall. A merely good day was one during which everything held together; on an excellent day one of the three VTRs would die, film would be missing, the network would abandon its format without notice, and the program log would be full of typos — yet through sustained hustle and ingenuity, nobody at home would guess that anything was amiss. Even in the early 1980s, when I started at channel 9 and most of our commercials played from the relatively automated but still intensely mechanical ACR-25, I would come home after sign-off so wired that it would be hours before I could get to sleep.

Several years ago a friend quipped, "Computers have taken broadcasting out of broadcasting." There's much truth there, yet nearly fifty years after he started at 3, Dad's still at it — ready to keep the station on the air with a click of the mouse or a turn of his trusty green tweaker.

There's no such thing...

Very little time today: just got back from the kickoff meeting for converting our stations' news microwave equipment to digital. The short version is, Sprint/Nextel is paying to move everyone to new equipment so that they can take part of the radio band we were using. This get-together explained the timetable and the steps we take over the next year. They even fed us, though nobody quite figured out what kind of soup that was. So maybe there really is a free lunch— the next year will tell.

Dad was there... not an especially festive way to celebrate a 70th birthday, but interesting.

---

What you don't want to hear when you walk in the door: "Come quick! Everything's gone squirrely in the control room!" Guess I'd better go see.

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Breaking news! A double post! A bifurcated blog!

I just finished yet another project, making the final connections for emergency bypass controls for each of the channels we control. So if the automation goes belly up, we can keep the stations on the air the old fashioned way: panicing and pushing buttons. These panels have been in the rack for a few weeks, running in a passive mode so people can touch them and get used to them. Now that the buttons actually do things, I went about and attached stickers to each panel:

Your call is important to us...

"Good morning, engineering... this is Jeff."
"You need to get that windbag idiot Reith off the air."
"Ummmm. I think you have the wrong number."
"No, you just have the wrong people on the air."
"You're calling about Jim Reith's afternoon radio show, right?"
"Well, duh!"
"You need to call WSYR radio. Their number is 472-9797."
"I'm not falling for that -- that's not the number I dialed."
"True — you called the wrong number. This is WSYR-TV."
"I didn't call the wrong number! I tracked you down to your secret office."
"Who exactly do you think I am?"
"You're Jeff Delmonico, right?"
"No. You probably want Joel Delmonico, the radio stations' GM. Call 472-9797."
"He doesn't answer at that number."
"He doesn't here, either. Have a nice day!"

Click.

Don't even get me started about the calls from some sweatshop in Pakistan: "Please mister Jeff I want only short time to renew your free subscription to Connector Specifier magazine which is most invaluable technological resource

Click.

I'm not such a bad person, am I? What did I ever do to deserve this? I try to be nice to people on the phone, and apparently this is the thanks I get. Calls from people who don't like our programming; calls from people who don't understand why they can't receive our digital signal from their camp east of Albany (the local PBS station is on the same channel); calls from people with hot news tips about how space aliens are tapping their phones in preparation for the imminent global invasion. Presumably they are calling from a pay phone so the call won't be traced.

For many years we carried the Phil Donahue show at 4pm. When we picked up Oprah, channel 3 bought Donahue, which they ran opposite Oprah. Several days later an elderly woman called:
"Good afternoon, engineering..."
"I'm having trouble getting Donahue."
"I'm sorry, but we no longer run Donahue — we show Oprah now at 4."
"I know that!"
"Channel 3 carries Donahue."
"I know that!"
"This is channel 9..."
"I know that!"
"Why don't you give channel 3 a call?"
"Their number is busy."

Really, I'm not a bad person... after all, I didn't give her my dad's direct number at channel 3...

Self expression -- or, rather, thelf exthprethion

Being unable to speak clearly is annoying.

This morning started early with an appointment for two fillings, one of which was deep enough that I half expected the drill to pop out my right kneecap. It didn't, but Dr. Palma gave me enough Novocaine that I wouldn't have felt it anyway.

