The night time isn't the right time

Welcome to Day #5 of the overnight shift.  This is the last overnight shift I have at the radio station this week and I have to admit it couldn't have come soon enough, it has been a very long week.

As I type this particular entry I am sitting in the production studio, not with a lack of things to say, but wondering where exactly to begin, and once beginning, wondering if I will in fact stop.  I have my launchcast station fired up and playing while I type, with headphones on, running the audio across the production board.  Some of you may remember that this is one of the ways I can steal music, I play it on one computer in this room, and have a second computer record the audio from the first one, then I go back and edit the recorded audio and save it as an mp3 and after a number of saved mp3s I burn them all to a cd.  I am not doing that tonight, rather I am just listening and moving some more music either into or out of rotation.  If something good pops up I may mention it, like the current song, "She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult, but for now, we have far bigger fish to fry.

For instance, we have an Asshat, and again it was a week where there was plenty of competition.  Certainly the Supreme Court was an early favorite with their letting a convicted murderer walk.  A late charge was made locally when an off duty police officer was out drinking and took it upon himself to pistol whip an innocent bystander.  Not content with just that, during the course of the pistol whipping, his gun managed to go off, shooting the now beaten man in the hand.  But I have been trying to have a light hearted week, where my Asshat should have some humor involved.

Another local entry popped up when Pittsburgh tried to resink the Titanic.  The Carnegie Science Center is currently doing an exhibit of artifacts from the Titanic, so leave it to my fair city to break a water main and flood the exhibit, trying to once again send the Titanic goodies back to Davy Jones's locker.  Funny as this is, it too is not the Asshat winner.

Enter Tyson Gay.  No, he is not the Asshat, rather he is one of the people trying to qualify for the United States Track and Field team going to Bejing.  Nonetheless, he is part of our story.  Last weekend trials for the track and field team were being held, and like all sporting events of some magnitude, they were covered by some press.  Not Super Bowl heavy coverage mind you, but some reporters were there in case anything of note happened, say a World or United States record were to be set, or something along those lines, or if some of the members of the Olympic team were named.  What usually happens on such occasions is that those media outlets that wish to report on the news but don't have the personnel to cover it, they will instead carry the story of those that are there.  I am sure you have seen this many times in your local paper, rather than a reporter from the paper covering a story, it will instead be attributed to somone else, either another paper, or a news service. 

At this point of the story we introduce you to this week's Asshat winner, One News Now.  ONN is a Christian news organization, you can go to their page and pick up some news stories if you so wish, but they will sometimes franchise out the reporting to other sources, such as the case with the track and field event.  The thing is, because they are a Christian outlet, they will filter their news, that is, they will not post things they deem offensive.  I am sure you have all come across these filters in your internet browsing, if you type a swear word, it comes back as a jumbled mess.  The thing is sometimes these filters can't tell one thing from another.  So, here we have a filtered Christian news site, and one of the things they happen to filter was the word gay, as they believed it to be to a positive  word reflecting a lifestyle they don't approve of.  So ONN received permission from the Associated Press to reprint their coverage of the track and field event, but then the filter got in the way.  Tyson Gay, track and field competitor, became Tyson Homosexual.  ONN ran the AP stories of the event and every time Tyson's last name came up, the filter replaced it with Homosexual, including one headline that read "Homosexual Races Into 100 Meter Semifinal".  And of course, because this is the Asshat award, nobody at ONN caught this before the posting the stories on their webpage.  So kudos to One News Now, this week's Asshat award winner.

I guess I should mention that the free agency period for hockey has started and the results for the Penguins have been a mixed bag.  The team has lost a few guys, including Adam Hall, Ryan Malone, Gary Roberts, Ty Conklin, Jarko Ruutu, Georges Laraque and most importantly Marian Hossa,  That being said, they have also locked up some of their pending free agents to long term deals including Evgeni Malkin (6 years), Brooks Orpik (5 years), Marc Andre Fluery (7 years) and have made some moves by signing Miroslav Satan and Ruslan Fedetenko to one year deals and are rumored to still be in the running to sign Jaromir Jagr, so all in all, I would consider it to be pretty much a wash at this point. 

As for the local baseball club, at least they are still losing.  Currently their record is 40-44, but they are a solid 10 games out of first place.  Mind you, because they have stunk for so long, the local media is treating being 4 games under .500 as though they are a pennant contender.  Meanwhile the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who were long ago adopted as my favorite AL team are now leading the American League East by 3 full games after sweeping the Red Sox.  For those Pirate fans that read this blog (there might be one out there somewhere), here is something to think about, the last time the Pirates had a winning record, the Devil Rays didn't even exist.  In that span of time, they have built an entire franchise, from farm system all the way up to the major league level and put a competitive product on the field, while the Pirates have done nothing but lose.

