I went to a two-hour presentation Saturday regarding Raleigh’s community television studio, also known as Raleigh Television Network. Cable administrator Michael Williams was introduced, as well as Carlos Bastilla, the studio engineer. The meeting was very informative and exciting.

Raleigh’s $1.8 million studio is by far the most advanced community television studio out there. As Williams put it, “we’re not just on the cutting edge here, we’re on the bleeding edge” (no pun intended in reference to my previous finger-cutting post). Raleigh is so out front, its driving the software developemt at Crispin, the software devlopers of the ingress/egress suite.

Steps were outlined for how a citizen can put programs on the air. Course dates have yet to be announced, but some will be starting next month. I could conceivably put content on the air as early as today if I wanted, though it would have to be content I either edited myself or got somewhere else. No one gets to play with the new equipment until they get trained: no exceptions.

One of the most exciting things I heard is the addition of a mobile studio, with a full suite of studio equipment in the back. It is for use of staff only at this point, but it may be possible in the future to farm it out to community producers (with staff accompanying).

I look forward to having some fun with this high-tech digital studio.

I spent the morning yesterdy working in the ttic, instlling n ttic fn to help keep the ttic cool. I’d done n wesome job, with ll the cbles netly stpled nd everything.

But I couldn’t leve well enough lone. I hd to go bck nd djust the thermostt.

I wnted to test the irflow to see how it ws working. I mde the mistke of using my hnd for this. Unfortuntely, between blncing on the rfters, the drkness, nd my ineptitude, my hnd got too close to the blde.

Thwck! I blinked s blood splttered cross my chest. Uh, Houston, we hve problem.

Fortuntely, I still hd a left pinky finger. I spent the next three hours t the “urgent cre” office (motto: urgency? Who, us?) getting n x-ry nd four stitches. Luckily for me it wsn’t nerly s bd s it could’ve been.

My finger is ll bndged up now, mking it tough to type certin letters on the keybord. I hope to be typing gin very soon, s well s plying guitr, s mking chords with dmged pinky finger isn’t esy. I could ply men slide guitr now, though!

The morl to this story is: don’t test irflow of metl fns using your hnd. Its pinful nd cn led to ll sorts of problems. Thts tip from me to you.

Is this album really ten years old?
—
Heaven Beside You
Alice In Chains

Be what you wanna be
See what you came to see
Been what you wanna be
I don’t like what I see
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Found out today that one of my favorite online radio stations has made the jump to Sirius satellite radio. Granted, its not your typical online radio station, but Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville. Sirius added Radio Margaritaville to its lineup last month.

Jimmy’s like the Oprah of radio: he’s got a media empire (albeit smaller than O’s. Or Martha Stewart, who is also making the move). Jimmy’s got the clout to pitch his radio pet project to Sirius and have them listen.

You can find him on Channel 98. He’s also on the Dish network’s music channels, too. And of course, you can still listen for free on the Internet.

I’d love to get a channel on Sirius. Can a man dream?

Last night was a veritable Murphy’s Law of sleep: everything that could wake us up, did wake us up. First, I stayed up late working through the mound of paperwork that had collected on my desk. Having tamed it, I went to bed. But sleep didn’t come right away. I was wide awake, having eaten a big piece of chocolate earlier in the day.

I closed my eyes and searched for sleep. A few minutes later, Travis woke up sobbing. He wasn’t falling back asleep, so Kelly went in with him.

A minute after that, we heard a horn outside. A train was a mile down the track, alternately inching up the track and idling. It sounded like it was looking at (or for) something. I tuned it out and tried to settle down again.

A car full of teenage girls drove by the front of the house, singing something at the top of their lungs. Great.

As their noise fades away, the train throttles up and finally glides past our house. It breaks tradition of other night trains by leaning heavily on its horn as it approaches Durant. In fact, it blows its horn near-continuously for almost a minute. Dammit!

Kelly leaves Travis, having been unsuccessful in settling him. He wails as we look at each other, deciding what to do. The train, having successfully woken up everyone on our side of Durant, decides to back up and wake up everyone on the other side. It chugs back down the track to its original spot.