Got to work nearly on time though, feeling like my tongue and half my face were still in Solvay. My philosophy is that I can feel crappy just as well at work as I can at home, one of the reasons I have only taken a couple of sick days in nearly 25 years. What I did not expect was how entertaining my temporary disability would turn out to be: normally we're a pretty taciturn lot at 8:30 in the morning, but today everyone was determined to engage me in conversation, to the general amusement of all. After an hour of inarticulate frustration I went up to the transmitter to help fix a problem with the live truck receiver -- might as well give Bob and Jack a look at the drooling, lisping carnival freak, too.

I was looking forward to lunchtime, not for the food, but for a few minutes to bat out a few paragraphs here. To express a few thoughts without sounding like a mutant congested Truman Capote and leaving a wet spot on my shirt. But the numbness went away an hour ago, and I can feel all of my face again. Now the only reason to drool is because I want to.

Writing can be fun, especially if it's by choice rather than by compulsion. It's still unsettling to realize that other folks might actually read this stuff, and it makes me a bit more careful about how I write (how, not necessarily what). My education in classical literature is deficient, but I have always enjoyed more contemporary essayists like James Thurber, Don Marquis, and more recently James Lileks. My literary hero is E. B. White: but not so much for his children's stories as for the "casuals" he wrote for the New Yorker and Harpers during the thirties and forties. White's revision of Will Strunk's The Elements of Style gives concrete voice to the principles that make his other work so vivid and compelling: "The greatest writers — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare — are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures."

Our daughter has become a good writer, often evoking a wry humor in her paragraphs. She reads voraciously; the other morning she awoke atop her bed, book beside her, the light still on. We started her right: the very afternoon she came home from the hospital nearly sixteen years ago, I rocked her to sleep reading Charlotte's Web, Hannah on one arm, the book on the other. I still read that story every once in a while, and I still cry when Charlotte dies.

Time to get back to work before I get all choked up.

Answers about answering

I've had several people ask how the automatic phone coupler works. Saying "just fine, thanks" only gets me an annoyed look, so I'll share a couple of drawings...



First, a few general points. All of the parts are available from Digikey, but other vendors probably also sell them. There's nothing particularly unique -- no custom-programmed logic or anything like that. Even the DC supply can be an unregulated wall wart. All resistors are 1/4 watt, 5% tolerance. For the sake of the circuit discussion, we will assume that toggle switch S1 is in the center "Auto" position.

Ring voltage (on the order of 90 volts at 20 Hertz) is enough to activate IC2b, but capacitor C1 blocks the DC line voltage. The phototransistor charges up capacitor C2; the combination of R5, R6, and C2 provide a filter that prevents false tripping. When C2 reaches a sufficient voltage it activates IC2a, which switches the phone line into the audio transformer, creating an "off hook" condition and answering the call.

DC current from the phone line flows through the LED of IC1b as long as the circuit is "off hook"; the phototransistor in turn triggers IC1a, which holds the line. When the caller hangs up, the central office briefly drops the DC current, which shuts off IC1, resetting the coupler back to an "on hook" condition. The phototransistor of IC1b is cascaded with switching transistor Q1 in order to provide enough drive current to feed outboard tally equipment.

Setting toggle switch S1 to "Off" essentially shorts out the ring detector IC2b and the line current detector IC1b, preventing the coupler from responding to ringing or holding the line. With S1 in "On", the transformer is hard-switched across the phone line. One nice feature about this is that you can initiate an outgoing call with a phone bridging the line, flip the switch to "On" to activate the coupler, hang up the phone, and then return the switch to "Auto". If the other end hangs up, the coupler will automatically reset. You can also dump the call by switching the coupler to "Off".

One variable you might encounter relates to the quality of your phone lines and the distance from your central office. If you find that the coupler false trips -- especially if it hangs up after a call but immediately re-seizes the line -- try increasing the value of R6. On the other hand, if the front LED just flashes and the phone rings without answering, decrease R6. We have a mix of copper lines direct to the central office and newer lines which come from a fiber rack in our building, and 2400 ohms seems to be a good value that accommodates both.

