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I was moving boxes from here to there — because this is one of the things I am doing right now. And at the individual box level I was taking things out of boxes because, well, they were in boxes and what’s the point of that? We’re moved in to the new building and all.
Anyway, I dug out this remote control, which goes to some stripe of projection setup:
And that’s just classy design.
I helped install one of these today:
Sadly it was in a classroom and not in our house. But it’ll look great in the class nevertheless. Except for the fingerprint smudges I left on it. That might sound passive-aggressive, but smudges can be cleaned, so don’t think of it that way, OK?
On our bike ride this evening:
We’ve been this way a few times now and I like this site. You hang a right and then you have the corn on your left. You go up the hill, take a big curve and a punchy little roller and then a long straight up to stop sign that means you’re almost done. It is a nice four miles and 15 minutes.
Here’s the next leg in that final stretch, where The Yankee and Stephen are pacing me home:
I think this should be a thing: Where were you the last time you heard The BoDeans?
Because you never forget Closer to Free. (Or most any of the rest of their catalog, really.)
You can never read enough Ernie Pyle. And now I get to see him anytime.
I see his desk every day. It is only strange if he starts talking back, right?
I do not always understand art. Seldom, do I understand art, more probably. I’ve come to enjoy one explanation of art, even as I now only paraphrase it and can’t properly attribute it. Art, said the forgotten-by-me sage, is intended to be transportive, to take you away from your world and into another.
Or some such thing like that. It is a nice idea. And so, when I see this on the IU campus I think I have been placed inside a giant Hot Wheels track:
Here’s the door and sign of the old building. The Media School will be moving out of there in a few days:
And here’s Franklin Hall, the new building. It was built in 1907, has been a library and an administrative building, and is now coming out of a three-year, $21 million renovation. That’s where the Media School is moving to:
My office is around back from there. But much more impressive, inside, is the main atrium, which is dominated by a 26-foot by 12-foot by 4-inches thick screen with six Directv tuners. You can do presentations via computers and play video games on this guy, too:
Opposite that main entrance above is the Jordan River. (They really should call it a creek, but when in Rome … )
This little creek runs around my office, which sits on one of the building’s back corners:
I was in the RTV building today and wandered by some great built-in display cases. The history of the program and fair amount of the gear that makes up the business was there. Like this Hitachi FP-3030, from 1976, for example.
It was a smaller camera for its day, but it also did some genius stuff on the inside. I won’t bore you with the details, but it created a more efficient signal which, among other things, allowed black and white televisions to receive color broadcasts and formed normal black and white pictures. It would also allow a color TV to take a black and white broadcast as well as a color picture during color transmission. Remember, this is the 1970s and color TV had just reached 50 percent household penetration, so this would have been important for a lot of homes. Also, this camera cost just under $20,000 in today’s money.
A magnetic tape recorder/dictation machine from Webster-Chicago:
I don’t know anything about this device, but the company dates back to 1914 and they started selling ancestors of this recorder in the early 1940s. At a time when high tech was still very expensive, and not even a term, Webster-Chicago sold more than 40,000 “electronic memory” units in 1947 and 1948 alone. There is an Electronic Memory unit on display, too, but glare on the display glass ruined the pictures. Webster-Chicago started declining in the 1950s with new magnetic tape technology prevailing over the old wire recorders, and when foreign recorders entered the American marketplace, that was pretty much it for the old company.
Friends, please meet the most handsome figure on the lot, the RCA-77:
The 77 was released in 1945, but it just oozed 1930s style and incredible sound quality. Ribbon microphones, like this one, are always popular, and this RCA product creates some great tones. It was the standard through the 1950s and you’ll still see them in use in studios today.
If you see one for less than a couple grand, buy it, because the seller doesn’t understand the marketplace.
