Losing blood!

Last night reads something like a comedy. I'd planned to give blood before setting off to the studio to try to finish off the wiring before the weekend. As it turned out, the doning session was much busier than expected, creating long waits and rushed push through. My donation started running slow towards the end, which has happened before - at least I clot well - and then things went from bad to worse. The two people infront of me in the queue at the tea room both suffered a re-bleed, resulting in blood all over the floor... and it was all too much for me, and I passed out. Bugger.

The resulting recovery delayed my departure further, and I didn't get home until 20:30, some 45 minutes later than planned (I'd hoped to be at the studio for 20:00) and I still hadn't eaten the rest of my dinner. It was 21:15 by the time I got to the studio, and then I discovered that my warning about being short of solder had been over-looked, so I had a meer 8 inches of solder to make up half a dozen cables. Well that wasn't going to happen. I managed to make up three short patch cables, before I ran out of solder. Enough to get one of the channels partially running.

Yesterday also turned out to be rather eventful for the day crew, who had a degree of hassel with one of our main suppliers regarding a bank error, which was causing problems with a cheque. It nearly turned very nastey (quite needlessly), and the said supplier didn't even call back once the situation had been rectified. Nice. Maybe a change of supplier is in order? We've had nothing but trouble for the last few weeks on this front.

There's a beer and curry night planned for tonight. I intend to go, but I need to have another session at the wiring to get it finished before webcast on Monday (and no, we can't put it off another week). The whole studio re-wriring project is slowly coming back on track, having been about 3 months behind. However, after the RSL, I'm going to have to attack the rack again... this time with a bag of cable ties.

Losing Sanity

Like I've said before, if I'm not writing much, then I'm just busy. Actually, I've been more than busy...

Last Friday even was yet another late finish as I found myself helping to write another advert, and preparing the racks for the TX install on Saturday. I'd spent the day monitoring the station's internet connections, which had been rather unstable over the last few weeks.

The TX install wasn't a smooth one. We re-wired the main output lines to have XLRs on the end, so the output is now fully balanced, then putting the TX into a dummy load, we fed it a 1kHz test tone. The only problem was... the deviation was wondering all over the place. The output level was going up and down as it pleased. I suspected it might be a dodgy cable, but after testing the cable, it appeared ok. This theory (and proving that the mixer was ok) was backed up by the input into the compressor being constant. Maybe it was an effect of all the harmonic filtering and the circulator that have to be used on the transmitter? We wound up the power, and let it run for a while, and it seemed to stabilise, but maybe we'll never know what was wrong with it.

While I was there, I installed a new rack mounted tuner (which we picked up for a tenner) and replaced the amp for something smaller. The DA, PA, and compressor still hadn't turned up.

Andy and I did some shopping, and we bought, and bult, a set of selves to sit all the monitors, etc, on next to the rack. Went home fairly early for a change, and got round to fitting some new lights in the lounge.

I took Sunday off from the radio station, opting to go shopping with my parents, and have a drink or two. Andy and Duncan used the day to redecorate the kitchen area of the studio.

I spent Monday evening wiring up the off air return and second guest headphone lines from the new rack mounted tuner.

We decided to close the office on Tuesday, and had re-arranged all the presenter's bookings around it... except we forgot about Carl, who had booked a slot on Sunday. Do'nt know how we forogt his booking, but I had a phone call from him while I was on my way to the 2E0 course in Lincoln. Not an awful lot I could do about that. Spent some time after the 2E0 course chatting to Barry G4DBS over a coffee at the Pyewipe.

Yesterday morning, I phoned Carl to explain what has been going on at the station, and to offer an apology for screwing things up, and not being able to give a detailed account of why we shut the office at the time (it was Andy's mother's funeral, and none of us really fancied manning the office). By yesterday evening, after my usual session at Radio Witham, I visited the studio to find the DA, PA, and SCOM processor all waiting to be installed. I racked them up, and powered them up to smoke test them, but once again, I'm down to just 12 inches of solder, and it was 00:30, so I though better of doing any serious wiring or configuration.

