Yes, anarchist catgirl presenting nonbinary seems like a good description for me.
So it turns out in addition to bricking themselves, these exciters can also crap out their backup battery. Not sure if I’d call it an improvement over the system in the old Apex M2X as now it’s an unserviceable custom $300 battery pack!?
Anyway let me stop being vexed by stupid transmitters and point out this thing I discovered:
Pink and red eyeshadow do appear to be my absolute jam.
Corporate meddling stressed me the hell out today so I dug into an old power supply to repair it. It’s not perfect but it helped my mental state a lot.
Brought to you by the confused shout from the TD that the switcher’s shot box is flickering like mad as the cursed-ass switcher rattles towards its inevitable fate as unsupported e-waste
This post continues with lots more images.
Read more “We’re a Happy Honda Days family or something. Fnord.”Last week we had a horribly long engineering staff meeting that basically pointed out to me that we’re all destined to be burned out like our damn transmission line in the coming months. I’m quite done with this. We were promised there’d be big improvements and then saw them yanked away and replaced with the promise of enjoying what will eventually degrade into “Just In Time Scheduling“. Yeah, how about no.
That being said, I’m gonna be exploring other career opportunities with companies that don’t treat their mission critical staff like rodents.
I had such high hopes for this company. It was great…. three mergers, four reductions in force, and one massive consolidation of HR and talent acquisition later. Now it’s just a slow burn of crushing cheapness and presumably, tax writeoffs of everything that doesn’t just get asset stripped.
Anyone interested in having a rather silly but talented engineer come work for them? I have 20 years experience in the field, including TV, FM and AM radio. I’d post a full resume here but I don’t exactly want everyone’s bots to come knocking yet. Also, I shitpost a lot. Maybe I need to write up a public resume in the form of a shitpost. That’d fool all the bots and give me the ability to sneak in cat pictures.
Meanwhile, here’s a sleepy kitty.
It me:
I have yet to get a picture of this because they just both get up, but lately Gingy and Scrappy have been curling up there like a little yin – yang of floofle. So precious.
The SNG truck that wants to try our patience— it just doesn’t wanna finish running all the emissions monitors so it can get a smog check. Supposedly it *only* needs to be driven 400 more miles. Uhhhhhhhhh.
I forget who made that glorious image but I suspect it’s Duffy Toler.
Anyway, that’s there because it started raining here in Northern California. Duckies would be very happy with this. Quack.
The rain has helped damp down the Mosquito Fire threatening the communities up in the Sierra Nevada foothills. It’s been really nice, even when it got blindingly thick on the Delta, and came down hard enough one morning to make my drive to work slow. I got there late and found the whole facility in headless chicken mode as an unusual combination of issues with how we procedurally handled breaks on streaming only newscasts caused a big ugly failure on air. We’re producing more live programming for television and streaming than ever and the engineering staff keeps getting smaller and more overstressed and something’s gonna break down eventually. Meanwhile, I was exhausted because I’d been down at the transmitter site late in the evening trying to fix the transmitter side of this hot mess, and I experienced a SMOKE TORNADO as one of the power supplies blew up. Impressive. Seriously impressive. Pictured here: the slowly growing heap of transmitter parts that need to be repaired or replaced.
I continue to be approaching the level of burnout this power supply managed. We had a meeting with local management today and got to express our concerns. Will corporate listen and take action so we don’t just wind up in a downward spiral of cascading failures and increasing understaffing? We can’t just hang on like this forever. This blows serious capaci-smoke.
Big thanks to Dan at GatesAir for offering me useful guidance with this transmitter. His biggest piece of useful advice on the ULXT series: once it’s up and running and fully stable, don’t mess with it, just let it run! Well, I guess we broke that rule of guidance. Really the biggest issue is that the antenna system is unhappy SOMEWHERE, I’m waiting on a tech to come by to sweep it and find the distance to the fault.
What follows this is a big ol’ image dump. Click to be, uh, dumped at I guess.
Me: *obtains new boots*
Five minutes later:
Me: *threatens inoperative Camio server with new boots*
Today, Comcast had a nice wide area outage across Sacramento and Elk Grove, and the result was, uh, beautiful: with no home internet over every area where they have a rock solid monopoly, mobile data was, uhhhhh, totally usable. Trying to place a phone call took several minutes followed by it just silently failing. I hit the speed test button in Fing out of sick curiosity and much to my amazement, it was actually able to run the test, with comical results:
This is rounded up – as the test was running, it was showing 10-15 kilobits, but for whatever reason the final test results screen insists on reading in megabits. I guess they (sensibly) figured it’d never get used on a connection this slow.
Eventually Comcast came back to life and everything was restored, but it’s still another one of those harsh reminders of how close we always are to having to wonder just how many of our friends are also ham radio operators…..
And with that: the usual caliber of quality posting begins.
This is the worst X11 window manager ever, it’s just clunky and unresponsive.
Straight out of the Mewsroom. On that note, my company has a slack channel named mewsroom and it’s glorious.
I forget what discussion of shitty electronics prompted me to look up the infamous Cellmate but it’s worth noting it’s got a successor which is even dumber 😀
Why did SacRT Route 1 wind up being shaped like this? Is it the concatenation of two older routes? Weird.
What is it trying to tell us?
And now for a lovely afternoon’s shitposting
Read more “I’m pretty sure this just means “PC Load Letter””