Finally, zener diodes D2 and D3 prevent spikes on the phone line from zorching your audio equipment or vice-versa. As an aside, you will notice that everything that ties to the phone line is completely isolated from the control logic, and both are isolated from the audio feed.

The whole thing fits comfortably on a single-sided 2" by 3" PC board. It could be somewhat smaller, but I designed this to replace a circuit that used reed relays, and this new board is a direct replacement in the existing enclosures.



Sorry... not very philosophical today.

Here's to finishing projects

This is a most unusual day: I have actually finished a project. Wiring's complete; drawings are done; everything works, and the relevant people understand how to use the equipment. Balloons haven't flooded down from the ceiling, but the day isn't over yet. There's still time.

An innocent soul might be puzzled: what's the big deal? Isn't that the way it's supposed to happen? Yes, but in most stations it never seems to turn out that way. Too many people assume that the equipment magically becomes operational an hour after the UPS truck pulls away; this especially applies to news departments. These are the same folks who try to sell upper management on new systems but never include such things as wiring, monitors, racks and such in the quote. So ordinarily I don't get more than halfway through a project before people start getting anxious about why it isn't done yet -- and three new projects get added to the stack, each one top priority. If you consider that I don't just work for the Syracuse station, but serve all of our Northeast group, it's a wonder that anything gets done.

I've been fighting this battle for the better part of 25 years, and have learned a few things that help:

1. Install the equipment that people see and touch (control panels, for instance) last. There's nothing like having the Chyron keyboard on the counter to make production folks come out of the woodwork.
2. Do the documentation first. Spend the extra time during the design / proposal stage to create the drawings and writeups that will become part of the final documentation package. You will never get the time to do this once the system is operational, and it actually makes installation easier -- especially if other people are involved in the work.
3. Do as much of the work away from the control room as possible. My best projects are racks that I have pre-assembled in the prop room, then moved on site and wired up. This gives me more room to work, better lighting, and fewer distractions. It can be very hard to neatly bundle cabling when you're banging elbows on adjacent equipment.
4. People don't read memos. If you need to convey information to people, bright-colored drawings work far better. My most successful "non-memos" look more like posters for coming movie attractions. I can do this pretty quickly with the same software I use for design work -- Visio.
5. Try to have several days where the new equipment is operational enough for people to play with it becore they have to use it. As it is, you are still going to get nailed:

"Nobody tells us about this new stuff."

"Did you read the memo I sent out last week?"

"I don't have time for that!"

"Okay, I'll show you."

"Never mind, I don't want to know."

Anyway, the project I just finished is a substantial upgrade to our 24-year-old audio console in the production control room. The console was designed for a station with one live truck and six videotape machines, back in the days when our audio operators thought mix-minus was a Betty Crocker reject. The upgrade automatically creates a dedicated mix-minus for every channel on the console, so the audio operator need only turn a knob to send the right feed for each of six IFB phone couplers. He no longer has to tie up submasters or echo-send buses, and scramble when we have multiple satellite remotes; it's made me very popular in Production, however temporarily. The truck operators like it, too: they dial in for the IFB feed and it automatically answers with a brief announcement that verifies which IFB channel they are using. And they don't have to face the wrath of reporters who did a live standup with their own delayed audio echoing in their ear. (If you ever wonder why field reporters flip their earpieces out with a disgusted grimace, that's why.)

On second thought, forget the balloons. Some Gannon's ice cream would work, though... just not coming out of the ceiling. Cleaning up the mess would be another project.

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Hillary in 2008? (HT: Justin Taylor)

Good fences make good neighbors

It's construction time in the side lawn: about 100 feet of chicken wire is going up to create a goose-free zone around the gazebo. Our morning variety show "Bridge Street" often does live segments there, and the production folks really hate pulling cable through the poop. It doesn't do Julie's stylish pointy shoes any good, either. Hopefully her shoes are intended to be stylish, and her feet aren't really shaped like that...