I've just noticed that the high quality stream has regained some of its stability, and didn't even drop connection once during Tuesday. Maybe things are looking up?

Losing sleep

With the A1 being closed all day on Wednesday, and coupled with a numb mouth from my visit to the dentist, I decided against going to Grantham on Wednesday evening. So I sat at my computer and worked away at some more of the Boundary Sound website. There are still a few pages that exhibit some of the gross coding errors that I inhereted, and I'm going to have to look at them this weekend.

By yesterday evening I was mast annoyed about the DA situation. No, it still hasn't arrived, and a phone call to out supplier reveiled that he only got hold of the cheque on Saturday (we posted it the last Tuesday), and he won't dispatch the kit until it has cleared (next Monday), so we might get the kit on Tuesday. Fat lot of good that is... the transmitter is being installed TOMORROW! So how am I supposed to wire it all up? No, I'm not a very happy bunny at the moment. Really need to sort out a company credit card, cheques are as much as a pain as some suppliers.

I spent a couple of hours doing initial presenter training with Simon, who seems to have coped quite well with it, so I'llpush him on a few stages next time, although I need to cover regulation and branding.

Later, Andy, Duncan, and I, had a go at creating the final advert schedule based on what we've actually sold. It turned out to be quite a challenge, and I gave up at 01:10 (simply had to get some sleep). Actually, I believe it was finished by 02:00. So that's yet another task completed... only a million more to get through in the next 16 days...

Losing days

Erk, where has the last week gone? Ok, where did we get to? The problem is, when there's a lot to write about, I'm really busy, and don't have time to write about it. Let's go back to last Wednesday evening...

...I arrived at Radio Witham (with Shelagh with me for the ride) to find Paul in the library sorting records. Managed to exchange as much news and information as was possible, trying to sort out my weekday problem in February (that's going to be such hell), and then got on with a fairly regular broadcast. I then dashed back to Newark to look at the Boundary Sound notwerk. It turned out to be something really minor... the kind of authentication was incorrect on both Andy's and Duncan's laptops. Don't know how that happened.

Thursday was a blur of work. I can't even remember what happened in the evening. I seem to remember Duncan being hung-over. I think I managed to sort out httpd on the linux box at the radio station. It was one of those sort of days.

Friday went a bit odd when BT's internet service completely failed from lunch time. Spent the evening training Mark, who had lapsed since last week's session somewhat. I hope I've got him all sorted now, but I won't be around much this coming Friday to check it out.

I had a much needed rest on Saturday morning, before going for a swim. Mental note - don't swim on Saturday afternoons - the pool is full of children. Managed to do some shopping, getting myself a pair of shoes that fit, then buying a DVDRW for myself (much needed, and now I can put the old CDROM in battenberg). Bought a 120GB HDD for the aircheck machine at the radio station, and spent some time installing it, and setting it up. At least we won't have a storeage problem with the logs this time round.

On Sunday I had a serious attack on Boundary Sound's website. There were several things that were annoying me, such as all the presenter pages having individually coded picture bars, and all pages having their own footer, rather than share a common template.

I finally finished off most of the work by Monday evening, in between training Dean, and the usual raft of jobs that needed doing.

So yesterday, yet another busy day at work, another evening in Lincoln, meaning I missed the Priory FM AGM (although I'm sure I'll get all the gossip later). I still haven't sorted out a programme plan for the evening show on Boundary, and I'm expecting the long expected DA to turn up today. I need to get the wired in by close of play on Friday, as the transmitter is being installed on Saturday. Not long to go now...

Broken again

Woke up this morning to find my cable internet not working. Cheers NTL. This is on top of an apparently non-working wireless network at the radio station. Both Andy and Duncan claim they can't get their laptops to register onto the network. I suppose, if I take my laptop with me to Grantham tonight, I might be able to drop by to have a look at it. I wanted to probe the wireless access point last night, but all the computers were down in preparation for the installation of a propper electricity meter... we hope. I have no idea why it isn't working though. I know I changed some DHCP settings, but it's been working since then. However, everything was rebooted on Sunday for some reason. Grrr >:(

Actually, looking at the stream connection logs, something odd is going on. I suspect someone has changed the stream content without advising me, because it has been dropping every 2 hours 30 seconds, which is mighty suspicious. Either that or something isn't right with the internet connectivity at the studio.

