Week of 11th June, 2001

Last Week

Monday, 11th June

10 o'clock shifts start today, running the ingest system again. Of course, the weekend is taken up by the 2001 celebration of the Pop festival I commented about last year. I just hope they organise it better.

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Tuesday, 12th June

A relatively quiet two days, especially today - there wasn't much material to process, so I spent quite a bit of today killing time.

Preparations for the pop festival continue - blank stock has been organised, despite the bean-counters' efforts. They don't seem to realise that if you run a TV station, you have to have tape stock to record on, so they complain about our tape consumption. I hear that we've been over budget for tape for the last several years - when will the bean-counters wake up to the fact that blank tape is necessary, and increase the budget for it? We frequently run short, if not out, of stock.

To be fair, perhaps they were sold on the 'tapeless' idea when we went digital. But until we can edit on the servers, we will need tape. We'll still need VHS stock for legal logging, subtitling, etc., even when we can edit on server.

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Wednesday, 13th June

Night Shift Overtime tonight. When will I learn to check my calendar before grabbing extra work? I'd forgotten the Pop Festival, which starts tomorrow afternoon.

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Thursday, 14th June

Well, as expected, the Pop festival was a shambles - we didn't get the satellite link up until 35 minutes after the scheduled start time, which meant much broken-field running down in Master Control, chasing the problem. Meanwhile, we filled the hole with music videos.

The actual offer, once it got going, was better organised than last year - they are, at least, sticking to the laid-down pattern for part durations, albeit some of then over-run - but it's a live show, so rigidity of timing is not a good idea.

The problem with the satellite link meant that we were two commercial breaks light for the repeat, so we split the last band set (over 80 minutes!) into 3 parts to get the commercials away.

Recording for the repeat, logging and rebuilding the schedule to suit what was recorded went well, so I was able to wander off home with a sense of satisfaction at a job well done. I hope the other two days work as well.

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Friday, 15th June

More of the same today - similar problems with link availability, but only a 17 minute delay, and one commercial break outside the live offer. The OB (outside broadcast) gave us a clock time to force the missing break for the repeat, so that was all right. Once again, a reasonably smooth offer.

The logging is a saga - they wouldn't let me plug Fujisan into the work network, which would have made sense. So I'm using one of the ingest computers to capture the timings into Excel, but I can't print, because the ingest system is firewalled from the building network, and has no printer installed. So I have to sneakernet the Excel file to a main network machine, and print from there. This brings problems with versions and file formats - the ingest computer is running Excel 2000, the main network machine is running Excel97. Whoopee and assorted cheers, and a loud raspberry to Mr William Gates for arbitrarily changing file formats between versions.


Katy and Jenny are at a Guide Activity weekend from this evening until Sunday afternoon, on the Thames near Shepperton - canoeing, rowing, and other outdoor activities.

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Saturday, 16th June

The third day of the offer today, and more of the same. The link was up in plenty of time, but the parts were totally confused - all due to one superannuated rocker doing a 2 hour set, rather than the just over the hour expected. Lucky I had a couple of 2 hour tapes available to record his marathon set. Everything afterwards was shambolic - I ended up using 30 minutes of a 90 minute tape at one point because I didn't know what was happening.

Hindsight, being 20/20, allows me to see that I could have used less tape, but you can't take risks with a fast-turnaround repeat.

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Sunday, 17th June                            Father's Day

When I got home from work last night (about 3 o'clock in the morning) I banged my head on something on my pillow - which turned out to be a large Toblerone chocolate bar, and a Father's Day card from my daughters. A humorous card, which gave me a good giggle this morning, when I had light to read it.

We took Jane's Dad out to lunch locally for Father's Day (her Mum came too) and then had to return home to await the arrival of my Mum, who is up from Wales for Katy's Confirmation next weekend. My uncle brought her up, after his stay for a couple of week's holiday. I'll take her home the week-after-next.

Jane just missed seeing my uncle, because she had to go to collect Katy and Jenny.

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