You’re too early

They started decorating the set for Good Day Sacramento on Tuesday. It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet. They subjected me to that Mariah Carey abomination. I hissed a lot and retreated to the tech core where I have the U-Matic VTRs. Deck the halls with Ampex 197, you heathens.

I just now noticed this was 3M tape, no wonder I wasn’t having to fight with it as much.

I got new sets of drive belts for these machines from Zin VTR Works and now the decks are happy again. So far I have three working, along with one of my own. Wait, one of my own, what? Well I saw this one at PPSP Recycling and bought it. All the belts were snapped but a kit from Zin reawakened it. It’s got mystery field modifications that no one I’ve asked could identify, but it just works as one should.

The panel on the right side normally contains nothing.
In Sony’s bizarre wisdom they decided to put a lot of the analog signal paths on this board that flips up over the transport. Normally the older VO series decks had either a record amplifier or simply nothing up there. Makes head cleanings more fun I guess.

And now, what I’m sure you really came here for: cursed weirdness and memes.

This meter turned out to be affected by some kind of curse that made the resistance measurements fly from about 4K to over range, no matter what range was selected, but still allowed it to zero correctly in all ohms ranges.
This meter is not cursed. For now, at least.
The Nozzle.
This cursed plug that is just asking to light you the hell up
In the case of the cursed meter, this cheap thing I bought off Temu confirmed that I was simply dealing with cursed test equipment. I’m actually surprised at how well it works, but would be terrified of the idea of putting more than like 48vdc into it.

BIRD STRIKE!!!

So everyone was preparing for the return of most of our staff to the office when senior management was in a meeting and heard an enormous bang….

That WAS a double pane window. Then a wild turkey in rapid flight came along, and both were no more.

We don’t know where this video footage will be used. I mean– what

I excluded the dead bird from these pictures. Do not continue reading this post if you don’t want to see it. I’ve included some unrelated safe images so you won’t see it accidentally.

Read more “BIRD STRIKE!!!”