No politics today - house plants and doctors

[malada]

The hostas I planted last year are mostly coming up and doing well. I'll be planting a few more this year.

My mother-in-law moved into a new housing complex and she needs some outdoor decoration and plants. I think I'll plant some hostas for her - they need zero attention. However, there are deer in the area and they likc hostas so I may need to do more research.

At work they're going to redo my office! It's been long overdue with the previous occupant having two walls painted dark maroon. Also, I'll be getting some real off-air monitors instead of the 3 dollar TV I brought in. It's given me incentive to do a good cleaning which the place sorely needs.

In medical news, my insurance company has rejected the latest medication my dermatologist has offered me. I think this is the second or third script they've given the thumbs down on. Having psoriasis sucks.

Comments

[malada]

Since we went digital we have the ability to broadcast over the air 4 digital streams: 3 standard definition and one high definition. The compression is pretty good - the HD suffers a little but most eyes won't see it.

So I need either 4 TVs - one for each stream, or one big display that shows all four "channels" via a split screen. One of the engineers (who's a Trekkie) was talking about a nifty but complex system and mentioned the Scotty quote from "Search for Spock" that roughly goes "The more complex the plumbing the easier it is to gum up." She agreed and they scaled back the monitoring system.

[acelightning73]

At one point, I had a t-shirt that said, "If life is a Star Trek movie, I must be Scotty. There's always some kind of machinery that needs me to fix it." But then I think about Miles O'Brien complaining about the Cardassian technology that keeps DS9 running (barely).

I have seen pictures of displays with four screens, used for video/movie editing. They're just next to one another horizontally, but you've got to push a lot of buttons to view the one you need to work on. (This was when Dell was trying to sell me a computer for web design. My long-time client, a banjo player in an Irish band, has always liked the way I edit audio, and he wanted me to be able to do the same tricks with video. He offered to buy me a computer that would handle that kind of work (and I'd have to learn a lot of stuff.) But when he phoned me from Ireland in the middle of the night, drunk as a skunk in a trunk, and yelled at me for not having bought a new computer right away (while I was trying to determine which model would be best for my purposes), I refused to have anything more to do with him. I had a cardiologist who yelled at me, I don't need a drunken Irishman yelling at me in the middle of the night.

So I didn't get a Dell with all the bells and whistles a couple of years ago, and I'm sorry to have lost a long-time friend. But my mental and physical health aren't able to handle being treated like that. When Simone Biles had to drop of out olympic events a few years back because her mental health was making her get "the twisties", a gymnast's term for losing one's sense of position, which could lead to career-ending injuries. I had to stop dealing with the banjo player in order to hold onto my mental health. So a four-screen monitor may not be what you need.

How about the kind of system they use for multi=camera security monitoring? You have a wall full of video screens in front of you, each labeled with the designation of its feed. You can switch the video to a larger screen if you need to see in more detail.

[malada]

That's what they're planning. They already have a similar system in TV Master Control and want to put a multi-screen display in my office.

Fun fact: we finally got rid of our one inch video machines (AMPEX VPR-6) last year. Two out of three still powered up and one could still play a tape... for about 5 minutes. I was not sad to see them go.

[acelightning73]

When I worked at United Nations Radio, some of the old-timers said the studio equipment had been there since the building was built. Our audio tape recorders (washing-machine-sized beasts that could take 12" tape reels) had TUBE amplifiers. I had started to learn electronics early enough ( that I understood how tube circuits worked. I sometimes had to translate a circuit diagram from transistors to tubes to find out what it was for.

There was a guy in my neighborhood who had a ham rig, and he'd step all over my trying to listen to Jean Shepherd and Long John Nebel when i was supposed to be asleep. I wanted to become a ham, but my family couldn't afford the rig. So when i grew up I got a First Class Radiotelephone Operator's License.

[malada]

I did get my Ham license in high school and managed to scrape up enough money for a rig. It was... old and not very good. I gave up on it when I got to college and just didn't have the time.

You got a First Class Radiotelephone? Awesome! I missed getting my Second Class (working on the First Class) by one question. That was a *fugging* tough test. Then I gave up on broadcasting and moved into manufacturing. Ten years later there was no manufacturing left in the area and I ended up in broadcasting!

[acelightning73]

I worked at the college radio station - WVHC (now WRHU) at Hofstra Univerity on Long Island, where I grew up. I got a First Class licence; I bought an electronics textbook and studied it very hard. I took the test several times before I managed to pass it, but then I applied to every radio and TV station in the city. United Nations Radio hired extra technicians when the General Assembly session took place, and they hired me. Then WNBC and WOR radio hired "vacation relief" engineers for the summer, and that's how I met Wolfman Jack and Long John Nebel and Alice Cooper and Murray the K. Dear gods, the UN was in 1970!

I was very good at it, which got me hired back for every UN session and every summer vacation. I joined NABET and IBEW, and got paid quite well for the time. I got married and we lived in the Bronx and I took the subway into Midtown. I did wind up smoking a lot of weed - one of the other techs at the UN was the son of the ambassador from Sri Lanka, and all sorts of interesting things got brought into the US in the diplomatic pouches.

There were two things I wanted when I was a teenage girl. A kit to grind my own telescope mirror, and a ham rig. I didn't want a gorgeous prom dress, or a car of my own. I wanted to live in a world where men PREFERRED intelligent, capable women, not brainless bimbos whose bust size exceeded their IQ. (I was not capable of looking "beautiful", nor even "pretty'. Stringy hair that wouldn't hold a style, glasses, zits, I was bit on the chubby side, I wasn't any teenage boy's ideal date. I also wanted to join the AV squad in high school, but girls weren't allowed to be on it because they might wind up alone in a projection booth with a boy, which would irreparably destroy her morals and her reputation.

I did work in manufacturing - I got a summer job at Grumman Aircraft when I was in college. My father worked there, and I competed for their scholarship program. Any student who was the child of an employee was eligble to compe who was planning to major in a science or engineering field in college. They gave them jobs in the factory so engineers wouldn't design a plane in which the wiring harnesses needed to be installed by midgets with prehensile tails. The last phase of the scholarship competition involved a brief interview with Leroy Grumman, one of the engineers who founded the company. He told me they'd never had a girl apply for it before. I didn't get the scholarship, but I did get a guarantee of a summer job at Grumman to help me pay for college.

Oh, dear gods, the stories I could tell! :-)