I'm still thinking of installing Gentoo on battenberg. It's been in a state of deadness for a couple of months now, and the cd-rom drive is truely shagged. I'm considering buying a DVD-RW of some kind for eccles, and putting the cd-rom drive from eccles into battenberg.

Last night, while a little windy, was uneventful. Returned the PSU to the radio club. Covered transmitters and receivers. But I think I'm going to miss the AGM on Thursday, as I've invited Chris Hubbard up for a curry.

Had another early start this morning. Finally managed to drag myself to the pool to swim 32 lengths in record time. I was slightly pushing myself, racing a woman in the lane next to me. I find a bit of competition always helps.

Access

...and for once I'm not talking about a Microsoft database product. No, I'm talking about the strip of grass and footpath that runs between my house and the A1. Some complete tosser has taken to driving his vehicle up the kerb on my street, down the footpath, and onto the street behind as a short cut to get to the main road, rather than drive through thre village like everyone else. If I catch whoever it is, I'll have a few strong words to say. I don't really want to have to ask the parish council to errect a bollard in the middle of this strip of grass.

Still busy at work - not a lot else you can say about that really.

Successfully purchased a power supply for my radio, so I'll be taking the club's PSU back to Lincoln tonight. That is, if the weather doesn't prevent me going - the forecast is a bit grim.

Burning the candle at both ends

I didn't have time to write anything on Friday. It's been heads down for the last week, and it's not really letting up, although I quite enjoy the challenges.

Thursday evening passed off with little incident, just a quick studio meeting.

Friday was just a blur of work. I forgot there was no choir practise due to the panto, so I spent the evening at the studio listening to Mark make a mess of a few weather forecasts while I fought with the network. I think I've solved the name service problem. I don't know what actually fixed it, because I sorted out several problems at once - ensuring I only had one DHCP server, not two, and then changing a load of DNS server settings, which don't seem to be propegating from the DCHP server as they should (I'm going to have to look at that, I suspect it's a failure with the ISP). I also added gateway to the hosts file on every machine (I can't add the others because the DHCP assigns different addresses all the time). I think that's just about sorted it.

Between Andy and I, we finished sorting the digital media library on Saturday, and I left the computer to process the files overnight, so that by Sunday afternoon, I'd got it all imported into the playout system, along with the voice tracking data and jingles. All ready to go on air. Just need to sort out the playlist templates now.

Andy and I spent last night fixing some other things that we've been putting off, such as fastening the semi-circular guest table to the back of the mixer to make it a bit more stable. We also trimmed and re-attached the studio doors. I've placed the mIRC machine next to the rack again, and started to wire it up, although I'm missing a couple of PS2 extension cables and a video extansion cable. Once I have them in place, I'll get that machine set up (it need reconfiguring). I've moved the PDS machine next to the rack, and off the producer's desk, then checked ircd was working ok, and edited the runlevels to ensure httpd was running. Sadly, I couldn't find where apache is keeping it's root files, so I couldn't put up a temporary intranet site, although Andy assures me he's written one to go on there, so as soon as I work out where everything is, I'll get that up and running so we can test it over the next week.

I think we've decided that we need someone to write all our weather forecasts in a standard format. Andy and I debated the usefulness of putting wind information in the forecast. Personally, I see no use for it, but Andy wants it as he uses it to decide whether or not he uses his bike.

I've re-plotted our propegation chart, which is a slight improvement on RSL 1, now that we've got rid of the steel pole, and replaced it with a lighter aluminium model, so we can use its full height (I think we're now much closer to the maximum height of 20m). Given that we've only been awarded 15W erp again, we need every bit of height going. I so desparately want to put the TX somewhere much better... we just can't get permission to do so. I've got a few ideas for a solution though. Need to talk to some people urgently to see if we can do it for RSL 3 though.

