Technology Screws me again!!

0Josh • 23rd Sep 2004 • blog entries, nome., station life

The past few days have been pretty routine, well as routine as you can get after only being here for a little over week. Lydia and I have been delegated our own show that we started hosting this week. The show is entitled “The Edge” and airs on both the AM and the FM station from 8pm-10pm. So far, we have been having lots of fun with it! However, yesterday it caused me much grief. Each day I’ve been attempting to bring the level of quality up on the show, and yesterday’s show was going to be awesome. The way we do most of the shows here (except for the morning shows) is to record voice-tracks. You pre-record these voice-tracks, and you don’t have to be in the studio when the show is on the air. With the Edge, we have been encouraged to do the show live atleast 2 times a week. However, most people aren’t able to tell when the show is live vs. pre-recorded.

Yesterday Lydia & I had voice-tracked a great show, and headed home around 6:30. Earlier in the day I had even recorded an interview with a man who has made it his life goal to visit every Starbucks shop in the world….he is already up to 3440. Around 8:00 we were sitting in our front room, and in my anticipation of the great show that was about to air, I turned on the radio. I heard the outdated intro that marks the beginning of the show (it was already in the computer when we got here, and I’m in the midst of finding something to replace it), right after that was supposed to be our welcome…however it went directly into the first song (which happened to be tjr’s majesty). I knew something wasn’t right, so I ran over to the studio, and found that all of our voice-tracks weren’t appearing on the automation computer, they were dead links! After the song ended, I quickly grabbed the mic, and decided to do part of the show live, something that I hadn’t done yet. I intro-ed the next song, and commented on a local event that was happening the next day. The phone started ringing, and I answered it off the air.
“KICY, this is Josh”
“Josh, you’re broadcasting live from the FM studio, right?” it was Dennis the station manager, who must have been listening at home.
“Yes, I am”
“Everyone does this the first time they do the Edge live, but when you broadcast from the FM studio, there is only dead air on the AM station”
CRAP!
I told him that the only reason I was even broadcasting live was because my voice-tracks were failing. We attempted over the phone to figure out what was going on, but were unable. He asked me to look at the log and see when the last time a voice-track was properly played, it was at 2:30 that afternoon! After we saw that, Dennis decided that it might be best for him to come over to the studio and see what the problem was. Long boring story short…we rebooted our automation computer, and our database computer. It turns out that earlier that day there was a toddler, (daughter of a volunteer) who was running around the studio, and turned a few computers off (resulting in temporary dead air). The order in which they were discovered and subsequently re-booted was not correct, and they weren’t able to communicate. I was pretty bummed because by the time we got everything correct our great show was pretty much over, and none of our funny material had been aired. Oh well.

In other news:
– Lydia has been feverishly turning in job applications, and has attracted a number of companies. We will see what comes of their interest.

– We went over to a part time volunteer’s house the other evening for dinner and met some people who left the station right before we got there. It was fun to fellowship with new friends.

– While we haven’t forked over the bill for cable ($64/mo for basic service), and have yet to order ‘the dish’ we were able to catch the season premier of survivor! Thanks to my dad who has been taping the episodes and mailing them up priority mail. We got last Thursday’s premier yesterday (Wednesday).

– The weather hasn’t been to bad, or to cold lately…however last night we went to bed while it was snowing!! When we woke up this morning there was about a quarter inch of snow on the ground, but it was all gone by 2 this afternoon.

– Our phone service is up and working great! We re-configured our wireless internet setup early this week, and I’m now getting a perfect signal, allowing flawless transmission on our internet based IP telephone. Feel free to call us up anytime on our Seattle or Tacoma based 253 phone numbers!

– We are traveling again the weekend! Lydia & I, along with the rest of the KICY team are traveling out to Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island to serve the entire village a spaghetti dinner! We won’t be on a small Cessna 180 this time, we are flying a 8 seater! I believe it might even be a twin prop!

WOW, that’s a lota Blog.