Toiling In The Pixel Mines – Page 2 – Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

LASTDAY

By Earl
October 7, 2011
0 comments

Holy crap. I want to work this morning and my palm crystal had turned red! LASTDAY! Time to report to carousel.

One of the last things I worked on was checking and prepping this morning’s Live With Regis & Kelly, the source of more than one closed captioning snafu. This one was funny: when you slow it down and pause it for whatever reason (getting up to answer the phone, answer a question, have a conversation with someone, save the universe, etc.), the captioning sticks on whatever characters last came through, and it repeats itself onscreen. It doesn’t do this on air, just on the edit station.

I just thought it was weirdly appropriate.

It’s like the equipment knows, man.

Last day at the station was more or less quiet. I’m so happy that I don’t have to drive to Rogers every night and back from Rogers every day. There aren’t words to describe how much of a drag that was, and how tired I was as the end of either leg of the trip.

Best of luck to my former co-workers. Enjoy your nice new batcave.… Read more

Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Going back to the beginning?

By Earl
September 4, 2011
0 comments

Family members drew my attention to a news item in today’s local paper that is funny-in-a-sad-sort-of-way, and strangely intriguing at the same time. Here’s an excerpt.

TV station KFSM of Fort Smith is seeking a federal waiver of duopoly rules so that it can buy a second TV station in its market area, an official with the Fort Smith station confirmed Friday. Van Comer, president and general manager of KFSM, said his station and KPBI of Eureka Springs have been negotiating the sale for about a year and have signed an asset purchase agreement for $784,000.

Let’s go over the reactions to this that I had almost immediately upon hearing it, and why I had these reactions. … Read more

Funny Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

TURN IT UP TO 11!

By Earl
July 14, 2011
0 comments

Part of my job at work is to make sure that there’s closed captioning on all of our programming. Airing something without captioning can net a heavy fine, and would probably get me fired if I wasn’t already staring down the barrel of being laid off in a couple of months when the operations center moves up north.

But sometimes, it would help, it really would… if the people who type in the captioning, even in an unpredictable live TV environment… would pay attention to what the hell they’re typing. … Read more

Gadgetology Toiling In The Pixel Mines

As the gods of video are my witness…

By Earl
June 19, 2011
0 comments

…the blog post to which I’m about to link may be one of the most useful things in the history of home-server-based video.

AVI Chunk Viewer: how to remove it

AVI Chunk Viewer, or as I’ve come to call it, AVI Chunk Blower is something that gets installed with a lot of video codec packs. What it does is pop up anytime it finds an AVI file that it thinks doesn’t conform to AVI standards, as laid out by its author. It stops you from doing anything else with the file it’s flagged until you close AVI Chunk Blower again. It doesn’t take different codecs into account (i.e. an AVI generated with an AVID codec). It’s the most nitpicky, annoying thing I’ve ever seen on a computer that happened not to be a virus.

And the above blog link shows you how to rid yourself of it by nondestructively renaming a single file.… Read more

Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

How do I ask for this at the auto detailing place?

By Earl
May 13, 2011
0 comments

Re-asses cars: because your car’s first ass is just never enough. 😆… Read more

Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Death from above

By Earl
March 30, 2011
1 comment

When you work with teevee weather people, you’re used to thunderstorm warnings and tornado warnings and flash flood warnings… but this morning, live on the air, our weatherman had a new one to deal with:

…a virus warning!

As always when these things happen unannounced, there’s a lot of talk about improving the warning system… like, oh, say, NOT HAVING IT POP UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN ON THE AIR.

I wonder how many folks are still trying to debug their HDTVs. 😆

Toiling In The Pixel Mines

I am the eye in the sky

By Earl
March 27, 2011
0 comments

One of the things I do occasionally at work is point the tower camera. Basically, as you can guess from the name, it’s a camera, right? On a tower. Hence, tower camera. I got a shot with it last week that I think I was the only person who liked it. … Read more

Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Yay TV

By Earl
March 10, 2011
0 comments

Teevee news: getting to the heart of what’s really troubling the average American these days.

Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Why I hardly ever watch TV at home

By Earl
January 14, 2011
0 comments

This is why I really don’t watch TV at home:

I gave at the office. (For real.)… Read more

Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

It’s a NEW CAR! Wait… WHAT??!?

By Earl
January 12, 2011
3 comments

One of the things I do at work is to “prep” and check shows that will air later that night, the next day, etc. etc.; I also have other duties that occasionally mean I have to stop that task in its tracks and come back to it minutes later (or longer). If something urgent happens, I don’t even look at where I stop – I’ll just have to figure it out later. And when I come back to it later, it’s still sitting in the middle of the show I was working on, and I see something like this.