Finally, on the radio front, I received an email from Baz, who, amother other things, was selling a 30A PSU. I've been borrowing a PSU from the Waddington Club for nearly a year now, so it's about time I bought my own. Should be a good investment.

Where did all this work come from?

Blimey. Yesterday was rather busy at work. I've got a huge pile of things to be doing, and I don't think this is going to let up until at least the end of the month.

Elsewhere, it seems that Grantham Hospital are still slowly erroding staff facilities. After I arrived at Radio Witham last night, I decided to take a wonder upstairs to the canteen landing, where the smoke room and staff toilets are, and where there used to be vending machines (although these seem to have been redistributed all over the hospital over the last couple of years). A few years ago the opening hours of the canteen were cut rather dramatically, so that they now don't serve dinner - only lunch. And it seems there is no breakfast service any more. Well, to get back to the point, I found the landing locked! It will now be locked from 15:30 on weekdays, and 14:30 at weekends. Even if I was at the radio station during the canteen opening hours, I don't think I even get a staff discount any more. I used to quite enjoy going for a meal with fellow presenters, and enjoying the social side of working on a radio station. I fear it has now all been lost.

Actually, as it happens, I can't make any weekday evenings in February. Coupled with my inability to go to conference this spring, and now the reduction in staff facilities, I ask myself if there's any point? After nearly 11 years working for the station, I'm seriously considering walking away.

A new year

Ok, as you've probably guessed from the long gaps, I've either been really busy, or not infront of a computer, so I'll try to run down what I've been up to...

I'd taken the 23rd and 24th of Decemeber off to go to Cumbria for Christmas. However, I took the opportunity on the Thursday morning to swim 32 lengths, and finish off my Christmas shopping, which was going horribly wrong, I also bought some folding crates to allow us to carry all sorts of stuff up to Cumbria that afternoon. The drive up was fairly exciting, with some fairly strong winds, but no snow, so the A66 was an easy run.

Found myself doing lots of ringing over the next few days... for Christingle, midnight mass, Christmas day, Sunday, and then Monday practise. Sunday was punctuated with the usual tractor trundle, which for once was held in fantastic weather. Monday was a bit of a wasted day - I'd hoped to take a few more pictures of the country side, but the light faded early and the weather closed in.

By Tuesday morning, I was feeling quite off colour - a theme for the next week I'm afraid. I think I picked up a minor virus, which gave me sporadic headaches, and light headedness on and off. However, I recovered enough for a brunch with Lucy on Tuesday, before going to Carlisle to watch the football (well worth buying a pie and a coffee to help keep warm during that), and later having a curry with Helen and Clive (and boy, was that curry hotter than I'd expected).

Travelled home on the Wednesday - a very uneventful journey. Tackled the pool on Thurday morning, before getting plastered at Baz's mid-xmas party (and still managed to do rather well at the music quiz). Duncan's mother invited Shelagh and I to go to the new year's bash at Gusto's, so we went to that, and had an enjoyable time partying until 1am.

I spent most of the bank holiday weekend at the radio station, trying to undelete the log files that aircheck had helpfully deleted as they were over 64 days old. Sunday being punctuated by the usual bouts of organ playing, followed by some serious cleaning at the studio again (the bathroom was becoming quite unbearable).

On Monday morning, the entire Boundary Sound management team went for a shopping expedition to Grantham, and managed to spend quite a lot of money. I managed to get a new suit out of it though. At last! I suit that fits! In the afternoon, I spent a couple of hours with my parents, before the usual Monday evening rush of activities - bell ringing from 18:30 to 19:50, radio net at 20:00 until 20:30 (only three of us on this week), then off to the studio for a spot of planning, etc. Also managed to un-double-book myself regarding the HBA conference and the Hereford bell ringing course, which somehow have got themselves onto the same weekend at the start of April.

So... yesterday. Started work again, after a quick 32 lengths in the pool. And an evening spent at the radio station (again) training and briefing day time presenters, which I've got to repeat on Thursday... something to look forward to.

Ok, not much detail, but as I said, I've been keeping myself busy. Looks like this year is probably going to be busier than the last. Maybe that isn't a good thing?