Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

The sight of snow blowing practically sideways today was an interesting counterpoint to the impressive (and just a little bit scary) lightning show not even 24 hours earlier. Nothing’s really making travel impossible here, it’s just nice to look at. Anyway, it reminded me of the early days of the Weather Channel, when “blowing snow” as a weather condition was displayed by the automated local forecast gadget as: More »

Well, I got a sharp reminder Friday evening from Mother Nature about what part of the country I live in. I was mentioning not too long ago about having only 40 days to complete PDF Level 2, and that’s accurate…but I may have to revise the number downward. We’re headed into March, the beginning of Some Kind Of Severe Weather Every Other Day season. “In like a lion” is an apt description of March in Arkansas.

Now, I have my Avid and all of its related equipment on a pair of pretty stout surge protectors, but I’ll put it this way: while this Avid came to me insanely cheaply, call it fate, call it the hand of God or whatever you like, I treat it as though the entire lot of equipment would cost me several thousand to replace. Because…well…it would. This is one gift that I do not play the odds with. In the event of bad weather moving in, the Avid gets shut down; if the aforementioned bad weather is a lightning-maker, it gets unplugged, period. My living rests with this machine right now, so I don’t screw around to put it lightly.

I got caught with my pants down on Friday evening though; I wasn’t watching the radar or paying any attention to the sky getting darker, mainly because I was a bit stressed out after an epic bout of baby barfage. I cleaned up the boy and let him take a nap while I cleaned up the mess, and then sat down at the Avid to try to get some work done, and… ZAP. The power went out.

This Avid has to be powered up and down in a very particular sequence; either procedure takes about 3-4 minutes. The outboard SCSI drives’ self-check sequence accounts for the lengthy power-up; the computer’s closedown sequence is why it seems to take forever to power down. Powering down the Avid stack is best done some time before the bad weather arrives because it just can’t be done quickly. And it’s just not supposed to be done by just shutting everything off simultaneously – that’s how you lose a lot of work.

Fortunately, everything checked out – though the SCSI drives, having not had a chance to park their heads, took twice as long to self-check (which had me holding my breath a bit) – but as soon as that was done everything was shut down once more. The lightning seemed like it was right on top of the house, so I may have lucked out.

Just a little reminder from Mother Nature to not get too cozy…and that my “40 days” may end up being something on the order of 30-35 days due to storm-induced downtime. That’s just great. I know we live in a world where folks have vital systems on a UPS – but that’s just something I don’t have handy at the moment. So the equipment to which I owe nearly every cent that I bring in gets treated with kid gloves. Kinda like the kid does, come to think of it.

Here’s to a less stormy, more productive and hopefully less barfy weekend.

…it’s the first 50 complete Classic Gaming Expo 2007 DVD sets, ready to go!

If you’re not already lined up for one of these, you better go here and order one.

OK, a funny story from my early days in TV, before I get Babylon 5 off my brain again.

My first TV job was technically “board operator” at the local Fox station (which isn’t even the local Fox station anymore). When I started, everything was switched live, and commercial breaks were a nerve-wracking rapid-fire Chinese fire drill of tape swapping. Somewhere in there, two things happened to bring a little bit of sanity to the proceedings: it was decided that the local breaks for network programming should be done from pre-built reels, and then at a later date, the station purchased a computer-based system for running spots, and an automation system to go with it. The two were even connected – you’d program the automation to take the local breaks and it would autofire that computer. Wow! I’m sure the resolution and storage capacity of that setup would be laughable now, but back then it was right out of the future.

Local programming, however, was still “built” – i.e. the appropriate commercials were literally insert-edited (or at least they were supposed to be) onto the tapes in question. Let’s say you had an episode of Love Connection; in the gaps left for local breaks, you’d insert-edit the local commercials on the log, one at a time; this was called “building” the show, and it was done at a little edit bay in the back of the control room. You were supposed to be building shows in between commercial breaks.

Now this, of course, was the first step down the road to disaster. The computer system had a “playlist” loaded into it for each broadcast day. If you were “building” shows during prime time, which often happened if the previous shift didn’t get it in gear, you had to walk a tightrope – moving the computer system forward so it could insert commercials into the show you were building, but you had to be done with that procedure, and have the playlist moved back to the right place, so the automation system could catch the next break in real time. If you didn’t stay sharp, the automation system would fire the wrong break from the wrong show (and that break probably wouldn’t time out the same as the break it was supposed to be running – i.e. coming up 30 seconds short), or…it could be even worse. Since the computer spot system ran through that edit bay, technically, what the automation system switched to in order to play spots wasn’t another A/V output from that computer…it would switch to the output of that edit bay. If you were checking or building a show when the automation fired a break, nobody would see commercials: they’d see you screwing around with the tape.

Are you with me? Because here’s where it goes horrendously wrong. Imagine you’ve got some nutty board operator in his early 20s who’s gotten far enough ahead on building his shows that he’s going to kick back during prime time and do a little bit of unauthorized editing – to the tune of making a dub of the latest fresh-off-the-satellite episode of Babylon 5 without the commercials in it, to be dubbed to VHS for his own private collection. Who this person could be, I’ve no idea. He might even be a theoretical person who doesn’t actually exist. (If this entirely hypothetical individual had known that such things as “DVD box sets” of entire seasons of TV shows were only a few years away, maybe he wouldn’t have bothered.)

So here’s the disaster: at the appointed moment in prime time one Saturday night, the automation system will send its signal to the computer to play a commercial break, and simultaneously switch to the output of that edit bay. But that edit bay will be otherwise “occupied” doing something that, let’s face it, it isn’t really supposed to be doing. A tape will be running, so the commercials won’t be seen – at least not for a moment until the horrible truth sinks in for our hypothetical board op.

(Let me just take a moment to point out that, really, this Rube Goldberg setup where the entire edit bay had to idle to run commercials was one of the lousiest jobs of wiring I’ve ever seen. My room at home is set up better than that. This was just a bit…well…lazy.)

Here’s how the train wreck all comes home. The show in prime time is Fox’s own Old Faithful of reality shows, Cops. The show segment is coming to an end with the gruff announcer talking about what’ll be happening in the next segment. Then the automation, which has been correctly programmed, triggers its break at precisely the right time, right after the announcer says “When COPS returns!”…

…and then the automated switcher jumps to the edit bay, and instead of commercials, gets the following Delenn quote from In The Shadow Of Z’ha’dum: “BILLIONS WILL DIE!”

Whoever this hypothetical board op was, I don’t think he ever managed to hit a stop button so fast in his life. Still, the local sponsors had to be impressed – that was quite a tease for a lousy episode of Cops!

At some point, I think it was decided that the hypothetical board op was safer working at an edit bay in the back of the building, putting together promos and stuff. Quite right, too. Probably never worked in TV again after that.

Dad, I think I found something!

It’s my kitty!

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For some reason – maybe a bit of boredom, admittedly – I watched Babylon 5: The Lost Tales for what has to be…well…frankly…the second time. For some reason I’ve just had B5 on the brain lately, and for some reason it’s been bugging me that I’ve seen, to pull an example out of nowhere, The Fall Of Night probably 20-30 times. I watched The Lost Tales once, on the day I bought it, and I was so put off by what I saw that I never went back for seconds until now. More »

You’ve been wondering what the cover artwork for Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2 will be like? So have I! Until my graphic design muse landed on my head on Saturday evening, that is. I think it’ll look like this:

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Here’s someone who’s ready to go to day care!

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