Bang!

That's the sound of the starting gun going off for the two CW stations: they are scheduled to go on the air September 18th, and we received the approval to start buying the equipment today. Yup... that's two new stations, one month.

We did jump the gun a bit, buying the satellite dish before the approval was in hand. A risky play, but it paid off. The dish is in place and aimed at the right satellite, so that's a week's worth of work behind us. The referee didn't catch us, so we got by with the false start.

Of course, no project would be complete without political dimensions. One of the stations is trying to use this as a springboard to break away from the technical hub here in Syracuse, and that just isn't going to happen right now. And we're out of space in the control room (no surprise there — we're already running six high definition and seven standard definition stations out of a facility built when "standard definition" was something you found in Webster's.

So we need to take back part of the room that we let the production department use for an edit area about twelve years ago; it originally housed our film islands, and it made sense when film disappeared to make use of the space. But now the edit room goes mainly unused, except for someone dubbing a tape once every few days: the production folks have three new Avid computer-based editing suites over by their offices, each of which is far more powerful than the old edit room ever dreamed of being. So it shouldn't be a big deal to take out the unused gear and get our technical space back, right?

The insane laughter will stop in a minute.

Nobody likes to give up turf, even when it's not their turf to begin with. There was a lot of resistance to clearing this area, but we finally prevailed — but under the condition that we move the equipment to the old master control booth. But they aren't very happy about it.

That bang... that was a starter's gun, wasn't it? Those are blanks... aren't they?

Better run.