Our present invasion of geese reminded me this morning of Archy and Mehitabel (don't ask why -- there's no logic behind it). Specifically, Archy's warning to Don Marquis about the impending rise of ants and demise of man: What the Ants Are Saying.

I'm winding down from mild grumpiness: went to use the Dremel hand grinder about an hour ago and found virtually every bit broken and several key pieces missing. This kind of thing is why I generally keep the tools I buy under lock and key, but we can't do that with everything. We have a couple of people with too much time on their hands: I find the darndest messes in the shop. One fellow who no longer works here used to amuse himself by slagging down CDs with the electric heat gun. Someone else likes to use soldering irons to melt holes in plastic. Whoever desecrated the Dremel better hope that I don't find them out. Goose poop has practical uses, after all.

---

A thought from this morning's ride in: what would smell bad to a skunk?

And so we begin

The station welcoming committee greeted me this morning: four adult geese and sixteen babies. At their rate of procreation and elimination, you won't be able to see the building in a few years. Already, crossing the parking lot is an exercise in careful footwork. The adults hissed and gave chase; the babies bumbled around eating gravel and mulch.

---

I'm starting the week a bit tired: the weekend was busy. A seminar at church Friday night and Saturday morning, the usual Sunday activities, plus a most unusual business meeting last night. Northside's attendance has roughly tripled in the last five years or so, and we have outgrown the addition that was finished only a couple of years ago. So last night we voted to approve another expansion that will give us more space for services and additional rooms for classes and children's ministry. It will also dramatically improve access and traffic flow, which is rather claustrophobic right how.

It was not so much the scale of the decision that impressed me; it was how the decision was made. I have been through countless meetings in other churches that get bogged down in minutiae to the point of evoking outright hostility; the first half hour would be consumed in a debate over what color to paint the front door. By the time the meeting finishes, everyone is exhausted and bolts for their car as soon as the motion to adjourn is seconded. In contrast, less than ten minutes elapsed between the motion and the final vote. It was so easy that after the motion was overwhelmingly carried, we all looked around at each other as if to say, "is that all?"

The process demonstrated something I increasingly see and value about Northside: they find trustworthy people who know their stuff and turn them loose. The building committee has phenomenal expertise in a wide range of architectural, construction, and engineering specialties, but keeps the focus that the ultimate goal isn't to build a building, but to build up people. The initial presentation was so clear and comprehensive that the few questions that came up were easily answered. It also demonstrated a generally shared set of values that allowed people to set aside personal preferences for the sake of the best overall outcome. The project should be completed by the end of this autumn; it will be an exciting summer.

---

Another circuit board designed, etched and drilled today. It's an amazing process, though it takes a bit of playing around to get right. In short, it involves laser printing the circuit traces on a special paper, fusing the paper to the copper surface of the board with a heat laminator, then soaking it in water for a minute. The coating on the paper dissolves away, leaving the toner on the copper. An additional sealer is then fused into the toner, and the result is a mask that resists the etching chemical. After about ten minutes in this nasty stuff, the unwanted copper is dissolved away, except for the areas with toner and sealant.

The instructions aren't always as plain or detailed as they should be, and at some point I will probably write them more clearly, once I get all of the kinks out. But now I can create a highly involved device in very little time, and it looks far superior to the breadboarding I used to do.

One tip I will pass along now: when you drill the holes for the components, make a point of missing your finger.

Watch where you step

The media's got it wrong: the big threat to society isn't bird flu... it's bird poo. At the station we have it in abundance.

Park in the southwest corner of the lot, and the blackbirds will nail your car. Not good if you have a light colored car when berries are ripe on the trees.

