Week of 5th June, 2006

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Monday, 5th June

10 o'clock shift starts today, on ingest. And it's quiet. Must be the summer.

That's the old system. The new system, which was supposed to be up and running for June 1st for all 20 channels, wasn't - not to anyone's surprise.

So they revised that air date - to today, for one channel, albeit they're launching 5  regional versions, different only in the commercials. To do this we'll need the new server, and all interstitial material migrated.

And, as one might expect, it didn't. There are still major issues with the "rewrapping" process, which - among many other things - rewites the timecode in all clips to match a set of rules. Of course, the rules they've been given bear only a small resemblance to reality, and the timecode rewriting is inaccurate anyway - the best they've managed to do so far is within about 2 frames. Sometimes it's totally wrong.

All this means that the downloaded schedule is a pack of lies, and inaccurate to boot. Until now, the scheduling system has not had to concern itself with the start time of the clip - the automation sorted it out using the clip metadata that it holds. But by default, the new system plays the clip entire, including the approx half second of black before it, and the 3 second postroll - which can be black or mute pictures, depending on how scrupulously the advertiser follows our specification. One can fudge around this, but it involves setting - manually, for every clip - a flag which we call "update ignore".  The import process can be amended to sort this, but hasn't been, as yet.

So air date today didn't. Next attempt will be Wednesday, at about midday. Thank $DEITY I'm not working that day.

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Tuesday, 6th June

The insurance company have finally paid out on the big endowment policy that matured a month ago. Monies are wending their way to us via the bank clearing system, and are due any day now. A reminder - don't e-mail me with "investment opportunities". Not only will I ignore them, but your e-mail address will be black-holed "until the time_t's wrap round", which is as near to forever as a computer understands.

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Wednesday, 7th June

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Thursday, 8th June

Jane's Mum to the hospital again today, for a post-operative checkup. And she's doing fine - which is more than can be said for my memory - I forgot to pay the quadruply-qualified Congestion Charge. Probably the heat - it's baking hot, 30-odd Celsius. Which is ridiculous - it's only June. On the other hand... "flaming June..."

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Friday, 9th June

So this morning, at work, I tried 'phoning up to pay the charge and fine - and that last is UKP80, discounted to UKP40 if you pay withinn 14 days.

And would you believe it? There's no way to pay a charge, and the penalty, by 'phone or online - not until you receive the Penalty Charge Notice, which is sent to the registered keeper of the vehicle, at his address of record at the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency in Swansea. That takes some few days. I wish I could lay my hands on the systems analyst who specced up the Congestion Charging system - he'd be singing high soprano after I finished with him.

Or perhaps, to be fair, that idea came from his political masters, who are rabidly anti-car - so that everything is as inconvenient for the driver as it is possible to be. The prepayment regime is one such inconvenience - you can buy days, but they must be consecutive. You cannot buy an ad-hoc selection of Charging Zone transits, in any fashion other than on-the-day.

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Saturday, 10th June

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Sunday, 11th June

Three days of ingesting - movies and other long-form on Friday, while someone else did commercials and promos, promos and movies yesterday, music videos and more movies today, including stuff that needs ingested because the transmission side has been robbed of a robotic tape player, in order to feed the new ingest system, and there aren't enough playback decks to handle the commitment, and more (lots more) that had been purged from the system for want of archive space.

Meanwhile, the new ingest system has been up and down like the proverbial yo-yo - more down than up. Wednesday's on-air date was binned - predictably. Next atempt is tomorrow - and on the evidence to date, it ain't going to happen then, either.


There was a result at home, though - I ordered me some DVDs. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Seasons One and Five, from Play, and they arrived yesterday - Play's usual good service. But I notice that Paramount seem to have re-released the rest of the series, and they've reverted to their greedy ways - even Play are offering the rest of the series at UKP55 or more. Well, I refuse - I'll re-enter the market when the prices drop to something reasonable. Like UKP40 or less. I make an exception for "Stargate SG-1", at UKP45, but for Season 9's 20 episodes, even that's a bit salty.


The summer heat continues, to the extent that it's uncomfortable to go out - I'm not used to heat.

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