Today’s project was to get the new Newsroom 1 Enco workstation online. Piece of cake, right?

(James Burke voice:) Wrong!

(If you don’t get that bit, I insist that you find a copy of The Day The Universe Changed, all of it, and watch the series through. Then you will.)

Thanks to Win2k’s ACPI and the damned Tyan motherboard’s inability to set IRQs by slot, I swapped cards around in that chassis for hours. Oh yes, and until some genius realized that we needed to tell the motherboard that IRQ 10 needed to be reserved for the ISA sound card, we couldn’t get the Digigram drivers to recognize said card. Duh.

As it stands, there’s still two cards with shared interrupts… the PCI Digigram sound card and the NIC. This is not a good thing. Eventually both devices will see simultaneous load, which will probably crash the machine. When it’s a machine running live broadcast programming, this is the kind of thing you try to avoid. The problem, of course, is that no matter where I place either of the two conflicting cards they both come up on IRQ 11. Gah!

And we get to hammer on it some more tomorrow morning. Joy to us all.

In between dealing with the usual assortment of network space issues, printer problems and other nonsense, I get to place the rebuilt West Conference Room computer back into its Smartboard enclosure. I also get to spend an hour or so in a conference call with the rest of Entercom’s erstwhile IT/IS team. Mind you, half these folks are engineers first and computer techs second. I’ll probably compile more stuff on Zero while I have the “mic mute” button toggled. I don’t have anything of value to contribute, as I’m well ahead of the standard Entercom computering curve.

No false modesty, it’s just that Entercom Portland is unusual (Hah!) in having a dedicated IS staffer. That would be me, for those of you following along at home.