Walk through the garage and the resident sparrows use you for target practice. Several years ago one of them scored a direct hit on my boss. If human targets aren't available, they'll decorate the wall phone or the bench vise handle: anything people are apt to grab without looking first. I don't answer the phone in the garage anymore.

But these are relatively light afflictions compared to the Canada Geese that have taken up residence here over the past few years. Ten years ago, when there was just one pair, it was a cute novelty. Now we have marauding packs that will chase you around the dumpster. At the peak last year we had over 50, and it looks like this year will top that. The entire side lawn, between the building and the stream that separates our property from the interstate highway, is thickly covered with goose poop. Driveways and sidewalks receive their share of the wealth, but at a slightly lower concentration of poops per square meter.

Geese are strategists, planning their deposits for maximum effect. This morning a school group was enchanted when the flock ambled to the front door. The kids crowded up to their side of the door to watch the geese; the geese came up to examine the kids. Finally at some unseen signal the flock turned around, left their calling cards right in front of the door, and ambled back to the stream. I'm certain that when the kids get home and their parents ask them about the visit, they won't remember a thing about the newsroom or the studio or the control rooms -- but they will be able to describe goose poop and its origins with great enthusiasm and detail.

Cleaning it up is a real chore. Perhaps we could start a rumor that the stuff can be boiled down to make gasoline... if it were valuable, it would surely disappear overnight. The government would have to step in, issuing controls and launching congressional hearings into the poop gouging scandal.

Maybe I'd better just use the hose instead.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This, from my daughter's whiteboard this morning:

Today is May 4th.
• National Day of Prayer
• National Day of Reason
• Respect for Chickens Day

To which my wife added:
It then seems reasonable to pray for chickens today.

---

"With all my schooling, this really isn't what I expected to be doing." The words of one of our interns some time ago as she scrubbed dishes after a cooking segment. It's been facinating over the years to witness the disappointment as young (and some not-so-young) people discover how ordinary broadcast television really is. Sometimes you see it in the eyes of touring junior high girls when they find out that Oprah's dressing room isn't just down the hall. Sometimes you hear it in the voice of operators who have just found out they need to drive the live truck twenty miles for a ten second weather shot. The magic is gone.

It's been 24 years since I came to work here. Back then we were in a shopping center, our main entrance across the hall from Baskin-Robbins. One night I stepped down the mall to grab some supper; I got back to find a half dozen girls camped out by the door, waiting for one of the "personalities" -- probably Bud or Rod -- to come out. They let me by, staring intently as I balanced my pizza and soda while trying to get the door unlocked. Finally one of them sniffed and said to her friends, "oh... he isn't anybody."

Of course, I had known that all along. Like several of my co-workers, I grew up in a family in which one or both parents worked in broadcasting, so we went in with few illusions of glamour. We were drawn to the business because we like the work. It's an interesting, constantly changing profession that can keep you thinking and learning... if that's what you value. If your expectation is that landing a particular job will make you "somebody", you will probably be disappointed.

---

Lunch is finished: instant ramen noodles. Chicken flavor, of course.

Now hear this... or not

I get an awful lot of email at work. Real email, not offers for various forms of personal enhancement. Even in-house spam ("I'm raising money for the Central New York Vegan Society during their Weinerfest this weekend, and I need sponsors! Just a dollar for every hot dog I can eat will make an enormous difference!! Forward this to everyone you know!!!") gets a rapid and firm squelching from our IT department. My daughter says "commas are our friends," but in-house spammers love exclamation points.

Most of the messages come from two in-house mailing lists: one for television engineers, the other for radio engineers. Since we have several dozen TV stations and over 1,300 radio stations, it's unusual for five minutes to pass without hearing the Outlook chime. Usually it's someone looking for an obsolete part or asking an edgy question ("Are other stations having trouble with the Rush contact closures today? I've missed all my local breaks again"), which elicits half a dozen replies of varying usefulness within the next two minutes.

This morning's mailbag included a query from a radio engineer whose station does a weekly show from an oceanside restaurant's pier: how can I get rid of background noise and interference from the audience? Suggestions poured forth about equalizers, audio processors, different microphones, automatic mixers.

