Obscure passages

If you have gotten past the homepage at NCPR in the last day or two, you'll have noticed that the new site design is starting to appear. My apologies for the interim confusion, but it is nothing compared to my own. It's ugly down in the crawl spaces of cyberspace. And the basic tools of web design are still primitive. Picture monks in the scriptorium, transcribing obscure passages from Leviticus by tallow lamp. Church Latin has nothing on javascript. What could "for (i=0; i<(args.length-2); i+=3) { test=args[i+2]; val=MM_findObj(args[i]);" mean? All I know for sure is that it is tiny and made of pixels I can barely read. And that you can't get the code wrong without sending people off to fan sites for Romanian calvary collectibles, or injecting heresy into scripture, or creating some other form of disproportionately large trouble. If by mischance you run horribly astray, just keep clicking. Eventually you will come across me in one of the sub-basements, busting my knuckles applying a torque wrench to a gunked-up function. We can help each other find the way back to daylight.

All in

No one imagined, when it was just an invitation to apply for funding, just how all-consuming the UpNorth Music project would become. 38 full days of recording in eleven communities, more than a hundred individual sessions, at least a thousand hours mixing and producing songs, interviews, broadcast features, podcasts. Designing and rebuilding the production studio, identifying, recruiting and paying artists, finding studio venues, planning a concert tour, mastering a compendium CD set, clearing performance and publication rights--a million details from remote broadcast setup to getting our new logo printed in frosting on a concert reception cake. Enormous big "ups" to production manager Joel Hurd and to project coordinator Jill Breit for all the sweat and blood.

It's all coming to a head tomorrow with the opening concert in the UpNorth Music Series at St. Lawrence University's Gulick Theater, and with the release of the project highlights in the 3-CD set Music Heard UpNorth. I've been working my way through the set with great delight. It sounds like the North Country--talented, inventive, diverse, quirky. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought I knew the musicians of the region, or at least the best of them. But on each CD in the set, there are at least half a dozen artists I had no idea were out there. Fantastic songwriters, monster instrumentalists, voices to make you cry. When NCPR takes on a project, I'm proud to say we go "all in." And the North Country, I'm proud to say, is full of artists who do the same.

If you can't pick up a copy at the concert tomorrow, Music Heard UpNorth will be available within a few days in stores around the region, and online via cdbaby.com. Or you can contact the station to place orders.

All things made new

Home renovation on the internet can be as messy and frustrating and time-consuming as in the real world. It's also prone to schedule creep, going over budget, etc. If you've been tuned in, you know that NCPR has moved into its 40th anniversary year, and you may have glimpsed our new logo on station correspondence. But so far you have not seen much at ncpr.org. That's about to change in the next few weeks, as we roll out our first complete website makeover since 2002. Things may be a little squirrely during the transition, with parts of the site being updated and part not. We'll do our best to keep the train on the tracks.

The look is intended to be more clean and contemporary, and more user-friendly to navigate and search. You will find that the menus will be consistent in content and location from the home page on throughout the site. The page itself is larger, taking advantage of the shift toward larger monitors in recent years. And we have taken a close look at how people are using the site to introduce some new pages that bring what people are looking for more front and center.
Take a sneak preview of the new design in progress.

It is a test page for the news section home page of the site. Most of the navigation works, sending you to pages in the old site. Some links to new pages do not work, and some of the destinations will have additional and/or changed content in the new design. But let us know what you think, quick, before I mess everything up. Email dale@ncpr.org.

Speak of the devil

I was starting to feel a little nostalgic about disaster, listening to the retrospective coverage of Ice Storm '98--right up until everything started to fall apart again. The massive thaw of the last week presented its bill with hurricane force winds. The campus went dark, the network and phones went dead. The website was kerflooey (a technical term). The transmitter was running on generator. Power surges melted my computer. It was a classic case of "speak of the devil."

Fortunately Lucifer didn't hang around quite as long this time. And there were some lessons learned. When the land lines went down, the cell phones came out. When the campus lost power, parts of the network stayed up on generators, as did our transmitter shack. There were workarounds for almost everything, from getting audio to the station to getting cancellations and closings out to the community--laborious maybe, suboptimal, but workable. Without the example of 10 years ago we would have been down to tin cans and a string.

So thanks for sending in your recollections of Ice Storm '98. But maybe in the future, we should just remember in our hearts. Not that I'm superstitious.

Ready or not

It's been ten years since the Ice Storm (always capitalized) administered its mighty dope-slap to the North Country. If you can remember what healthy woods are supposed to look like, you can still make out the edges of the devastation when entering or leaving the region. It'll be another decade before all the debris has mulched back into duff. But good intentions decompose more quickly. Looking around the house now I see that we still have no heat source that doesn't require electricity, and that the battery stash has long been looted of anything containing an erg of oomph. The candles looked quite romantic burning down to nubs on the dinner table, and the canned goods supply is down to one portion of cream of asparagus soup and some ripe olives.

It may just be that constant vigilance is an oxymoron. Nervous fatigue sets in. How long can you look into every shoe and never find a bomb? How long before we rebuild on the floodplain or the coastline or the flank of the volcano? And if, somehow, we stayed prepared for disaster, would it be for the next one, or for the last one? I can remember when they decommissioned the public fallout shelters and disposed of all the stock. Half the North Country stored old baby clothes and sundry in sturdy brown barrels with a yellow Civil Defense logo on the side. Every science classroom was stocked with an almost-new Geiger counter. And I bet it's not that hard now to find a good price on a used power generator: "1998 Honda 2 KW, low hours, runs like new."

Share your received wisdom (if you have received any) from the Ice Storm of '98. Drop us a line at radio@ncpr.org.