Week of 25th October, 2004

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Monday, 25th October

Middle shifts start today, the midday start. And since it's school half-term, Jane has done her usual "disappear for the week" to get a bit of time off.

Except that not everyone remembered the fact. One of Jane's minded children turned up first thing, in care of her father, and they were both dismayed to be reminded that Jane isn't here. How they'll get around that, I have no idea, but they were told ahead of time.

A bit later, the man from Dolphin Showers came, he saw, but he failed to conquer. I'll give him this - he was honest. They prefer to do complete bathrooms, not partial ones, and he said that I'd do better getting a local plumber to do the job - cheaper, too.

And so to work - where the shelves started fairly empty, but filled up rapidly as the day passed. And they filled far faster than we could clear them. When I went home there were two-and-a-half shelves of jobs to be done, instead of less than one, and I'd done about half a shelf.

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Tuesday, 26th October

More of the same, and if they don't stop throwing long PasBs of linefeeds at us we'll never catch up.

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Wednesday, 27th October

Jenny returns from New York this morning, on a "red-eye" flight. She leaves for JFK at 22:00 Eastern last night, and lands here at 10:00 local time.

Or actually 15 minutes early - well done British Airways. I went to collect her from Heathrow Terminal 4 and got stuck in a traffic tailback - road accident. But even so, I was there and waiting for her when she came out of the Arrivals door, having left after I heard her flight pass through the Heathrow Air Traffic Control zone.

So we went home to pick up a few goodies, and then drove down to Weymouth to meet Jane. Jenny will stay there until they comes back on Friday, and I brought Sarah back with me - plus beer and goodies for Christmas presents. There will probably be more.

And Hopalong has a minor problem - when he's warm, the idle is too low and it varies dramatically, to the extent that he frequently stalls. I suspect the throttle cable is sticky, since I can't adjust the idle and have the adjustment survive a blip on the throttle. Or, of course, I could be doing totally the wrong thing. He'll have to be looked at properly - when they get back.

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Thursday, 28th October

Overtime today - supposedly an ingest shift. But due to short notice absences, I ended up doing a tapes shift - which is now a lot easier, since the Flexicart robotic tape players are now set to rewind tapes after they're finished with. This means that half the workload of a tapes shift is gone, so that you can do more break cover for the other transmission controllers. Meanwhile, the freelance brought in as extra cover for my ingest shift was snowed under with material.

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Friday, 29th October

Masses of commercials delivered today - way more than we can cope with on a normal day. But this being Friday, we have all weekend to catch up.

The powers that be at work have decided, in their infinite wisdom, to merge two of the channels we currently transmit. The content is similar, but one channel is targeted to Eastern Europe, while the other targets Scandinavia. Merging the channels means we need to be able to produce promotional material carrying 8 different audio tracks on the servers. This is quite a feat when a Digital Betacam tape only carries 4 audios. We need to run two tapes in sync, and combine the audios into one package for the server. Luckily the digital video standards will allow this (you can, in fact, do 16 audio tracks, in 4 groups of 4. Up until now we've only used 1 of the 4 groups internally)

Doing it is a bit of a kluge, but it does work.

Meanwhile, I've got to recover some continuity clips from server, because the original master tapes are mislaid. This is so that the clips can be re-ingested with the 8 audios. And I managed to recover all but 5 of the 50-odd clips wanted, and they are repackaged as required, ready for the extra audios to be added.

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Saturday, 30th October

Lots of promo clips for the merged channel have come up for ingest, ready for the merged launch on Tuesday. And I managed to ingest all of them by end of day. You have to be a bit more careful about cueing the tapes before ingesting the clip, but making that work correctly is one more keystroke, which we will need to remember to do for each 8-channel clip. In fact, it would probably be wise to do it all the time, just so we don't forget. And after 4 or more years of not using that extra keystroke, it'll be difficult to remember it - for a while, at least.

And it has been decided that another channel will have it's geographical coverage broadened soon, in similar fashion. I had a bunch of promos for that channel as well.

Now all I have to do is write the operational instruction, so that others will know how to do this.

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Sunday, 31st October

More of the same.

 
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