I thought, if you don't want to hear what's going on around you, why not just do the show in the studio?

It just doesn't pay to ask questions like that. Usually the answer involves consultants or salesmen and includes a statement like "we've got to maximize our leadership paradigm."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Yesterday turned out pretty much as expected. The fiber problem was found: a bad splice just down the street from the Binghamton Verizon office, and everything's back up and running. And we survived The Visit with no loss of life.

Washing down all those stones probably made the difference.

Timing is everything

Today's the big day: our corporate president for the television division is in town, a fact which escaped me until an email late yesterday announced a general staff meeting later this afternoon. It was obvious that something was up when we had a crew outside washing the crushed stone around the bushes by my window. And from the sudden flurry of redecoration in the lobby area: nicely framed promotional posters of our network programming, plus two new shelves (not quite level) for our latest awards. Welcome: we love us.

There's a strong parallel between corporate visits and ratings periods: each is preceded by a week or two of frenzied cleanup, we make an all out effort to impress, and afterwords things go pretty much back to normal. I always wonder what it would be like to constantly operate as if we were being observed. I also wonder how much of this our visitors (and viewers) perceive.

Of course, this visit has not gone unnoticed by Mr. Murphy. At about four this morning one of the fiberoptic lines between our Syracuse hub facility and the Binghamton station failed, taking out standard definition programming to our two Binghamton stations and one Rochester station, plus the computer networking to both sites. The high definition feeds are on a different fiber, so we are using those to keep everyone on the air. It took a bit of creative thinking and some minor repatching, but things are fairly stable while Dominion Telecom is looking for the problem. We're betting it's a bad patch in the downtown Binghamton Verizon office.

In the meantime there's plenty of moaning, and a couple of already stressed-out folks look like they expect our guest to stomp into the studio, the reincarnation of Caligula, glaring at us with his fist thrust forward, thumb down. Nos moritabamus te salutatem! Those of us about to die salute you! (Thank you, Mrs. Metosh.)

I have pointed out more than once today that equipment fails all the time, everywhere; what counts is how you respond to it. Everyone's on the air, nobody's losing money. And because Rochester and Binghamton are disconnected from the computer network, that's all the more internet bandwidth for the rest of us!

They didn't take much comfort in that.

Resistance is futile

"The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him." -- Russell Baker

Back to the phone couplers this morning, with a renewed sense of urgency: one of the old ones apparently died this morning. I say apparently because when I tried it, it worked repeatedly without fail -- but the live truck operator who brought the report insists that it wouldn't answer. This isn't a terribly unusual phenomenon, but the problem lies in discerning whether it's a case of intermittent equipment putting on a good face for the person trying to troubleshoot it -- playing alive, as it were -- or a case of someone who doesn't like to do live hits looking for a reason not to.

Anyway, I brought out the big guns to figure out why the new circuit doesn't quite capture the phone line: our 1968 vintage Tektronix oscilloscope, which took up most of the remaining space in my office. After about two minutes of probing around, it turned out that part of the logic was never quite getting up to the necessary voltage to trip the switch. Which is odd, since that part of the circuit is just two resistors. The simplest of parts, which hardly ever fail unless you set them on fire.

Or unless you can't see straight.

Resistors come in hundreds of different values, identified by several narrow colored bands on the side. Different colors denote different numerals: black is zero, brown is one, red is two, orange is three, and so on. So the 3,000 ohm resistor that's part of this simple circuit would have an orange band, a black band, and a red band (to indicate two following zeroes).

Except that this 3,000 ohm resistor actually measures 1,000 ohms. With good reason. What I thought was an orange band is really an unusually cheerful shade of brown.

So I'm not sure whether to be glad at finally solving the mystery, or to be annoyed at the latest proof of advancing age.

"Damn your eyes!"
"Too late..."
-- Young Frankenstein