Okay, onto the week that was.  As I mentioned, I have been doing overnights at the radio station.  Mostly I have been doing this because the person I usually ride in with in the morning is taking a week's vacation.  That left me with a few options, I could do overnight shifts, thereby guaranteeing I would be at work on time, and grab cat naps on the couch at the radio station overnight as needed, I could take a cab to work (city buses don't run as early as I have to be here at 5am), but a cab ride is $12-$13 and working only one job, I can ill afford to be wasting money on such luxuries.  My last option would be to either walk/ride my bike.  Mind you, I have walked it before, it is not an impossibility, but it takes 2 hrs (less if I ride my bike obviously) but the last 15-20 minutes of that trip are all uphill, so of all of the options, I went with doing overnights, starting with Sunday, which was by far the longest, with me getting in the studio at 10:45am and not leaving until 12:30pm on Monday. 

(Excuse me while I have a bite or three of my cookies and creme parfait.  I just ate the cherry, which is as close as I will probably ever get to one of those, but I digress.)  Anyway, we have some people that work here that are professional, and then we have some that work here that are just occupying time and space.  So when I came in Sunday morning I was informed that my station (WPTT) had aired infomercials that morning with the wrong tags on them, calling the station by our sister AM stations call letters (WJAS) and of course telling me about it 4 hours after they aired means that nothing was done about it when something could have been done, say 4 hours earlier when the problem occurred. 

Damn this parfait is good, crumbled oreo cookie, chocolate cake, whipped creme and chocolate syrup, especially with a nice coffee to wash it all down. 

Also of note when I got in Sunday morning was the fact that the kitchen ceiling was leaking again.  One of our air conditioner ducts runs through the ceiling there and water was building up in the ceiling tile causing it to bow and water to drip through to the floor and into a garbage can that was catching the leak.  Of course it never occurred to anyone to call our maintainance guy to fix it, because stuff like that makes sense.  As it turns out, he was coming in anyway because apparently the previous evening the power went out and the generator that does simple things like, I don't know, keep all three radio stations on the air, failed to kick on right away, resulting in us being off the air for a few minutes.  When the generator did kick back on, the resulting reboot of the computer system caused a problem with carts transferring from the FM production room into the air studios.  No one bothered to mention this to the engineer till the following day when I came in and told him about it.  He was away from his computer (he can remotely reset the system via laptop without being onsite) so he said he would call when he reset the production room computer.  He finally called early that evening, but his resetting the computer, while solving the problem in production, actually transferred the problem to the FM on air studio, which now wasn't receiving the carts from production.  Of course we didn't know this until the system went to play a cart that was supposed to have updated but didn't, so another call into the engineer and he resets the FM on air studio and again the problem transfers back to the FM production studio.  He eventually decided to take the entire sytem down, by now we are at 12am Monday morning and the actual power outage that started this distaster happened at 6pm Saturday evening, and all of a sudden we are making the postal service look speedy by comparison.  The problem with taking the system down is that while two of the stations would be running off of a satellite feed and wouldn't  be harmed programming wise, the third station (our sister AM) was playing music that was recorded into the computer, so in order to take it down, I had to get the emergency music cd running so we didn't have dead air.  Of course I asked the FM overnight guy where the cd was, but he was of no help, having spent the afternoon drinking, he was more than content to just sleep than to be of service.  One time he said not to worry about it, as though a radio station not actually airing programming is a good thing, the second time I asked him for it, he just mumbled something and went back to his drunken passed out stupor.  Finally I did find it, in of all places, inside the cd player.  An entire systemwide reboot later, and a problem that should have taken maybe 20 minutes to fix had it been handled properly Saturday night, instead took 31 hours to fix.  And that was just my first overnight.  Thankfully the entire week hasn't been that bad, it hasn't been great, but at least not that bad.

I should mention that I do have a job interview Monday.  Not sure if I want the gig or not.  On the bad side it is Wal Mart, and it is a decent haul from my apartment, probably two city buses and I am not sure I want to put that much effort in just getting to a job I know won't pay all that well.  On the good side, I am being interviewed to work in the toy department, and trust me, I can rock the toys.  Plus I would get the store discount,and while I don't do a large amount of shopping at Wal Mart, saving money on the things that I do get there from time to time is always a plus.

Well I better put this under wraps, maybe later I will blog about some more of the overnights, but for now this page is more than long enough.  Enjoy your 4th of July!!!!