Ouch!
At Target today:
Four Gilette Mach-3 razor blades: $8.00; Coke Zero (12-pack cans): 4 for $11.00.
Filed under: Cost of Living on July 27th, 2007 | No Comments »
Back in Business
After a week and a half of upgrades, master control is finally operational again. Manis and Tim really outdid themselves with the installation of the new digital board. Of course, a new board required upgrades in other areas, so we also have three sweet new computer monitors mounted on a rack above the console. Plus, Tim came up with the perfect ebony shelves to support new powered loudspeakers. Their internal amplifiers generate a bit of hiss which I don’t like, but they look nice. Most apparent is the new floor Tim put down. It’s shiny.
The week we spent in CR-7 was lame, so I was excited when I arrived on Thursday and heard that we’d be switching back to MCR after the noon news. Sure enough, halfway through Fresh Air I went into MCR and Manis had me press the two buttons that switched our signal from being routed through CR-7 back to MCR. Then we spent the next few hours diagnosing a series of odd problems.
The first and most troubling was the talkback system going out over the air. We were testing the talkback system–the intercom between the dialog studios and master control–and I was holding down the talkback button on the console and saying “test” to see if Ben could hear me in the other room. He could, but then Hank Connor called and said he heard it over the air. Puzzled, Manis and Tim looked around until they figured out that the program signal was being fed from a headphone jack which they had been using to test the signal before we switched back to MCR. So, that potential trainwreck averted, the 4:30 news went off without a hitch. The last remaining problem will be getting the board clock to sync with Simian, which is synced to the atomic clock and the network. The board clock gained five seconds in about four hours. That’s bad, but it’s fixable, says Manis.
We’re lucky at work to be able to afford such nice equipment. The board–an incredibly expensive item–was paid for with a grant. But the state pays for everything else, and that beats having to beg for all of it. I really love my job.
Filed under: Technology, Work on July 27th, 2007 | No Comments »