Week of 9th June 2014

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Monday, 9th June

New fortnight starts today - nights, the 18:00 start, loading material onto the system for editing.

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Tuesday, 10th June

And barring the fact that the entire building was sweltering hot, some kit had fallen over from the heat, and it's a miracle that the transmission side kept running (just!) it's all good. Not much work sent in, and most of that HD, so the workrate was slow, but even so, I was done by 03:00.

I've joined the Indigogo funding campaign for the OP-i secure e-mail and owncloud server appliance. That campaign runs until the 15th of this month, at 23:59 Pacific time, and as I type, with 4 days to go, they have 93% of their $10,000 goal pledged. They'll get their funds, even if no-one else joins, because Indiegogo isn't all-or-nothing.

I'll be using this as my local mailserver and owncloud server, so that I can get at mail and such documents as I see fit to load to the OP-i from anywhere. Open Products already have an Android app, with an iThing version in the works, and it is claimed to be possible to automatically upload smartphone photos to it.

Of course, all this is dependent on the Swedish developers doing their thing. I suspect that production and fulfilment, despite their claims, will take longer than "end of June 2014", but that's OK. I've never heard of a crowdfunded project that actually shipped on time.

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Wednesday, 11th June

Another quiet night at the tapeface. Slower, because I was fighting my typos in registration. You have to enter the start timecode of the material you want, the end timecode, and the duration - in separate boxes. And the timings have to be consistent, that is:- end - start = duration. The application, which is written in Java and runs in a web browser, has a calculate button beside each of the three boxes - type in any two, and calculate the third - but if you enter start and duration, and forget the end, the tape just runs. And runs... and runs... until you reach the end of the tape, when it rewinds - but doesn't stop capturing  Or if end - start > duration, it will stop after the duration. This is, to say the least, inconsistent... and annoying. 

The other thing is procedural, not a fundamental design flaw - you have to prepend a flag to the material ID, in order that the system will allow you to send it to edit. No flag, no send to edit. Oh, you can try, but the system will just throw up it's little hands in horror, and sulk. But it won't tell you it's sulking. The only thing that works is to fail it, change the registration, and redo. And when it's a 2 hour movie...

Then, after sleep, I had to visit Simon, to repair a corrupt user profile, again. It's strange - I haven't yet been bitten by this, nor has Jane, or Katy. But Simon, and Keith... several times each.

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Thursday, 12th June

A day's overtime in MCR today. And it is a day - 10 a.m to 10 p.m.

And it was quiet - no feeds, no off-sat receivers needing to be reset. Just obsessive logging of regular checks.

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Friday, 13th June

Friday 13th is actually a Friday this month.

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Saturday, 14th June

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Sunday, 15th June

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