So, Kelly and I are wide awake. Travis is wailing, and a train is taunting us just outside. Niiiiiice.

I take a turn comforting Travis. While I missed seeing him before his bedtime, 12:30 in the morning was not a good time for a visit. He didn’t seem to mind, though. Every time I tried to lean him back into my arms to rock him to sleep, he would use his steel-like abdominal muscles to pop back up and stare wide-eyed around the room.

After ten minutes of fruitless backscratching, pacing around, and rocking, I finally put Travis down in his bed and handed him a stuffed animal as I stepped out of the room. When he stopped wailing five minutes later, Kelly and I thought we were home free.

Just as we were beginning to breathe again, along comes Thomas the Tank Engine, making a third low-speed pass up the track. WTF? I suppose after midnight was a good time to break in a new engineer or something. At least this time, they barely touched the horn.

Having heard this all before, I waited and bit and – sure enough – the train came sneaking back down the track, this time with no horn at all. Practicing his stealth moves, perhaps?

The funny thing is that earlier in the day, I had really wanted to see a train pass by. On the way to the TriLUG meeting, I saw crossing gates down as I drove down Atlantic Avenue. I stopped at the old Seaboard train station downtown and waited, hoping the train would pass mere feet from me as I stood at the old passenger platform (trains move very slowly there, so its not as dangerous as it may sound). After ten minutes, I realized the train I thought I was tracking had been heading north. D’oh.

I’ve got a stack of discount coupons for Carowinds, the Paramount amusement park outside of Charlotte. The coupons are good for $18 off each of up to six full-price tickets. This brings admission to $26.99 apiece.

Carowinds was my first job. I worked the Foto-zine booth, putting people’s pictures on magazine covers. For my whopping pay of $3.35 an hour, I had the privilege of filling out two income tax returns. The park borders North and South Carolina, so both had to be filed. Yay.

When I got tired of being cooped up in the darkroom (and wearing damn suspenders all day), I moved up to a cushy job as a recording engineer with Sing-A-Song Recording Studios, which had a booth in one of the arcades. My bosses, Derek and Kurt Slep, went on to form Sound Choice, a leading karaoke dealer in Charlotte. Mmmm, karaoke!

Anyhow, Carowinds is always a good time. Send me an email or comment of you’d like a coupon to go. They’re good until July 24th, so hurry!

Vice Admiral James Stockdale, a former Vietnam POW and 1992 Reform Party vice presidential candidate, died last week at the age of 81. During Adm. Stockdale’s captivity, he slashed his own wrists to protest prisoner abuse, which led to immediate improvement in the treatment of him and his fellow prisoners. When he learned he would be used in a propaganda film, Stockdale smashed his own face to prevent it.

The man was uncharacteristicly brave. If anyone deserves the Medal of Honor, he did. I can’t imagine being able to do what he did.

Later in life, Ross Perot picked him to be his vice presidential candidate. Adm. Stockdale described it as “taking a football player, telling him he’s now a boxer, and then putting him in the ring with Joe Lewis.” Its a shame most people know of him only through this campaign disaster.

Read about Adm. Stockdale’s amazing life in his obituaries in the Los Angeles Times and the Olympian

Watch Scott McClellan squirm as reporters rightfully call him on his abrubt turn-around on proclaiming the innocence of Karl Rove.

If Rove outed an intelligence agent, he should go to jail. End of story. Let’s see if Bush will stand by his earlier statement and fire Rove.

On Friday, I discovered a way to unlock Packet8‘s DTA-310 terminal adapters. Strom Carlson did some sleuthing and discovered the device Packet8 uses is the same as Sip-In-One’s. He flashed the DTA-310 wit a Sip-In-One firmware image and it worked. Thus, if you cancelled your Packet8 service and have no use for your TA, you can now flash it and use it with Asterisk.

I’ve added a link to Strom’s page on my Asterisk webpage.
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