Thanks to my neighbor at leuschke.org, we are proud to present some jumping cats.
It’s cute. The perfect anodyne to a crazy and stressful workday. You’ll see. Would I lead you astray? (The cats were strays, but I digress.) I promise, no Flash animation is involved.
Galvanized Into Action
For those of you (all two of you) who noticed that my iMood hasn’t changed in a while… no, it’s not laziness. I really have been ill the entire time, and there’s no end in sight.
I’ve got one of those damned annoying colds that never really knocks you out flat but also never goes away. I’m constantly wavering between a state of dazed functionality and feverish misery, punctuated by sniffles, sneezes and the occasional coughing fit.
Why yes, I have always been the sickly child. Had I been born a plains-dwelling grazing animal, I’d have been culled from the herd by natural selection a long time ago. Bah.
Starve a cold, feed a fever, my ass. What do you do when your cold includes a fever? Stupid homily anyway.
Streaming audio is dead. Long live streaming audio.
Months after the complete dismantling of our streaming audio systems, Entercom wants to start a streaming audio system. This time, however, it’s solely for the use of program directors around the company. Guess who gets to put together the prototype server?
Shortly after noon today, I put Rosey and The Fan online with one audio channel each. The machine is a Pentium-II 400MHz with about 192 MB of RAM and an M-Audio Delta-44 audio card. Sadly, I’m using the Windows Media Encoder to source the streams. For the money it’s the easiest way to serve two simultaneous audio streams from the same Windows-based platform.
Before the zealots in the audience get all fired up about my obvious failure to avoid using Microsoft products, I’d like to state that the purpose of my efforts is to create a system that any of my peers in Entercom can set up on their own. This rules out such arcana as Icecast under Linux.
Now that we have stereo input on both streams, the next step is to torture-test the rig so we can write up specific hardware requirements as well as installation procedures and get that info out to the markets that need it.
Some days I really love my job.
(No, you can’t have the address of the server. It’s only on the company network, so it wouldn’t do you any good. Sorry.)
So why didn’t I get in any journal entries for the last two days? I’m so glad you asked.
Wednesday was Kiddie Day. I had Hannah as well as little Najoni to mind, then Hannah’s mother and I watched over a houseful of rugrats. Later she went to pick up Wendi and Bernie from the airport, after which we all hung out until late in the evening. There just wasn’t any time for the Internet that day.
Yesterday was my first day back at the office. You wouldn’t know it by the amount of work I got done, though. John Graefe, my Corporate Boss, was in town to meet with the company’s Internet Director and myself. We discussed issues with website hosting, domain management, in-house audio streaming and the forthcoming intranet project. Let’s just say I have a lot of interesting work ahead of me between now and next summer. After we “did lunch” I showed him around the offices. He met Daria Landar (my trusted comrade over in West Sales), both Jacks (Hutchison the GM and Hernvall the Controller), and Dan Harbison (Dot-com-Dan, the webmaster for KNRK). All in all it was a busy, talkative, brainstorming, chatting, stimulating kind of day. I even managed to get a few small tasks out of the way.
All that talking made hell out of my throat, though. By the time I left I felt totally raw, and that didn’t get better when we had to spend a couple of hours at the school or when Amy and Michael came over for three hours of Diablo II. (Fun, though. Midnight rolled around before we could find out how badly The Big Pink Teddy Bear was gonna maul our haphazard group of intrepid warriors. We’ve got skill and equipment issues…)
Today was something a bit more like a normal day. Lots of small fires needed extinguishing. I’m caught up on my email at long last. Most of the people who were having the biggest problems are happy once more. Just about the only really major problem today was that Pacifier/Northwest Link/Europa had a truly stupendous downtime today. The problem first manifested at about 10:25am and was finally resolved just before 3:15pm. I’m not pleased with their technical capabilities right now, you could say.
I’m looking forward to going home, resting my sore throat and relaxing until Sunday’s marathon project session. I have the usual email maintenance to do, the usual tape backups to run, and a couple of unusual tasks that will fill the long stretches when tape is running…
One gets the impression that this week’s Friday Five was contributed by a woman who owns a lot of shoes, doesn’t one?
Friday Five
As of a few minutes ago, I am one episode away from completing TMTT. All that remains is “Here Comes Jurai,” the cutesy throw-away episode that closes out the 2nd Tenchi Muyo OAV. I’ll see about finishing that off over the weekend.
Speaking of music videos, the newly-formed Downloads page has direct links to each of the anime music video files I’ve created. No longer must my visitors wonder where they can find these and my other creative treasures!
I can go home now. Yay.
