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Friday / IU / photo — Comments Off
26
Aug 16

Welcome to the weekend

So how did you start your weekend? Today I helped haul a giant plasma television covering into the building.

Sadly, that’s not going in our house. Seriously big, more than a little heavy. This crate holds 550 pounds of gorilla glass for a four-foot by two-foot video wall. I didn’t have to put it on the wall, but it was interesting to watch:

And, at home, we’re transcribing recipes. Hardly a big, gigantic screen worthy event. Doesn’t have to be. It seems like, sometimes, Friday evenings aren’t what they used to be.

And that’s more than fine.

IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
25
Aug 16

Indoor peektures

My second in-the-building bike sighting:

I imagine this won’t last long. I’m going to ride my bike to campus, but I will leave it in my office. At least until the indoor bike storage area is complete. (We have one of those. Pretty fancy, no?)

We’re one day closer to being in the television studio today. Pretty exciting stuff. We should be in there in another week or two. Here’s the tally light on camera two:

There are four robotic cameras in the studio. You can control them all from a joystick and a touchscreen in the control room. Very fancy.

IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
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:

This controls the volume to the control room monitors. Engineers

My first bike-in-the-building sighting:

And that is how you know classes have begun.

I’m sitting in the studio, see?

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.

IU / Monday / photo — Comments Off
22
Aug 16

Pictures from the last few days

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

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

Hanging out with Ernie Pyle:

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

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:

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:

I wonder when that was used last.

Friday / Instagram / photo / video — Comments Off
19
Aug 16

I’m told this needed to be in black and white

There comes a moment when everyone thinks they can be an artist …

Helium gives up. Found this floating around on random currents, a floor away from where it was supposed to be. #FranklinHall #IndianaUniversity #Bloomington

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Aug 19, 2016 at 9:19am PDT

Outside:

Inside:

At a reception in the Franklin Hall Commons:

I got this book through an interlibrary loan from the University of North Carolina:

It is a book of oral histories from northwest Alabama, covering the Civil War era, which was a hard time for the people in the area. Most of the folks there didn’t want to be involved, they saw it as a rich person’s war. But when the Confederates came through they would press men into service. And when the Union came through they would press men into service. And then there were the Booger men, guerillas, bushwhackers, thieves and murderers, led by “Mountain Tom” Clark. In 1872 Clark confessed to 19 murders and was lynched. One member of the mob remembered Clark say “No man will ever run over Tom Clark!” So his body is now buried under Tennessee Street and is supposedly still there today, where he’s run over by everybody. At least that’s the folklore. Interesting read.

We grew up hearing sanitized versions of stories like this.

The book has that Due Date card inside, of course. The last time it was stamped was 1995.

I should have made a video about that.