Uneven wear

Last week concluded five years of The Listening Post--yikes! In the spirit of new beginnings, my kitchen and bath are being gutted to the studs while Terry and I remake our acquaintance with dishwashing in a plastic tub, spit baths, hot-plate cookery, laundromats, and the complete inventory of fine dining establishments throughout the region. I knew that NCPR MemberCard would come in handy.

Memory resides most strongly in the sense of smell, I am told. Certainly the ever-present aroma of plaster dust is putting me in mind of past home devastation projects: "Sir, we had to destroy the building in order to save it." As they peel the onion, layer by layer, every bone-headed home handyman shortcut comes back to haunt, each budgetary compromise revealed in the full light of its squalor. Ugglee!. But this is as close as we could come to Plan A, as formulated by Terry: "Let's bulldoze it into the cellar-hole and build out back," or my own variation: "Let's open the gascocks and throw in a match."

But eventually, we'll have something out of it, besides a crippling debt-load and a renewed appreciation of modern amenities. We'll have a shiny new state-of-the-art kitchen and bath that make it blindingly clear just how low-rent and disheveled the rickety remainder of the homestead really is.

Getting a second life

People are always telling me I need to get around more. “There’s a whole other world out there,” they tell me. Anyone who attends a church or belongs to a service organization knows that social networking can be strange, but you need to go online to find out just how strange. The other world out there is called “Second Life,” a 3D virtual world built pixel by pixel by its residents. There you can pick a name, design a body, select a wardrobe and walk (or fly) around, touring whole neighborhoods of virtual homes and businesses built by fellow travelers. It has its own economy, denominated in Linden dollars. There are construction companies who can design and build your virtual second residence, fashion designers who will clothe your avatar in bleeding-edge style. You can talk to people, hold meetings, create and display artwork and multimedia. There are red-light districts and war zones, radio stations and even branch offices for presidential candidates. You can do almost anything in Second Life that you can in this one, except eat a really good grilled cheese sandwich.

At the moment, Second Life has a population of four million, at least 20,000 of whom are in residence at any given time. For such an out-of-body experience in a world of illusions, I have chosen four items for my personal inventory, two sandals, a monk’s robe, and (since I didn’t sign up for the premium account) a begging bowl. Before you come to the conclusion (correct but irrelevant) that a lot of people have too much time on their hands, consider this story: Democracy advocates in China are unable to assemble for mass demonstrations in so-called “first life.” But recently over 10,000 Second Life avatars marched through a virtual Tiananmen Square to protest human rights issues in China. The place clearly presents some features of interest. Once I learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time there (just consider controlling your body with arrow keys and keyboard shorcuts) I’ll scout the place out and send back some Letters Home. Or my avatar will post to my blog, whichever world that is in.

Dread air

It was 4:25 am when my phone rang and the voice of Radio Bob delivered the prerecorded message “Gee! It’s awfully quiet here at North Country Public Radio.”--the silence detector on the transmitter telling me that my hasty training as cub radio tech acolyte was about to be put to the test. My first reaction was “Good grief, don’t you realize you’ve reached an English major?” But I was soon engaged in remote viewing of the dimly-understood station automation system via my laptop at home. No joy. So I put on my coffee and drank some clothes and by 5 am was at the station, clueless, but proud to serve. First I woke Joel Hurd from his well-deserved rest to interrogate the transmitter, then I woke Radio Bob in mid-getaway at a downstate hotel room. Yelling “Help” real loud is within my skill set.

Soon Bob was talking to Joel in the studio on one cell phone, and to me—exiled to our Waterman Hill transmitter shack to read dials—on another cell phone. This made it hard for him to use his hand puppets. While Joel may be an engineer, he's a production engineer, and compared to a radio engineer, that’s about as relevant as being a choo-choo engineer. As for me, the web manager—that may sound techy, but web geeks think radio technology is made up of tyuubes and—things. Actually, with the online stream still working, I was thinking “Ha—so much for the legacy platform, it’s time for the true masters of cyberspace to rule. MWAA-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Some hours later Bob had distilled enough information from the mash of our ignorance to make a diagnosis, and Ellen Rocco and Sandy Demarest dispatched themselves south on a high-tech treasure hunt. They brought back a brand new stochastic deverbillator (or something like that) and a mere eleven hours after the dreaded call, we were back on the air. For those who take an interest in the technical specs; it was a metal box, sort of rectangular in shape. I think it may have contained both tyuubes—and things.

Pretty good radio

Fundraiser is coming around again, starting Monday, and one of the things it brings to us twice a year is an opportunity to reflect on just what it is we do. At NCPR, the job set is so eclectic that demented dilettantism might be a phrase that captures the spirit. You might say that it is our job to make ADD look good. So we endeavor to be great at being pretty good at everything. This puts us in line, I think, with the spirit of work as practiced in the North Country, where every job description has the closing caveat borrowed from auction notices “And much miscellaneous, too numerous to mention.”

There are a whole slew of projects on the burner, ranging from the UpNorth Music studio outreach project to the North Country Reads one book, one community project. We will be helping public broadcasters do better online via shared resources at PubForge. I find that I will be involved in creating and maintaining a PubForge wiki—and I don’t know a wiki from a kiwi—but I’m willing to give it a shot. We’ll be turning some attention toward a new project, the Public Radio Talent Quest. There’s a new Book by Email, There’s a new audio play by Betsy Kepes set in an 1890s schoolhouse. We will be building a big chunk of webspace to examine the “Summer of Love” during its fortieth anniversary year. You get the point—we’ll try nearly anything, and I think our track record is, well--pretty good. There’s a lot more to public broadcasting than grabbing a signal off the satellite and passing it on to your radio. At least that’s what we think—when we have any time to think.