IU


24
Aug 16

Settling into the fall term

We’re starting to understand how the new building works. This is the first week of classes. Everyone is lost. You quickly learn the facial expressions. And then you have to figure out where they are going. Sometimes they know. Sometimes they don’t. It is a confusing building. Sometimes you don’t know where they are going, either. Sometimes you’re finding your own way. But there’s good cheer through it all. It is a fancy building.

The big nano patch. The oversized little connector set up:

Nanopatch

This controls the volume to the control room monitors. Engineers

My first bike-in-the-building sighting:

bike

And that is how you know classes have begun.

I’m sitting in the studio, see?

comms

This is one of the devices that allows you to talk from the control room into the studio next door. The engineers are pulling together the last few days of their details on this beautiful new facility. Soon the studio will be open and we’ll be making television shows.


22
Aug 16

Pictures from the last few days

We got a new chair over the weekend. Got it just for the cat, apparently:

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She won’t get up so that anyone else can try it.

Hanging out with Ernie Pyle:

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This was dinner last night. We are so healthy around here:

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Today I’m hanging out in the new control room. So many lights and buttons and switches. You can fly to Mars on this console:

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That’s a state-of-the-art Grass Valley switcher. This studio is full of high-end equipment. Full of it. And from the new to the old. In storage I found a 1970s video projector:

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I wonder when that was used last.


17
Aug 16

Come dine with me

In the control room of the television station, where today I learned how to use the new Telemetrics system. This one station controls four robotic cameras — tilt, shift, pan, focus, set shots and variations. If you’ve ever used a joystick I can teach you a bit more than the basics in a hour or so:

Telemetrics

I had lunch at Dat’s, which is an almost-Cajun joint. The food’s fine, but we’re a little too far away for it to be authentic, according to my own arbitrary rules. But, hey, I had lunch with Frank Sinatra:

Frank Sinatra table

And tonight I’m hanging out with Allie:

Allie


13
Aug 16

Anybody need a computer install?

It is Saturday. It is raining. We are working. I put together 40-some-odd of these today:

big screen

The boss bought lunch at one of the nearby greasy spoons. The stuff on the walls is the best part of the place. I enjoyed this plaque:

big screen

Seems apropos. I think I have a cardboard cut. Also I got rear-ended this morning. Been here 15 minutes and some college kid, a cocky boy from Missouri in a dirty old pickup truck, has already forgot to use his brakes.

I’m fine. The car’s fine. I choose to not think of it as an omen.


11
Aug 16

Just a bit of the new workplace

Working in the new television studio today. Here’s the new news desk:

news desk

And here are three of the monitors in the adjoining control room:

control room

I wonder where I’ll spend the most time while working with the television crew.

Just outside in the giant atrium, there’s the also-giant television screen:

big screen

They say it is 12 feet tall by 25 feet wide and four inches thick. Also, it has six Directv tuners which, right now, means a lot of sports:

big screen

I wonder how long before that becomes something you don’t gawk at when you walk by.